Does Google have its eye on digitizing St. Louis?
By Matthew Halverson
Close your blinds, St. Louis. Rumor has it that cars resembling those used by Google to photograph cities for its highly detailed (as in, so detailed you can see cats in windows) “Street View” maps have been spotted around town, causing locals with a nerd-like love for virtual cartographic endeavors (as in, us) to wonder whether we’re getting, well, Street Viewed.
In case you haven’t turned on your computer recently, Google is no longer satisfied with cataloging the Web or inspiring new self-referential verbs. It wants to take over the world, too—or, at least, play digital de Soto and rediscover it. What started with Google Maps and Google Earth in 2005 has progressed to Street View’s pedestrian’s-eye–view maps of a handful of major cities. (Naturally, New York was among the first.)
Megan Quinn, a spokeswoman for Google, wouldn’t confirm that the cars seen in St. Louis were part of its photographic fleet, but she would say that the Web conglomerate is “focused on major metropolitan districts such as St. Louis.” And the way we see it, what better time than now—as Highway 40 goes into lockdown mode—to build a digital doppelganger of our streets: If you can’t drive them, you might as well surf them.
All right, Google, we’ll accept that you guys can’t reveal your mapping plans, but can you at least throw us a bone and update Google Earth to include the new Busch Stadium? It’s only been a year and a half now ...
“We’re updating imagery in Google Earth on an ongoing basis,” Quinn says. “However, imagery for any given location is usually between six months and three years old.”
We’ll take that as a maybe.
