Google Earth Got New Rival, China Map World

China Map World. Google Earth got a new rival now namely, Map World, China's version of the online satellite mapping service. Map World is designed solely to compete Google Earth technology and also to provide the same service to residents of China. This is also a response from China Government for Google's delay on applying the license to provide its mapping service in the mainland.

It is China's State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping (SBSM) who created and announced "Map World" two days ago and the official China online mapping service can be accessed via www.tianditu.cn and www.chinaonmap.cn

"In the near future, Map World will flourish to be a famous Chinese brand for online map services with proven reliability," Xu Deming, director of the State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping, was quoted as saying.

China selected the Great Wall of China with cloud above it as the homepage interface. And the preparation of the service took about two years including taking all the satellite images from 2006 to 2010, according Jiang Jie, the database department director of National Geomatics Center

Jiang further say that Map World and its website are still at a preliminary stage, still need a additional infrastructures, for example it only has 80 virtual machines to handle 10 million daily requests, while Google Earth has thousands of virtual machines.

"Our map service is expected to update the geological data about twice a year, but Google Earth can update its information every couple of minutes, through satellites," Jiang said.

Looks like there won't be "peace" between Google and China, after China is allegedly launched hacking attacks toward Google services last year, which caused Google to withdrew its search engine service and directed to Google Hong Kong.

Posted in: Google,Tech News