And human Google employees correcting mistakes.Private mapping services and geological surveys.The map itself – the whereabouts and dimensions of roads and buildings and rivers and borders – comes from:.To keep feeding reliable, accurate and up-to-date information about the real world around us to its applications, Google Maps has to constantly rake in huge amounts of data from diverse sources. And a powerful educational tool (especially with Google Earth).An incredibly popular API that puts Google Maps to work in reams of third-party applications on the web and mobile.The engine for a custom map maker in Google My Maps (and others).Directions and layers of extra information (essentially, more maps that you can switch between).This list just scratches the surface of Google Maps applications: And tying the two together, making sense of the data and making it useful with applications, are powerful algorithms (mathematical keys for processing data with computers). Google Maps is also all of the data (pieces of information) that these applications process for you – the high quality, digital map of the world and all the information in it. On the surface, Google Maps is a large, interconnected ecosystem of applications (or apps). We’ll touch on these here, but be sure to read a full explanation in Chapter 2: What is Google Maps? Today, Google Maps is a lot of different things in one package. 2017 OctĪfter bringing web mapping to every corner of the world, Google Maps went to outer space with direct imagery from the moon, Mars and other planets. New satellite imagery was added to Google Maps – over 700 trillion pixels of images. Google Maps quickly introduced the features to its apps. Google acquired Waze, a rival mobile and web map which showed more crowdsourced live traffic information. Offline maps first became available on the Android mobile app. 2010 Marīicycle directions and trails were added to the web and mobile apps. Turn-by-turn navigation took Google Maps mobile apps to another level of functionality – eventually rising to challenge single-purpose SatNav devices for drivers (like the once-ubiquitous TomTom). NovĪ new version of the mobile app – the first to feature the ability to locate your device using GPS and nearby wireless networks – was released. 2007 FebĪverage traffic congestion was included for over thirty US cities, Street View debuted for New York City, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Miami and Denver. Decīefore the year was out, Google Transit connecting public transport routes and timetables was first launched in Portland, Oregon (this would evolve into the worldwide google-maps-explained/glossary format for sharing transit information). In the same month, Google Maps offered third-party developers the chance to make more bespoke applications with Google Maps data by launching the Google Maps API (now known as Google Maps Platform). Google Maps showed that it can go far beyond the everyday mapping functions – like navigation – in the web and mobile apps with the launch of Google Earth. “We think maps can be useful and fun, so we've designed Google Maps to simplify how to get from point A to point B.” Google announced the launch of Google Maps with a pretty understated blog post on 8 February. Google acquired web mapping pioneers Keyhole, Where 2 Technologies and ZipDash in just a couple of months, quickly positioning itself to take on its position at the forefront of a new generation of web maps. This is a brief history of that evolution. It’s big success is that it has continued to pack more applications with more features, more data and more data sources into its products with better and better algorithms – bringing people back to use them day after day and year after year. Google Maps has grown and evolved a lot over the years since it launched in 2005. Not only a route finder, street viewer, or location sharer – Google Maps is lots of things all at once. This is the Google Maps University guide in it, you’ll learn that there is a lot more to Google Maps than you ever realised. But for a lot of us, the scale of Google Maps features is still unknown. We are using its features more and more all the time – multi-modal transit journey planning, finding our nearest cafe or ATM and virtually exploring far-flung corners of the world. With over a billion individual, active users each month, five billion downloads for the Android mobile app and counting, and an enormous 20 petabytes of geocoded data (that’s 20 million gigabytes), Google Maps has quickly become the biggest map project in history.
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