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.

Custom map shares theY are billions