With World War III seemingly put on hold, those who were trying to follow the Russian skirmishes in Georgia have now been told why Google Maps was not the place to tell your Tbilisis from your South Ossetias.
Those people who were urgently seeking out more information about the Eastern European nation were mystified to find that the normally reliable Google maps had next to no information about the country.
Google engineers have, as usual, been quick to explain this knowledge gap from a company that prides itself on knowing everything.
"The most obvious question is, why doesn't Google Maps show any cities or roads for Georgia, or its neighbors (sic) Armenia and Azerbaijan?" the Google blog states.
"The answer is we never launched coverage in those countries because we simply weren't satisfied with the map data we had available. We're constantly searching for the best map data we can find, and sometimes will delay launching coverage in a country if we think we can get more comprehensive data.
"Some of our customers have asked if we removed map data from any of these countries in response to the recent hostilities in that region and I can assure you that is not the case. Data for these countries were never on Google Maps in the first place."
It's obviously a bit annoying for Google that their missing maps were highlighted, so if you are planning to start a war in one of the world's smaller countries could you at least email the search supremos and let them know ahead of time?
