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Recent google map searches7/14/2023 In alphabetical order, these terms are: cat, christian, democracy, flu, god, government, hindu, internet, jewish, love, monkey, music, muslim, sex, tax, war, wedding. We further included a more general set of words to discover parts of the map that are not captured by these urban features, adopted from an earlier study of the Google Maps geography (Graham and Zook 2013 1). The full list of urban features, in alphabetical order, is: atm (cash machine), bank, bar, cafe, church, coffee, dentist, dinner, florist, food, grocery, hairdresser, hotel, library, lunch, mosque, museum, music, park, pharmacy, place, restaurant, school, shop, supermarket, synagogue, theater, university. We specifically included types of places that are more frequent, such as shops and schools, but also included parks and universities that may be less frequent within a city, but that are nevertheless commonly found. In a first stage we reviewed taxonomies of geospatial databases, and based on their vocabulary curated a list of the types of places that we might commonly see in cities around the world, including restaurants, schools, parks, and other potential destinations. We selected 44 English search terms to help us discover map content. For our analysis we instead crawled it with automated scripts, essentially imitating a person on the street searching for something nearby – executing searches for dozens of search terms, each translated into about a dozen languages, and repeated across thousands of global locations. In contrast to Wikipedia, where all its data is openly available for anyone to analyze, the data behind Google Maps is not open. These form the basis for our analysis, and we will discuss the data collection process in some detail. To this end we executed millions of map searches for different places and languages and collected the results. Overall we find remarkable differences in coverage – for example, coverage in certain major languages is highly constrained to certain geographic regions, while coverage in other languages is much more broad.ĭue to the commercial nature of Google Maps, the data behind it is not publicly available, and in order to analyse its coverage we have attempted to collect the data ourselves. In this section of the report, we compare the data volumes and geographic distributions of the data shown by Google Maps across a dozen different languages, at both global and local scale. But how good is its content coverage in these languages? Can it offer everyone a view of the world in their language? Or do the languages we speak potentially limit which parts of the world we get to see on Google Maps? In principle it is accessible to many: according to our platform survey, the Google Maps website currently offers interface support for more than 70 languages. We have chosen Google Maps because for many people it will act as a kind of portal to the world – it helps us navigate the city, and it helps us learn about other places. We thus want to also look at the state of content coverage in major languages, by considering two platforms: Wikipedia and Google Maps. As part of our broad review of the state of the internet’s languages we have looked at the state of interface language support on major platforms, asking: will people need to be able to speak a second language in order to use particular apps? However, the essays by our contributors also illustrate that interface language support is only part of the overall picture of language support, and that the actual content of major websites is often not available in key languages.
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