[nickpleis]

Of course it's entirely possible that Google did independently arrive at the same innovation. I have no idea how long Google has been working on this, but it was likely quite some time (which is probably why the solicited help from that company in the first place...)

I'd really be curious to know what the truth is here. Landmark nagivation is an unbelievably big project, and Google is doing it at pretty large scale. It may have very well taken a couple of years to build the thing (not so much the programming, but rather building the data-set itself).

[paraschopra]

They license the dataset. It is usually the algorithm which determines what is a landmark and what is not (it is my guess).