[rmc]

Are you sure about that? Outside the USA (which has a nice "lots of government work is public domain" rule, which lots of countries lack), there is very little 'freely available' map data from countries. One of the first non-USA countries on Google Maps, the UK, even now does not have freely available map data from the government (this is partially why it was people in the UK who set up OSM)

[willrobinson]

I am sure about what I said in my comment, not what you've said in yours. I said they started with free data. And indeed they started with data on the US, not the UK. Everyting begins at home. My point is Maps did not start from zero. Public data got the ball rolling.

I cannot say for sure but I would guess it is also what spurred the ideas to bring in a guy they knew who was doing related work at Stanford and also to acquire what became Google Earth. I believe it all began working with public data. They have obviously added lots of proprietary data since that time. They have a massive amount of cash to spend. Far more than the libraries and government agencies in the US who have the public data.

[rmc]

Yes they started in USA, but when UK was announced it wasn't a blank map (like OSM was when it started). The UK maps started with purchased, non-free data. So in a way, you need to bootstrap it somehow.

[willrobinson]

What was the date they started in the UK? How much cash on hand did they have at that point? A billion or so in the bank maybe?

It all started with public data. Google was born out of a project at Stanford centered around the idea of "online libraries". They had lots of practice using public datasets. The crawlable web is itself a public dataset.

Your point about OSM is the reason I mentioned the generosity of MapQuest.