Geographic Revisionism, as practised by Google.

IMC'er | 29.04.2005 19:30 | Culture | Cambridge | London

According to an article from website The Register:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/29/google_bush_map/

George Dubya is now not only rewriting history in his image, but is also having a crack at redrawing the world's map as well.

This appears to be authentic too, because if you go to Google and type 'google maps', this is what you get as the first result at the top of the list:

http://maps.google.com/

You'll note, that if you zoom out from the US, no other countries except those in the UK seem to exist on this map!

By way of explanation, I shall borrow a quote from The Register's article:

"In Google's Brave New World, potential threats to US national security have been neutralised by airbrushing them from the surface of the globe. Naturally, the UK survives the apocalypse by virtue of its "special relationship" with the US".

What more need be said?

Brave New World (Order) indeed.

Eat your heart out, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell.

IMC'er

Comments

Hide the following 5 comments

Is that a Republic?

29.04.2005 21:09

Sorry, but that's the UK and REPUBLIC of Ireland. Try not to join the airbrushing!

Rich

cutting off your nose to spite your face

01.05.2005 09:46

Of course, this means Bush has accidentally wiped out the countries where most of the world's remaining oil and gas supplies are...ooops!

laura

Silly

01.05.2005 20:23

It is blatant why the map only show US + UK/Eire - Google haven't got the rest sorted yet.

Sometimes it isn't a conspiracy...

fredrico
mail e-mail: musteatvegan@yahoo.co.uk

H'mmm...

05.05.2005 18:55

I should point out that this posting was meant as a tongue in cheek item, not to be taken too seriously.

If you follow The Register's stories, you will know that, like The Onion, they too indulge us with satire and humourous comment from time to time.

However, as for Google not having sorted out their world map, well, they've been around for quite a few years now, so, one has to start wondering why this hasn't been fixed already if that is the case.

I mean, it's not like they can't afford to employ someone to do this job, is it?

IMC'er

it is the start of a service in their largest customer base

11.06.2005 15:25

Google are slowly increasing services as they go. They can't just suddenly plonk an entire world map - complete with all roads, postcodes etc... online as this will take a LOT of money and time. Instead they have produced a map service for their 2 largest customer bases - UK and USA. This is to see what the reaction to the service is and see if it is worth expanding to other countries.

If we are to fight capitalism we have to understand it.

fredrico
mail e-mail: musteatvegan@yahoo.co.uk