Google doodles in Hyde Park

dankarran — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 18:55:45 -0500

I was in the Apple section of a department store in town yesterday having a test drive of the latest MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops when I noticed that they had Google Earth running on them. Trying the MacBook Pro out first, I was very impressed with the responsiveness of the machine when exploring in Google Earth. The MacBook wasn't quite as impressive, but still very nice and an improvement upon the iBook I've got at the moment.

As I was exploring, I zoomed into London and specifically into the area of Hyde Park and its north eastern corner. I had spotted a road pattern that didn't look quite right on top of the imagery that was being shown. Hyde Park is full of criss-crossing paths that are really quite distinctive from above, but what I was seeing didn't fit that pattern at all.

It rather looks like a glaring intentional error has been introduced, perhaps so they can tell when people have copied their maps verbatim (read the Maps that Lye page on the OpenStreetMap wiki for more information).

Wondering if it was perhaps a series of paths that had been introduced after the aerial imagery had been taken, I took a look at Yahoo Maps to see what they showed and they didn't have the paths included.

I suppose the logic in adding erroneous data here is that it doesn't matter if you follow it as you're in open space anyway, and so it won't matter to pedestrians if the paths don't actually exist.

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Google doodles in Hyde Park