Home
About
Search
🌐
English Română
  • Google now knows where I live

    Citește postarea în română

    Mar 1, 2010
    Share on:

    More then an year ago I wrote a blog, where I was telling that Google doesn’t know where I live.

    The issue was that Goole Maps had a very poor coverage for Romania, and Yahoo! Maps is a way better alternative for this part of Europe. I still believe that Yahoo! Maps is a better alternative but I was surprised by one thing. Occasionally I’ve visited Google Maps to see how things are going with the coverage of Bucharest, basically it was represented a single way to cross the city from highway A1 to A2, and nothing else.

    About a month ago, I went back to check what was new because I needed to build an Romanian tourism app and… surprise, surprise, even though the satellite photos are of lower quality now, I could find my street using the search and even the block where I live. Even more I was able to calculate alternative routes to various  locations in Bucharest.

    It looks like Google has began to have a little more interest in this part of central Europe, now allowing for a real competition with Yahoo!. This is a great advantage for Android phone users who use Google Maps for there GPS app. Few years ago, to user Google Maps in Romania it was completely useless, you could see the satellite images, but that was about all, you could not find useful addresses, and if there ware marked on the map you could not automatically find a route to them.

    Eventually I used Google Maps for my app, even though I still believe that Yahoo! Maps is a good alternative, as far as quality and API. Speaking of API, both of them seem ok and I don’t king that’s a criteria to difference them between the two giants.

    A thing a little shocking about Google knowing where I live it was on an evening when curios to see if my GPS works on my mobile phone I went on my balcony. Everything was ok, it found me within 50 and 100m on the Google map, using my wireless connection for the data transfer. Another evening a friend came over to tried the same thing, using the same connection to the Internet, same Google Maps app, and he was found within 100m.

    Nothing unusual in theory, but everything changed  the next day when he told me that his phone didn’t have GPS, and what we ware seeing was the date from the last time I connected my device… so Google now knows where I live… literary…

Claudiu Perșoiu

Programming, technoloy and more
Read More

Recent Posts

  • Moving away from Wordpress
  • Custom path for Composer cache
  • Magento2 and the ugly truth
  • A bit of PHP, Go, FFI and holiday spirit
  • How to make use of the Xiaomi Air Conditioning Companion in Home Assistant in only 20 easy steps!
  • How I use Magento2 on my local with Docker and Docker Compose
  • About passion, programming and heating systems
  • The Books for Zend Certified Engineer 2017

PHP 49 MISCELLANEOUS 44 JAVASCRIPT 13 MAGENTO 7 MYSQL 7 BROWSERS 6 DESIGN-PATTERNS 5 LINUX-UNIX 2 WEB-STUFF 2 GO 1

PHP 35 JAVASCRIPT 14 PHP5.3 11 MAGENTO 7 PHP6 7 MYSQL 6 PHP5.4 6 ZCE 6 CERTIFICARE 5 CERTIFICATION 5 CLOSURES 4 DESIGN-PATTERNS 4 HACK 4 ANDROID 3
3D1 ADOBE-AIR2 ANDROID3 ANONYMOUS-FUNCTIONS3 BOOK1 BROWSER2 CARTE1 CERTIFICARE5 CERTIFICATION5 CERTIFIED1 CERTIFIED-DEVELOPER1 CHALLENGE1 CHM1 CLASS1 CLI2 CLOSURES4 CODE-QUALITY1 CODEIGNITER3 COLLECTIONS1 COMPOSER1 CSS1 DEBUG1 DESIGN-PATTERNS4 DEVELOPER1 DEVELOPMENT-TIME1 DOCKER1 DOCKER-COMPOSE1 DOUGLAS-CROCKFORD2 ELEPHPANT2 FACEBOOK2 FFI1 FINALLY1 FIREFOX3 GAMES1 GENERATOR1 GO1 GOOGLE1 GOOGLE-CHROME1 GOOGLE-MAPS1 HACK4 HOMEASSISTANT1 HTML2 HTML-HELP-WORKSHOP1 HTML51 HUG1 HUGO1 INFORMATION_SCHEMA1 INI1 INTERNET-EXPLORER3 IPV41 IPV61 ITERATOR2 JAVASCRIPT14 JQUERY1 LAMBDA1 LINUX1 MAGENTO7 MAGENTO22 MAP1 MINESWEEPER1 MOTIVATION1 MYSQL6 NGINX1 NODE.JS2 NOSQL1 OBSERVER3 OBSERVER-PATTERN1 OOP1 OPERA1 OPTIMIZATION1 ORACLE1 PAGESPEED1 PAIR1 PARSE_INI_FILE1 PHONEGAP2 PHP35 PHP-ELEPHANT2 PHP-FOR-ANDROID1 PHP-GTK1 PHP42 PHP53 PHP5.311 PHP5.46 PHP5.53 PHP5.61 PHP67 PHP7.41 PROGRAMMING1 REVIEW1 ROMANIAN-STEMMER2 SAFARY1 SCALAR-TYPE-HINTING1 SCHEME1 SET1 SHOPPING-CART-PRICE-RULE1 SINGLETON1 SOAP1 SPL2 SQLITE1 SSH1 STACK-TRACE1 STDERR1 STDIN1 STDOUT1 SUN1 SYMFONY2 TEST-TO-SPEECH1 TITANIUM2 TRAITS1 TTS1 UBUNTU1 UNICODE2 UTF-82 VECTOR1 WEBKIT1 WINBINDER1 WINDOWS1 WORDPRESS1 YAHOO3 YAHOO-MAPS1 YAHOO-OPEN-HACK1 YSLOW1 YUI1 ZCE6 ZCE5.31 ZEND3 ZEND-FRAMEWORK3
[A~Z][0~9]

Copyright © 2008 - 2021 CLAUDIU PERȘOIU'S BLOG. All Rights Reserved