
He looked and he just said, ‘why don’t we do all of it?’” Street View was Larry and Sergey’s idea I went to show Sergey on the map all the major cities we wanted to acquire. “At the time satellite imagery was quite expensive to acquire and scarce because there weren’t that many satellites available. Google’s co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, he said, thought that geospatial – data and information related to maps and location services - was a key element of Google’s organising the world’s information. “Our aim was to create one seamless, browsable map of the entire world – an Earth that you could browse,” John Hanke, co-founder of Keyhole and vice president of Google’s geospatial division until 2011 told the Guardian. Later in 2005 Google launched driving and public transport directions, but it wasn’t until the launch of satellite imagery that Hanke saw how committed Google was to the project. “It wasn’t the first out there, but the role of Google Maps in transforming digital maps, making them popular and bringing them from a tech niche into the public consciousness cannot be underplayed.” “Yahoo beat Google to web maps and MapQuest beat it to turn-by-turn directions, but people didn’t stand up and take notice until Google Maps came along,” said Gary Gale, the Ordnance Survey’s head of APIs.


Google Maps launched in the US on 8 February 2005 and in the UK two months later, though by that time it wasn’t the first digital map of its kind: Yahoo had beaten Google to it with a redevelopment of its long-standing Yahoo Maps in 2004.
