Google Street View adds wiki features

BEIJING, March 10 (Xinhuanet) -- Google has said it wants to let users of Street View edit the service to add local color in the hope of making it more useful.

The company has opened up the mapping service to allow users to edit business information flagged on Street View. The search giant will even allow you to move the tags, many of which are badly positioned. "Sometimes you may find a place in Google Maps that isn't quite positioned where it should be," Google says on its blog.

"You can edit details about a business listing directly through the Place Page," the company says.

"Let's say you know that your favorite pizzeria is near the corner but the marker for it appears further down the block. You want all hungry pizza-cravers to be able to find this great spot, so you want to make sure the marker leads them directly to the storefront. You could use our map editing feature (the "move marker" edit) to move it to the right place, but moving the marker to the right location is not always that easy, especially in denser urban areas, if the only reference you have are maps or satellite images because you can only get a view from above. So now we have added one more very handy reference for making a map marker edit: Street View images."

By making the edit facility work with Street View, moving markers and adding information will be much easier, Google says.

Street View has been controversial in the regions it has been rolled out, often criticized for invading privacy. Nonetheless with many people it remains extremely popular, providing the facility to tour areas virtually and to explore areas before traveling to them directly.

In Britain where Google's Street View service is almost complete, covering nearly 400,000 km of the country's roads, tourist organizations are in general support of the service. Sandie Dawe, the chief executive of the official website to promote UK tourism, VisitBritain.com, welcomed the launch of the nationwide service. She said that Street View was one of the “first places people turn to when planning a visit to one of Britain's many world-class attractions.”

In Britain, a survey commissioned by Google from the polling company YouGov indicated that Street View’s launch coincided with a 30 percent increase in people using the website’s mapping technology. Six out of ten of those users had consulted Street View to find out what a place they were going looked like, while one-third had used it to look at locations abroad and 21 percent had used it to help while house hunting.

In order to address privacy concerns, Google uses automatic technology to blur faces and car number plates. The company also allows users to request that their property be removed from the service.