I have a hard and interesting job. I do navigation & autonomous control systems for large mining vehicles. A couple of notes...
1. You want to do R&D. Developing new things is fun; maintaining existing things is boring. However, "getting in" to R&D positions is difficult without #2:
2. Domain knowledge. We almost never hire based on programming skill alone. Programming is a prerequisite, but specific expertise (guidance, navigation & control systems in my case) is the real value you need to bring. Graduate degrees are one way (but not the only way) to move in this direction.
Usually if I input an address into Google maps, it places a marker somewhere near the actual address. If I use street view it seems to point me in a random direction and usually not toward the address I wanted. I think this is aimed at that.
Search for colocation in your area, then call and ask. I'm paying around $70/month for a 1U server with a fixed amount of bandwidth. Reliability and support (aside from network issues) are up to you.
The same could be said of Google's search engine itself: an autogenerated web site consisting of essentially nothing other than links to other places, many of them paid. But no one can deny that it's a useful site.
I think that is the issue here -- probably the vast majority of such sites are undesirable, but you can't discount them all.
If you don't know what the arrows represent then you maybe don't understand what tomography is after all.