Maps, Earth and Views
So tomorrow, Friday February 7, 2025 at 7pm Pacific time, marks an anniversary.
That precise time will be the 20th anniversary of the launch of Google Maps. And what a journey it has been. Not only for all the hard working folks at Google, but also for the billions of human beings on this planet that have benefited from this ubiquitous geographic platform.
Only someone at Google could delve into this, but I’d have to guess that the number of journeys that Google Maps has aided must number in the many trillions.
Many of you mapping nerds out there might already know the full history, but perhaps many of you don’t. Or perhaps you need a refresher…
Let’s wind back the clock to 1999. At that time if you wanted online mapping and directions — at least in the USA — there was only one place to go: MapQuest.com. For the history of that groundbreaking company see “12 Map Happenings that Rocked our World: Part 10: A Relentless Quest for Maps“.
But that same year another tiny, tiny seed was being been planted. And the people doing the planting were a couple of chaps called John Hanke and Brian McClendon. John and Brian were both tracking the big bang explosion of the internet and the web that was consuming everyone at the time. And they had a new stealthy startup. But it turned out it wasn’t anything to do with the internet — their secret new product all ran on a huge Dell PowerEdge server.
And on one warm spring day in Austin they demo’d the product to Bill Kilday, who had been John’s friend for 15 years.
Before I get to reveal the meat of the demo, let’s quickly wind the clock forward to the present day: as a result of that demo, John, Brian and Bill started a journey together that lasted for the next 24 years. It begat a geographic product that nearly everyone on the planet knows: Google Maps. How about that for a Map Happening That Rocked Our World?!
In 2018 Bill wrote a book about their travails. It is the definitive, insider story of Google Maps. The book is called “Never Lost Again” and I can’t recommend it enough. Among other places it’s available on Amazon and Apple Books:
In writing this article I’ve referenced the book liberally and, speaking frankly, there is absolutely no way this article would have the detail it does without having had “Never Lost Again” as my guide. So @Bill — thank you, thank you and thank you.
I recently had the privilege of chatting with Bill and I told him about my plans for this post. We both agreed that the timing should coincide with the 20th anniversary of Google Maps.
So, with that in mind, here we go!
Let’s go back to that demo that John and Brian gave Bill in the spring of 1999. Bill recounts the demo:
On the screen floated a perfectly detailed rendition of Planet Earth. Oh, I thought, there’s that photo. You know the one. It was on the cover of every junior high science book. Known simply as the Blue Marble, this classic image was captured on December 7, 1972, by the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft five hours into a lunar mission. This one spectacular photo is widely credited with jump-starting the modern-day environmental movement.
The Earth seemed to be rotating. Moving somehow. “What’s your address again?” John asked. “It’s 465 Joe Sayers, Austin, Texas,” I said as he typed.
That’s curious, I thought. The photo on the screen. The Earth. It is moving! Maybe it’s a QuickTime movie animation of some sort? But QuickTime movies aren’t interactive in any way, they are linear. Why would John need my address if this were a movie and . . . Wait, how is this thing zooming in? What the hell is happening here!?
These thoughts raced through my head during the fifteen seconds that we zoomed from outer space down to what was clearly my house. I recognized my standing seam metal roof, the neighbor’s trampoline in their backyard, my red Ford Explorer parked out front, and the Arroyo Seco running behind the house.
“Holy shit!” I exclaimed.
What Bill was seeing was the beginning of something that would take the world by a storm. But it wasn’t Google Maps. What he was seeing was a product that would come from a new stealthy startup, called Keyhole 1.
Keyhole was born out of the work of another Silicon Valley startup, Intrinsic Systems, who had pioneered a super efficient way to stream large image databases to a screen. It was this technology that made the demo possible. Initially the thought of putting it on the web was deemed a risky strategy. To quote John Hanke at the time:
If we put it in a browser, it will be just like MapQuest and they already own that market.
By 2001, the Dot com bubble had burst and Keyhole missed their initial opportunity for a funding round. They scampered to find a business model that could be built around their incredibly sexy demo. And their attention turned to enterprise mapping — at the time still very much dominated by Esri. Bill recounts the history:
Creating maps using Esri software required sophisticated data analysis and training. You could get an accredited college degree in GIS, spending four years learning how to use it. More realistically, a team of Esri-trained specialists (or Esri’s own consulting arm) was needed to configure a custom solution for a client.
