The prototype that became Google Maps lived in a spare bedroom in the Sydney suburb of Hunters Hill. Four unemployed software engineers worked there on a Windows program they called Expedition. Stephen Ma, one of the four, looked at a screenshot of it for the first time in years when The Guardian interviewed him ahead of the product’s 20th anniversary. “I’m actually surprised how similar it looks to what Google Maps looks like today,” he said.
The team called itself Where 2 Technologies. Ma, a former Silicon Valley hire who had been laid off after the dotcom bubble burst, was invited in by a fellow Australian, Noel Gordon, who was already working with the Danish brothers Jens and Lars Rasmussen. Their target was MapQuest, the market leader, which AOL had bought in 1999 for $US1.1bn. MapQuest was clunky; users had to print their turn-by-turn directions.
A pitch that fell through
The Where 2 crew took the demo to Sequoia Capital hoping for seed money to ease their maxed-out credit cards. Then in March 2004 Yahoo Maps launched SmartView, which let people search for restaurants and entertainment venues on a map. Sequoia lost its nerve and walked away.
As a consolation prize, Sequoia introduced them to Google, and the team got to show the demo to Larry Page. He liked it but had no use for desktop software. “We really like the web,” he told the Rasmussens.
So they rebuilt it for the browser using Ajax, the set of techniques that lets a loaded page fetch fresh data without a full refresh. Rather than one huge map image, the page pulled in small tiles as needed, which is what gives online maps their smooth, dragging motion. Google hired the team and bought their intellectual property for an undisclosed price. Google’s 2004 annual report said US$66m had gone out in cash, performance bonuses, shares and options for four small acquisitions, Where 2 among them, and that sum was split among several owners.
The Where 2 group began work as Google employees on 7 June 2004, in a Sydney office that then held six salespeople. Eight months later, on 8 February 2005, Google Maps launched.
Google’s own side of the story
Work had also been going on inside Mountain View. According to the Acquired podcast, a young Google product manager named Bret Taylor was running a small feature in 2003 called Search by Location, which let people type searches by place but had no map behind it. In Taylor’s own words, “It had zero users per day.” Taylor, Page and the business development chief Megan Smith concluded the feature was not cutting it, with AOL’s MapQuest as the benchmark to beat.
Ma stresses that the credit belongs to a team. He gives most of it to Jens and Lars Rasmussen, whose idea it was, and names Taylor, James Norris, Andrew Kirmse and Seth LaForge, whose names appear on the original Google Maps patent, as others who are often overlooked.
Where it stands now
The Guardian reports that the service has more than 2 billion monthly users worldwide, and that it powers third-party platforms including Airbnb and Uber. Ma has been gone from Google for 14 years; he moved to other projects in 2006. The commercial side and the collection of location data, he says, were not on the team’s radar while he worked on the maps. A University of Melbourne media professor, Scott McQuire, called Google Maps a great product that works on the basis of data extraction.
Sources
- Google Maps changed the way we get around. It all began in a spare bedroom in Sydney | Technology | The Guardian
- Google Maps | Acquired
