Weekly NDM

Google Maps: a decade of transforming the mapping landscape

This article is about how Google Maps began 10 years ago and how the way we navigate has drastically revolutionised. It also discusses how Google maps had began and that although it wasnt the first of its kind, with Yahoo! and other institutions beating them to the idea, but it gained the most recognition.

• While Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s nascent world wide web supported the first online maps in 1993, it wasn’t until the launch of Google Maps ten years ago today that digital maps began to enter the mainstream.
• In 2004, Danish brothers Lars and Jens Eilstrup Rasmussen went to Google with an idea for a web app that would not only display static maps, but provide people with a searchable, scrollable, zoomable map.
• Google acquired their company Where 2 Technologies - along with a second company called Keyhole developing the geospatial visualisation software that would become Google Earth - and the new team of 50 people set out building Google Maps.
• Google Maps launched in the US on 8 February 2005 and in the UK two months later, though by that time it wasn’t the first digital map of its kind: Yahoo had beaten Google to it with a redevelopment of its long-standing Yahoo Maps in 2004.
• Google Maps didn’t stand still. Later in 2005 Google launched driving and public transport directions, but it wasn’t until the launch of satellite imagery that Hanke saw how committed Google was to the project.
• Street View has proved to be one of Google Map’s most controversial but popular features. Launched for select US cities in 2006, and rolled out to Europe, Japan and Australia in 2008, the service relied on building up pictures of every street in the city using a specially equipped camera mounted on a car.
• Google Maps first appeared on a smartphone in 2007 on Apple’s first iPhone - a very different era when Google and Apple were partners more than rivals as they are today.
• In 2010 it was revealed that Street View cars had also been capturing information about private Wi-Fi networks as they roamed the streets of US and Europe, prompting a $7m fine from US authorities.