2022
I am contributing to Google Maps first because I am a user of Google Maps and as a user I appreciate finding tons of useful information about the places I might want to visit and in particular pictures that give me a good idea of what the place is like.
As a consequence I started visiting neighborhood after neighborhood in Southern Florida where I currently live with the purpose of making sure every POI I would encounter would have at least 1 good picture so anyone could remotely see what the place is like before visiting it. First I visited the streets in my city, then the adjacent city, then another city a little bit further and my pursuit of a visual accuracy of Google Maps brought me to visit hundreds of cities... I took pictures of close to 25,000 different points of interest out of which a third didn't have a single picture on Google Maps.
I review my Google Maps statistics on a regular basis and they confirm that the work I am doing to give a good image to every place on Google Maps is paying off: my pictures have now exceeded 600 million views and every day these pictures are viewed more than 2 million times.
So to the question of the meaning of the local guides program to me, my answer is it is a way for me to help millions of people every day get a clearer idea of where they're going and what to expect there.
But while all of this could seem very theoretical and removed from human contact, it is all but that. My going around and taking pictures has brought me to have discussions with dozens and dozens of business owners and various people observing me taking pictures everywhere I go. These conversations and direct contacts obviously touched me more than the millions of views every day because I could see that the local guides program was here to help every point of interest that deserved it.
One such example was a visit of a funeral home. Not a place people are shopping for, not a place pictures are often thought of as the relevant item, not a place where reviews are common.... On one of my photography "run" (technically a roll since I am doing all my work on an electric unicycle), the owners of a funeral home saw me taking pictures of their business. They were very sad because the only picture of their business on Google Maps was a picture of the back of their building by the Google StreetView car. While I explained they could easily fix it by taking pictures themselves, I also let them know that I would make sure this would change very soon. They invited me in to admire the inside, I took a few pictures inside and out, posted these pictures a few hours later and before the next day their small business was now shinning on Google Maps. I left these people so happy that a Google Local Guide took the time to help them with their presence on Google Maps.
To this day, my pictures are still the ones featured for that business and no other picture was taken.
The Google Local Guides program is about helping the users of Google Maps and the Points of Interest themselves.
