We already know that Google knows pretty much everything. Even the companion app Google Maps knows pretty much every location on earth to get you to where you need to be. Just how does Google know about all of our streets and cities and just how much of the urban world has it mapped out? Well, according to a new report from CNET, Google has revealed that it has more than 16 million kilometres of Street View imagery and about 93 million square kilometres of Google Earth imagery.
Those are impressive numbers that aren’t likely to mean much to many people. To put this into perspective, Google estimated that they now cover around 98 per cent of the places in the world where people live. Which is a remarkable claim given that many of us are probably still not convinced that places like Hotazel exist, and yet somehow Google has it mapped.
It also just shows you how ahead of the game it is versus its competitors. For instance, Apple has only started showing street-level photography in its Apple Maps application and yet somehow Google provides enough coverage in its mapping software that you could practically not need to travel to cities and still get the experience of walking around in them.
It will be interesting to see where Google grows its services from here. While they continue to update their imagery software and provide better traffic and public transport mapping, you can only imagine the eventual amount of detail we could get out of a service like this and the potential that it offers to certain software developers.
Last Updated: December 17, 2019
