Due to the currently ongoing conflict between Russia and Georgia, it has been noticed that Google, as of now, doesn’t have any data at all on the country in Google Maps. No cities, towns, roads, or points of interest—just a blank region. This lack of data also affects Georgia’s neighbors Azebaijan and Armenia. Conspiracy theorists thought that Google censored the data either at the behest of the government of Georgia or Russia, but Google was quick to dispatch a blog post saying that they didn’t have data at all in the first place. Their reason? They “simply weren’t satisfied with the map data [they] had available.”

Hogwash! If the only reason why they didn’t place any data is because they weren’t satisfied with it, then why did they add really inferior data for the Philippines last year? As I mentioned before, the primary reason why I thought that they didn’t have any data on the Philippines before last year was that they were waiting to get better data and wasn’t satisfied with what they have now: precisely the reason they’re spouting as to why Georgia is still blank now.

Oh well. I’m still waiting for Google’s promise to “[work] tirelessly to add more detail to the existing countries in Google Maps.” It’s been almost a year already and there’s still no improvement to the data for the Philippines. The low quality of the data has been noticed by many people already like in this comment left by Luis over at Technograph.