MOUNTAIN VIEW, July 20 — For all the noise around mapping apps, the salient point about Google Maps is that it began life not as a corporate behemoth’s pet project but as a C++ desktop program created by four people in Sydney. The service now reaches more than a billion people each month, a figure the company disclosed in 2020, and it has quietly become the default way much of the world navigates its streets. The founding story is almost quaint by today’s standards.
Brothers Lars and Jens Eilstrup Rasmussen, along with Stephen Ma and Noel Gordon, started Where 2 Technologies in early 2003. Google acquired the outfit in October 2004, bringing the four founders aboard.
That same month, Google also bought Keyhole, the geospatial data company whose Earth Viewer later became Google Earth, and in September 2004 it picked up ZipDash, a firm specialising in real-time traffic analysis. The official launch of Google Maps came on February 8, 2005. The satellite view relies on two sources: high-resolution imagery of cities shot from aircraft flying between 800 and 1,500 feet, and satellite imagery that, according to a 2011 report, is typically no more than three years old and updated regularly.
The original version used a variant of the Mercator projection — fine for most users but useless for anyone trying to navigate near the poles. In August 2018, the desktop version finally switched to a 3D globe display, though users could still toggle back to the flat 2D view.
The mobile years and the two-billion-user club
The mobile app arrived in 2006, bringing GPS turn-by-turn navigation and parking assistance. By 2013, it had become the world’s most popular smartphone app. In 2017, Google announced that the app, alongside other Google services, had reached two billion users on Android alone.
It would seem that once people started using it, they rarely stopped. Google Maps also provides an API that lets third-party websites embed maps, and it offers a business locator in many countries.
The collaborative mapping tool Google Map Maker was discontinued in March 2017, but crowdsourced contributions continued under the Google Local Guides programme, with non-Local Guides also able to contribute. The service’s 360-degree Street View remains one of its most distinctive features, offering panoramic interactive views at street level. For a product that began with four people in an Australian office, the scale is remarkable.
The company does not issue monthly user numbers as a matter of course, but the 2020 figure of over one billion users remains the most recent publicly available benchmark. What comes next — perhaps deeper integration with AI-driven navigation or more granular real-time data — is not yet clear, but the history suggests Google has no intention of letting anyone else claim the map.
