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Google Maps and Waze start swapping data

Maps gets traffic reports, Waze gets satellite imagery and Google Search

Google Maps and Waze start swapping data

It has been just three months since Google's billion-dollar acquisition of Waze, and the two services are already mixing and matching their huge data sets.

Waze is a crowdsourced mapping application that specializes in traffic data. Users can submit information about accidents and road closures via Waze's mobile app; Waze compiles all that data and sends it out to other users. Google loves data, so the search giant bought the company last June.

We'll start with Google Maps for iOS and Android, which will now have access to the Waze community's road-condition reports. Any time a Waze user reports an accident, construction, road closure, or other event, that information will be beamed out to millions of Google Maps users. Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, France, Germany, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Switzerland, UK, and the US are the first to get the feature, and it will undoubtedly be brought over to the rest of Maps in due time.

Waze users get some love too; map editors will now have access to Google's Street View and satellite imagery, which should make corrections a lot easier.

And of course, Google being Googleit also added itself as a POI search provider for Waze alongside existing options like Yelp and Foursquare.

This sounds a whole lot like what Google originally envisioned when it bought Waze, saying, "We’re excited about the prospect of enhancing Google Maps with some of the traffic update features provided by Waze and enhancing Waze with Google’s search capabilities." So we have to wonder: is this the whole plan? What's the next step for Waze and Maps?

A big fear among Wazers was that their community would be destroyed after the Google acquisition or that they would be neglected while all the data was syphoned off into Google Maps, but Google seems to be going to great lengths to placate its new customers. With simultaneous updates and separate announcement posts that link back to each other, Waze and Maps are one big, happy family.

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Channel Ars Technica