Esri was essentially a blank sheet of paper. In order to begin using it, you had to go out and find the data you needed, and download and import it. In the meantime, you had to hope that the data was the right format and map projection so that the multiple layers of data worked together. Esri specialists were needed to acquire and integrate mapping data in order to make the application work.
Lastly, it was slow. Viewing an Esri-generated map online involved a click followed by a long, painful wait for the map to refresh. If you wanted the base map for your Esri map to be an aerial image, the software bogged down even more. Esri was glacially slow, almost unusable, especially if you didn’t have the aerial image loaded on your local hard drive.
By comparison, Keyhole was simple to use, came bundled with access to terabytes of data, and was lightning fast.
Bill went on to say, half joking:
Maybe Keyhole could be a simpler GIS aimed at non-GIS experts? Maybe we could be the GIS solution for people who can’t spell GIS?
It was with this idea that Keyhole’s first product was born on June 14, 2001: the Keyhole EarthViewer. It was aimed at one just vertical: commercial real estate. But scaling sales proved hard. By 2002 Keyhole was running on fumes. Despite cash injections from Nvidia and another Japanese company their burn rate was way too high. There were other deals on the horizon, one with CNN and more intriguingly an opportunity with the US government in the aftermath of September 11. But by January 2003 the board was at the point of laying people off or shutting down the company. Management was given three months.
On March 20, 2003 the US invaded Iraq. And a week later Keyhole’s deal with CNN was closed. Within a few days CNN was using EarthViewer — CNN called it their Map Viewer — on live TV to zoom interactively to military action on the ground.
If there was one single event that saved Keyhole’s you-know-what, it was a key clause in their contract with CNN: John had got them to agree to display Keyhole’s URL on the screen anytime they used EarthViewer on air.
Within a few days a headline in the USA Today newspaper told the whole story: “Tiny Tech Company Awes Viewers”.
CNN’s use caught the eye of the US government. It wasn’t long before In-Q-Tel, essentially the US Federal Government VC arm, was heavily engaged. And Keyhole still only employed 20 people.
Keyhole started to blossom — and not just in financial ways. They managed to snag John Rohlf who is still considered among the best 3D graphics programmers in the world. It was John who invented something groudbreaking and it was called: KML.
KML stood for Keyhole Markup Language and has gone on to become a phenomenon that enables one of the most prolific ways to exchange geographic information. Much like you and I can easily exchange and read PDF documents, KML allows people to exchange and read geographic information, which could then be displayed on top of Keyhole’s interactive digital globe. This changed Keyhole EarthViewer from a single user app into a hugely collaborative tool.
Now organizations could collaborate and share geographic data, viewing it in Keyhole’s super easy and super fast tool. This caught the attention of public safety and law enforcement departments across the country. Fire and police departments started to use Keyhole in place of their legacy enterprise “Geographic Information Systems” (GIS) software made by the 800 pound gorilla, Esri.
I was working at Esri at the time. I can tell you that it sent their CEO and founder, Jack Dangermond, into an apoplectic panic. In fact the shivers were felt down the spine of the entire organization. How could this tiny company be having such a disruptive effect?
But for Esri at least, the worst was yet to come.
By early 2004 Keyhole reached a classic inflection point. It was time to raise a “Series B”. Menlo Ventures was the lead. On April 21, 2004 they provided a term sheet and it was time to make a decision. But instead of signing John and his cohorts delayed and holed themselves up in a conference room.
After a few hours the news finally broke to the other “need-to-know” employees.
Google wanted to buy them.
Series “G”
By October 27, 2004 the deal was finally made public. Keyhole was now wholly owned by the Google. Google had only just gone public a few months before. They had become super bold and were mushrooming fast.
Strategic meetings with Sergey Brin and Larry Page ensued. Keyhole was almost immediately challenged. Bill Kilday, by then Product Marketing Manager for Keyhole, was anxious to hear about Google’s plans for the company. He wanted to ask Larry and Sergey:
A year from now, thinking about what success looks like, would it be better if Keyhole generated ten million dollars in revenue or had ten million users?
To Bill these were audacious goals.
But Larry and Sergey had other questions, such as “How big would their database need to be to cover the entire planet at one meter resolution?”
