It initially “only” contains a database of 5 million places across 400 categories… interestingly, by comparison the nearly decade old Wikipedia just reached the 3 million (english) article milestone in August 2009.  But even so, as you start to do some initial searches on Public Earth you quickly realize that even at 5 million records strong, there is still a lot not there.

It seems that 5 million places is just an initial seeding to get things kicked off. The hope seems to be that the general public takes it from here and starts to fill in the rest.

I’ve only had a little bit of time to play with it but did some exploring in three different geographic areas I know fairly well just to see how it would do.   Here are the basic findings:

PROS

• The user interface is very simple and straigtforward…and its easy to navigate around and search for things, pan the map, etc.
• The map quality is great and is what you would expect from a modern web map experience… its ‘powered by Google’  so what did you expect?
• The tools and ability to create your own place on the map are very simple and straightforward to use.

Cons

• There is a lot of information missing. They pre populated the service with 5 million places worldwide, but even your typical bottom of the line person navigation device comes pre loaded with at least 2x as many points of interest for the United States alone.
• Many of the categorizations are screwy… exploring the “kid friendly” places around me here on the upper west side, I got a handful of places that made a lot of sense like the Hayden Planetarium, although inexplixably nothing on the massive Natural History Museum and kid mecca which the planetarium is attached to. But in that same category I also got totally random places like a poultry shop in New Jersey somehow categorized as a ‘Farm’ and a boat dealership.
• There is often not much information on a place even if the ‘listing’ does appear

Since the site just launched yesterday and it is a communal user generated content type site, the cons here are not unexpected.  As it grows much of the missing information will be filled in and the community will presumably help correct all the categorization issues  and help fill in all the colorful details.  Or will they?

Public earth has built a nice, very easy to use, highly functional site which certainly could be the foundation for a full blown and powerful wikipedia for places. The million dollar question now is will people come to it and use it and spend time editing it en masse?  Just because you built it, doesn’t mean people will come to it. 

For the typical consumer, the large portal web map platforms are probably a more reliable source for finding things around you, so from here it will be interesting to see what tactics Public Earth needs to use to ramp up the volume of places and really clean up their data. I suspect that like Wikipedia this chore will fall largely on a small group of power users who just enjoy doing it for the sake of doing it,  or maybe they can steal a page from Foursquare and use some sort of gaming element to make it fun for the rest of us to add new places and do the editing for them.

Only time will tell… but certainly something to keep an eye on.