As if you didn’t already know, Google’s Street View cars have been going here, there and everywhere since the first camera-equipped vehicle hit the streets over a decade ago.
The web giant has just revealed that Street View has now captured more than 10 million miles of images from around the world, a distance that, if driven in a straight line, would circle the Earth more than 400 times.
Speaking to Cnet about reaching the 10 million mile mark, Google’s Ethan Russell described images as “at the core of everything we do”.
After years of using only its Street View cars to capture content, the service has expanded to backpack Trekker cameras to capture images from off-road locations as diverse as the Grand Canyon, London’s Westminster Abbey and Peru’s Machu Picchu.
And if the Trekker can’t do the job, the team mounts cameras on everything from tricycles and boats to camels and ziplines.
Over the years, the service has spawned hundreds of “you won’t believe what we found on Street View” posts from news websites around the world — oh look, here’s one from Digital Trends!
It wasn’t all plain sailing, though, as Google’s Street View cars occasionally crashed during their explorations. The company also got into hot water a few years ago when it emerged that its vehicles were scraping personal data from private Wi-Fi networks, though Google described the data collection as “inadvertent.”
There are still many countries where Street View has yet to collect data, including most African countries and China, with the latter’s strict internet controls — and ban on Google services — meaning the situation won’t change anytime soon.
Although there are several alternative services to Street View, they have not yet reached the coverage achieved by Google’s offering. Apple, for example, has started building its own image database, but it has a long way to go to catch Google.
The Mountain View, California-based company also revealed that Google Maps now covers 98% of the world’s inhabited locations. Evolving significantly from its early days as a simple navigation app, Maps offers a growing list of features that have made it an indispensable app for most smartphone users.
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Source: newstars.edu.vn