The office where Google has been building the best representation of the world is not a remarkable place. How the two operating systems incorporate geo data and present it to users could become a key battleground in the phone wars.īut that would entail actually building a better map. That didn't matter on previous generations of iPhones because they used Google Maps, but now Apple's created its own service. Geo data - and the apps built to use it - are where Google can win just by being Google. Whereas Apple's strengths are in product design, supply chain management, and retail marketing, Google's most obvious realm of competitive advantage is in information. Google is locked in a battle with the world's largest company, Apple, about who will control the future of mobile phones. If you're at all like me, you use mapping more than any other application except for the communications suite (phone, email, social networks, and text messaging). Mapping systems matter on phones precisely because they are the interface between the offline and online worlds. 'Increasingly as we go about our lives, we are trying to bridge that gap between what we see in the real world and, and Maps really plays that part.' 'If you look at the offline world, the real world in which we live, that information is not entirely online,' Manik Gupta, the senior product manager for Google Maps, told me. If Google's mission is to organize all the world's information, the most important challenge - far larger than indexing the web - is to take the world's physical information and make it accessible and useful. Google responded by creating an operating system, brand, and ecosystem in Android that has become the only significant rival to Apple's iOS.Īnd for good reason. Where you're searching from has become almost as important as what you're searching for. The company began as an online search company that made money almost exclusively from selling ads based on what you were querying for. Google opened up at a key moment in its evolution. It's the first time the company has let anyone watch how the project it calls GT, or 'Ground Truth,' actually works. This is the data that you're drawing from when you ask Google to navigate you from point A to point B - and last week, Google showed me the internal map and demonstrated how it was built. The deep map contains the logic of places: their no-left-turns and freeway on-ramps, speed limits and traffic conditions.

Behind every Google Map, there is a much more complex map that's the key to your queries but hidden from your view.

Satellite map with street addresses