Criticism of Google Maps emerged from a number of places over the weekend because the service replaced many of its satellite images of New Orleans which had shown damage from Hurricane Katrina with images that pre-dated the hurricane. This resulted in an unusual letter from the Chairman of the House Science and Technology Commitee’s Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight to Google CEO Eric Schmidt requesting an explanation for the change.
Google appears to be pulling out the stops to rectify the problem. On Saturday, the maps I looked at looked like they were pre-Katrina. This morning, however, I started looking at New Orleans neighborhoods I had heard of before, and at least some of the satellite images I saw showed significant damage. A good example of this is the one I found when I searched for 9th Ward, New Orleans.
I worked extensively with Google Maps satellite images while I was developing RinkAtlas. Google Maps’ satellite image quality is very uneven, as I suggested in What is “The Middle of Nowhere in the Google Maps Era?. If you really care about finding the highest resolution, most up-to-date satellite image of a specific location, you need to compare the images available from Google Maps, Google Earth, Yahoo! Maps, and Windows Live Local, and probably a few other services I haven’t included.
Having said this, I understand the uproar this caused in certain circles. I read somewhere that it’s been 19 months since Katrina hit New Orleans. Imagine if a service like Google Maps suddenly and inexplicably started showing The World Trade Center intact on its website in April 2003, after showing what Ground Zero actually looked like for 19 months. There would have been an uproar at that too.