Dear Customers,

We have had many customers reach out to us over the past 30 days regarding your Google Maps Street View, missing imagery, or connections between images. According to Google, these problems arose from a new classifier on Google Maps, which is intended to remove inappropriate content. This particular classifier is falsely identifying scenes that should not be removed and is causing issues with connections.

The Google engineering team is working hard to fine-tune this classifier, and we expect that it will drastically decrease the false-positive rate once it is implemented.

Google’s official statement on the issue gives an estimated time frame for this updated version will be the last week of December. Once the fix is implemented, we expect all published tours to come back and function properly. If after 30 days you do not see the changes and are still having and issue, then we do have the option to publish the tour again. Google is asking that all currently published tours wait to see if they are corrected automatically and to not weigh the publish pipeline down with numerous re-publishes.

This issue primarily affects 360 photos (as compared to other photo and video content)
Images that are deemed inappropriate are not published on Google Maps
Street View connectivity only applies to live published photos and looks to connect the next eligible published photo. This is why a lot of you have reported missing or strange connections
What’s happening next:
The team at Google is hard at work to improve the performance of the auto-moderation system
They are also introducing a manual check for all newly published photos that have been flagged to lessen the false positive rate
After this version is ready, all 360 photos will be reprocessed and republished

We will notify you here is there are any additional updates on the subject.

~ BLUERAVENstudios support

 

January 13th, 2020 Update from GOOGLE

 

UPDATE FROM GOOGLE as of 1-27-2020

UPDATE: 3-30-20

COVID-19 Affecting Quality Assurance Process

The new image filter A.I. has improved greatly and the vast majority of Street View contributions have now been processed and updated. There are still some cases of false positives from the new image classifier which may result in connection issues. Unfortunately, the quality assurance team and much of the Street View support team are no longer operating out of their offices and a temporary delay has been placed on the pipeline process. You can still contribute to, edit, and manage your business listing. All edits and contributions will be addressed in the order in which they were received. You can read more about the official Google statement on the subject HERE > Google Maps & COVID-19

We will notify you here is there are any additional updates on the subject.

~ BLUERAVENstudios support