2022
I recently posted an article on How will Google Maps look like in 10 years from now. I've tried my hand via "A day in the life" in in It's January 2028? How will the Google Maps look like in ten years? Would love your adds to that post.
Now, for a bit of history on Google Maps: The intent of this post is to help that future projection by describing the history of google Maps.
This post is the first in a planned series where I’m describing the history of Google Maps.
History is a big word for a product that is 12 years old, however given its significance in the Google ecosystem, it deserves a description. My attempt is to do that in a format of key ingredients, and how all these, cooked the current product.
Google Maps Ten Key Ingredients
- Search by location, Bret Taylor’s “Useless Project”
- Keyhole, the satellite map maker pitch and Sergey Brin doing Googlers one at a time
- Zipdash Nextel mobile app and the start of traffic forecasting
- Where 2, the Danish two men company and the start of the fight against Mapquest
- The iPhone Launch and the Apple deal for Google maps as the pre-installed app
- The Stanford Project, VuTool and the Chevy Astrovans
- The battle of the maps: TeleAtlas, Navteq and the Google Ground truth secret project
- Street View and 360 crowdsourcing
- Local Guides, the secret Google Maps army
- Android OS, Motorola and the mobile titans battle
Let's start then, with Search by location, Bret Taylor’s “Useless Project”
As any great innovation, Google Maps has its origin in failure.
Bret Taylor was the product manager of a Google product called “Search by Location” which was launched as part of the Google Labs in September 2003. It was Google’s first effort related to mapping.
Bret Taylor went on to start FriendFeed, acquired by Facebook for 50 million dollars, then the CTO of Facebook, and then he started Quip, the business collaboration software. Quip was acquired by Salesforce.
Now, back to “Search by location”. Remember that 2003 was the year of Yahoo in search and Mapquest for maps and directions. If you wanted to search for a local business, there was Yellow pages. Remember the yellow binders dropped in front of your garage every year?
Search by Location was a website where you could put in a keyword, as well as an address or ZIP code, and Google would find Web pages that matched both. “It was a practically useless project. It had zero users” according to Bret Taylor. His main example was on coffee shops. When Google tried to index businesses in Palo Alto that served coffee, the main example of a coffee shop was Sun Microsystem. Sun named its products after coffee (most famously, Java). So that broke the entire use case.
So, Google decided to license Yellow Pages information. It made Search by Location more usable, but far from a breakthrough. A web implementation of the Yellow Pages directory, pretty much. And as Yellow pages, it attracted little usage.
The next big ingredient was still missing. KeyHole will bring the maps into Google’s radar, and provide the next big step forward. It will also take Maps in direct competition with Mapquest and Yahoo.
Like the post? Let me know by a “kudo” if you want to continue this ingredient journey and hear the story of KeyHole acquisition by Google.
