[colinbartlett]

I would love to know how much Google spends on StreetView.

When they first started sending those cars around, I think everyone collectively mocked, "Haha. Well you're certainly not going to photograph every street in the world."

[ohwp]

What about "Haha, Well you're certainly not going to create a 3D point cloud of every street in the world"...

Google's self driving cars are just doing that.

EDIT: I can't find the post I once read, but this post also makes some clear: http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130502024505-99...

EDIT 2: Here a video of the presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXylqtEQ0tk @ 3:30 you can see the generated (and stored) point cloud.

[DanBC]

That bit blew my mind.

I'd love to see some of those point clouds. Maybe Google has an artist-in-residence who could 3D print varies landmark locations?

[3rd3]

That was actually a little bit sobering for me. I thought the AI techniques they use were much more general, autonomous and independent of map data. I didn’t know that location information of traffic signs, pavement etc. are taken from map data. But it makes sense to prefer data from most reliable sources.

[erikig]

Google's pretty good at thumbing their noses at the naysayers that say "Haha...you're not going to xxx all yyy".

xxx = crawl and cache, yyy = reachable pages on the web xxx = scan and preview, yyy = published books etc

[blueblob]

When I first saw the article for the google patent on free ad-powered taxis[1], I immediately thought that it was another way to get get more cars for street view.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7114079

[ericgoldberg]

I think they buy a fair bit of their data from third party vendors, but I'm not positive. Still, aggregating and organizing all that information is impressive.