Google IS a public service, sometimes
For big profit Google’s mission statement is a seemingly public serving one, “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” and is strikingly similar to the tax payer funded Library of Congress’ mission statement:
The Library's mission is to make its resources available and useful to the Congress and the American people and to sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations.
According to U.S. Rep. Brad Miller, Google has been tampering with the city of New Orlean’s collection of knowledge about itself, as I reported over the weekend in Google Maps under siege:
"Google's use of old imagery appears to be doing the victims of Hurricane Katrina a great injustice by airbrushing history," wrote Miller in a letter to Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
Schmidt has responded, via the Official Google Blog, in a post entitled “About the New Orleans imagery in Google Maps and Earth”:
In September 2006, the storm imagery was replaced with pre-Katrina aerial photography of much higher resolution as part of a regular series of global data enhancements. We continued to make available the Katrina imagery, and associated overlays such as damage assessments and Red Cross shelters, on a dedicated site (earth.google.com/katrina.html). Our goal throughout has been to produce a global earth database of the best quality, accounting for timeliness, resolution, cloud cover, light conditions, and color balancing.
Google expresses surprise over the furor, tempered with understanding:
Given that the changes that affected New Orleans happened many months ago, we were a bit surprised by some of these recent comments. Nevertheless, we recognize the increasingly important role that imagery is coming to play in the public discourse, and so we're happy to say that we have been able to expedite the processing of recent (2006) aerial photography for the Gulf Coast area (already in process for an upcoming release) that is equal in resolution to the data it is replacing. That new data was published in Google Earth and Google Maps on Sunday evening.
Google even shows humility:
Make no mistake, this wasn't any effort on our part to rewrite history. But it looks like this April Fool's joke was on us.