Bill finally got the chance to ask his question. Larry and Sergey thought for a moment: “I think you guys should be thinking much bigger than that.”
It took quite a while for their answer to sink in.
Where2Tech
It turned out Google had separately been experimenting with mapping as a way to add location information to search results. But it was it was about to get another lift, and that lift came from Where2Tech.
Where2Tech was founded by two Danish brothers, Jens and Lars Rasmussen. In the latter part of 2003 they found themselves unemployed from a company called Digital Fountain in Sydney, Australia.
Jens had been tinkering with the idea of adding mapping capabilities to a CD-ROM based business search app (or “Yellow Pages” app). This was to be an app that you installed — it was not a website. And, like Keyhole, Where2Tech stayed clear of browser based mapping because of the dominance of MapQuest.
With both of them unemployed they pitched their idea to anyone that would listen. One of Lars’ contacts made a fortuitous introduction to Larry Page and a meeting was finally scheduled on June 4, 2004. Legend has it that with holes in his socks and only $13 in his bank account, Jens booked a flight to California on his credit card.
Larry immediately challenged the brothers to make their app work in a browser. The Where2Tech app was certainly better than what MapQuest provided: it was fast — much faster than MapQuest. Unlike MapQuest, who generated each map image on the fly, Where2Tech relied on a vast array of pre-generated map “tiles”.
Where2Tech’s approach allowed not only fast maps, but it also allowed big maps — and not only big maps, but big “slippy” maps — maps that you could simply click and drag to pan rather than having to click on a ‘Pan’ button and wait for a new image to be generated.
Three weeks later Jen and Lars came back with another demo. It was enough to get Larry to offer them employment contracts to work at Google.
By October 2004 the Where2Tech and Keyhole teams were combined. In time they were collaborating to make each of their fledgling products better. By November 2004 the goal was set: they were to launch Google Maps in three months.
Data, Data, Data
The planned Google Maps product was not without its dependencies. It relied on satellite imagery and digital street map data. Furious negotiations ensued with imagery and street map data providers.
For imagery data Google primarily worked with Digital Globe. A deal was negotiated for imagery of the 200 most populated cities on the planet for $3 million. In Keyhole terms it seemed like a staggering price, but with Larry Page’s challenge to think bigger, the proposed deal was sent up the chain.
When Larry Page reviewed the deal his question was simple: “Is this all their content?” Larry didn’t want imagery for the top 200 cities. He wanted imagery for the whole planet. The maps team was flummoxed. Had they lost their collective mind?!
The team’s focus wasn’t just on maps and imagery. It was also on business locations.
At the time MapQuest, Google and others relied on business listings from the likes of a company called InfoUSA. InfoUSA in turn relied on teams of telemarketers to call businesses once a year. Their data was therefore always painfully out of date and, as a result, users of MapQuest were often directed to businesses that had moved or had closed.
Google started taking a different approach. They set up a system to crawl the now pervasive web pages that every business had, making the assumption that businesses had the incentive to keep their information much more up-to-date than any electronic “Yellow Page” directory. This effort fit perfectly with Google’s mantra to “organize the world’s information”. Now the mantra was simply being applied to “organize the world’s geographic information”.
Google Maps Launches
With fast, large, “slippy” maps and vastly superior list of businesses, Google Maps was launched, for initially just the US, at 7pm Pacific time, Monday February 7, 2005.
One hour later traffic started to pick up.
By 7.45am the next morning the site had been “slashdotted” — meaning that someone had started a thread about it on the influential tech website, slashdot.org.
By 9am the site exceeded the forecast (and server allotment) for the entire first 24 hours.
A phenomenon was birthed. Within days people in countries outside of the US were clamoring for the same UI. It didn’t take too long. In June 2005 Google Maps was launched in Japan. Then came the UK, then Ireland and then France.
For licensing reasons satellite imagery was held back as part of the initial launch. But it arrived on April 4, 2005, causing the servers to once again become overwhelmed.
Then, in June 2005 Google launched the Google Maps API. It was the equivalent of Apple’s App Store moment for iPhone. It unleashed whole new industries: Yelp, Trulia, Zillow and Strava to name just a few.
For a while things went swimmingly, but there were some snafus. For internal political reasons the Google Local team (focused on businesses) and the Google Maps team were later merged. And the name of the newly merged product? Google Local.
