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Journalism of Courage
Cabbies are supposed to know the city like the back of their hand so it’s no wonder that search engine giant Google turned to them for mapping Bangalore.
Google used its cab drivers in Bangalore for the city map-making. The cabbies turned out to be good contributers to the Google maps software,a senior official of Google India said on Wednesday.
“Cab drivers are the best when it comes to knowing the geography of the city and with a bit training in internet any cab driver can become a good map contributor,” Google India’s country head (products),Vinay Goel told reporters here.
“In Bangalore,we have our office cab drivers. They drop people in the morning and take them in the evening. They have nothing to do in between. So,we give them maps and they work with our people in our lab.
“Many of them have the advantage of knowledge of the city and hence started mapping for us. There are a couple of drivers who contributed heavily to the map-making,” Goel said.
To a query on use of cab drivers for the same purpose in other cities,he said it depended on their interest and knowledge in internet.
“For other cities,we cannot say because we don’t know how many of them are trained in internet. We have not reached out to them directly but if they have passion they can participate,” he added.
