The way we have calculated the Explore Score score for the past year has depended on the volume of visits to each Gigapan panorama over the life of our one-year-old website, and this method makes it hard for new Gigapan panoramas to obtain high scores without being in a major periodical (like Sports Illustrated, in the case of the Yankee Stadium high-scorer).
Explore Score is now a totally new value that takes into account not just volumes of visitors, but how richly the panorama has been annotated and the degree to which it is a subject of conversations. In a way, it is a measure of how “explorable” we believe the image to be. As with all scoring algorithms, you are going to see some of your favorite panoramas rise and others fall based on this new scoring methodology. We hope you will agree that, on balance, this change turns out to be an improvement in scoring true explorability and in giving new panoramas a better chance.