Google Local? WTF was that?
It didn’t take too long before the name was changed back!
But Whithersoever Google Earth?
You maybe thinking … didn’t Google Earth come out before Google Maps? The answer is no. While Keyhole EarthViewer continued to be nurtured under Google’s ownership, the priority was put on the launch of Google Maps rather than the relaunch of Keyhole’s product.
The relaunch was going to have access to 10 times the satellite imagery of Keyhole EarthViewer. It was also going to be much faster due to the vast infrastructure that was allocated to it.
As work continued on the relaunch an internal debate ensued: should it be “Google Earth” or “Google Globe”? The answer was decided through a simple test: say “Google Earth” ten times fast. Then try the same test by saying “Google Globe”. The decision was made. Google Earth it was!
There was also debate about the price. Keyhole EarthViewer was still $29.95 per year for personal use and up to $400 per year for GIS professionals. The answer from up high came down.
It was going to be free.2
Larry and Sergey preferred to do something great for users rather than make a few extra tens of millions of dollars in revenue. I guess also they also weren’t too concerned about cost!
Then there was a debate about registration. Given it was free, would you at least be required to register? Bill Kilday succeeded in pushing for removing even that barrier.
Google Earth was set to launch on 27 June 2005. A last minute internal scuffle with Marissa Mayer, then the final approver of everything that went live on Google, almost tanked the launch at the last moment. But finally everything was approved and the launch went ahead as planned.
At 28 MBytes per install (large for those days) the initial load on Google servers took its toll.
On the first day of its release Google Earth was downloaded 450,000 times. And within 28 hours the team met their download goal for the first two years.
Those Views of Streets
In 2005 Google went from having zero mapping products to having two ultra viral ones within just a few months. By the end of 2006, Google Maps had launched in 47 countries, and Google Earth had been downloaded 120 million times.
But like all good product managers the Google geo team didn’t rest on their laurels.
It just so happened Google had hired a guy called Luc Vincent in 2004. He was given the task of scanning the contents of libraries throughout the world. Ethical and moral questions aside, this was a monumental undertaking.
But soon after joining Luc was summoned to Larry Page’s office. Larry told Luc about another project, one that had started with a computer science professor at Stanford named Marc Levoy.
The project involved capturing videos of cities at the street level, collating them into a strip and then making them searchable by typing in an address. Larry was focused on something entirely new: making the physical world searchable from an entirely different point of view. Thus the idea of Google Street View came to be.
To cut a long story short, John Hanke introduced Google Street View to the world at the Where 2.0 mapping conference in San Jose on May 29, 2007. I was attending the conference at the time and I remember it well. There was a palpable gasp from the room, but I also remember people commenting “Yes, but can they scale?”
And I think you all know the answer to that question.
But Did Google “Win” — and What of the Future?
When pop stars go on a “World Tour” it doesn’t mean they go on a world tour. It generally means they tour in the USA, Canada, Japan, Europe and — if you’re lucky —Sydney.
With that in mind does Google dominate the consumer mapping world? Well the answer is no. Not quite. There are still a few key areas of the world where people don’t flock to their product:
- In China it’s Baidu Maps, Amap or Tencent Maps
- In Russia it’s Yandex Maps
- In India it’s sometimes MapMyIndia
- In South Korea it’s Naver Maps or KakaoMap
- In the rest of Southeast Asia Grab Maps is gaining ground
Then there’s Waze — but that’s a Google owned property.
Finally there is my alma mater — Apple Maps, still valiantly trying to usurp its rival. For owners of iPhones they’ve had a lot of success in grabbing mindshare in the USA. And it’s actually quite fascinating: many users don’t even realize they’re using Apple Maps, and remain adamant they’re using Google!
What of the future? Will some 20 person disruptive team tear up the mapping world with some artificially intelligent geographic agent? It’s going to be fascinating to watch.
But looking back on the last 20 years you have to admire the grit and perseverance of the whole Google Maps team.
It was truly a Map Happening That Rocked Our World.
Final Thanks
My heartfelt thanks and acknowledgment to Bill Kilday, author of “Never Lost Again“, without whose insider view of Google Maps my story would forever be lost!
So, as a final thought: go buy Bill’s book. 3
Footnotes
Map Happenings 