Google Data

Forward Geocoding is the process of converting addresses (like a street address) into geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude), which you can use to place markers on a map or position the map. The Google Maps APIs have several services that you can use to convert addresses into coordinates – the Geocoding API, the Place Autocomplete service in Places API, and the Place Search service in Places API. What are the differences between them and when should you use each one? Here’s where to start.

Note that while this blog focuses on the server-side Places and Geocoding APIs, these best practices also apply to the client-side Places and Geocoding services in the Google Maps JavaScript API.

Geocoding API

The Geocoding API is best for handling unambiguous queries: complete postal address strings (for example, “48 Pirrama Rd, Pyrmont, NSW, Australia”). Compared to other Google APIs, the Geocoding API provides the best quality matching of addresses globally for these types of complete, unambiguous queries. However, Geocoding API is not recommended if your application handles ambiguous or incomplete queries, such as “123 Main St”, or if it handles queries that may contain non-address information such as apartment numbers or business names.

Geocoding API is best used for unambiguous complete addresses, such as “48 Pirrama Rd, Pyrmont, NSW, Australia”

Places API

The Places API allows users to discover both addresses and semantic locations, such as cafes or parks, by name or type. In contrast to the Geocoding API, it handles ambiguous or incomplete requests in a more robust way. If your application handles user interaction, or addresses that are ambiguous or incomplete, consider the following services.

Place Autocomplete service

For applications that respond in real time to user input, we recommend using the Place Autocomplete service in the Places API. This service is designed to return multiple possible addresses and allow the user to choose between them. The autocomplete lookup function can also be biased to return results specific to a location, enabling high quality results to be returned for incomplete queries such as “123 Main St”. Since the Place Autocomplete service is optimized for responding to user input, it also has very low latency, usually at least 10x lower than the Geocoding API. It’s also good at handling misspelled queries, or queries containing non-address information, since as the user types, they can see suggestions and correct their spelling if needed.

Typing “123 Main St” into a Place Autocomplete search box lets the user choose from multiple results. Results can also be biased to prefer those near the area shown on the map or near the current user location

Place Search service

The Place Autocomplete service relies on a user to choose the best option from multiple results. What if you have an application that handles ambiguous or incomplete queries in an automated fashion, with no user able to provide input?

For geocoding ambiguous or incomplete addresses in automated systems, when there is no user to select one of the autocomplete suggestions, we recommend the Place Search service in Places API. Place Search is better at coping with ambiguous queries than the Geocoding API, and lets you restrict your search to a specified area, or rank results by distance, allowing more precise filtering and ranking of results for ambiguous or incomplete queries. Place search is also more robust at responding to queries with additional non-address information such as business names or apartment numbers.

Future Changes to Geocoding API

We plan to roll out an update to the Geocoding API at the end of November 2016 that will increase the difference between Geocoding and Places performance for ambiguous and unambiguous queries. This change will improve the quality of Geocoding results for unambiguous queries, but will be more likely to return ZERO_RESULTS for ambiguous or incomplete queries where the Geocoding API was unable to find a high quality result.

If you are already using the above best practices, you should see an improvement in your Geocoding API results. If you are currently using the Geocoding API for incomplete or ambiguous queries, or for queries that may contain non-address information such as business names or apartment numbers, we recommend that you switch to the Places API instead, as it is likely to give better quality results for your use case.

You can try the new Geocoding service ahead of launch by adding an optional parameter, new_forward_geocoder=true, to your Geocoding API request. For example:

https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?new_forward_geocoder=true&address=1600+Amphitheatre+Parkway,+Mountain+View,+CA&key=YOUR_API_KEY

If you want to try the new Geocoding service in the JavaScript Maps API Geocoding Service, you can set the new optional parameter newForwardGeocoder: true in the GeocoderRequest object. The new Geocoding service will launch for both the Geocoding API and the Geocoding Service in the JavaScript Maps API at the same time. All of the recommendations in this blog post apply to both the server-side and client-side APIs.

If you have any bug reports or feature requests for the new Geocoding service, please let us know using our public issue tracker.

In Summary

The following table sums up when we recommend you use the Geocoding API, Place Autocomplete service and Place Search service.

If your application does not yet follow these best practices, you may get worse results from Geocoding API in future, so we recommend you test how your application works with the new Geocoding service and update your application to use the above best practices if required. Try the upcoming Geocoding service by setting new_forward_geocoder=true in your geocoding request.

For more information on the Google Maps Geocoding API, Place Autocomplete in the Places API and Place Search in the Places API, please see the developer documentation. Also see this more detailed best practices guide in our documentation for more details on Geocoding best practices for various use cases, including minimizing latency when querying Directions API with addresses.

Finally, a big thank you to all the developers who use the Google Maps Geocoding API and provide feedback via the issue tracker. Getting feedback from developers is vital for us to be able to keep improving our products, so if you have any bug reports or feature requests, please let us know!

Posted by Elena Kelareva, Product Manager, Google Maps APIs

If you’re building a website today, your users are more likely to view it on a mobile device than on a desktop or laptop. Google has plenty of resources to help developers make their websites stand out on mobile, from a guide to building mobile-friendly websites, to a mobile-friendly testing tool, to promoting new mobile web technologies such as Accelerated Mobile Pages and Progressive Web Apps.

Mobile web users often get frustrated when trying to scroll the page, but an embedded map captures their swipe and pans the map instead. This can even lead to users getting stuck on the map and having to reload the page in order to get back to the rest of the page.

Today we’re introducing intuitive scrolling for sites with embedded maps and making the full-screen control visible by default on mobile devices. This should give your users a more intuitive and less frustrating map interaction experience on mobile browsers.

The map trap

We have added a new gestureHandling option to the Google Maps JavaScript API. This setting controls how touch gestures* on the map are handled.

Values:

• “cooperative”: Two-finger touch gestures pan and zoom the map, as do all mouse gestures. One-finger touch gestures are ignored by the map. In this mode, the map cooperates with the page, so that one-finger touch gestures can pan the page.
• “greedy”: All touch gestures pan or zoom the map. This was the previous behaviour.
• “none”: The map cannot be panned or zoomed by user gestures.
• “auto”: Gesture handling is automatically set to either cooperative or greedy, depending on whether the page is scrollable or not (defined by a comparison of the page body dimensions and the window dimensions).
• If the page is scrollable, “auto” sets the gesture handling mode to cooperative.
• If the page is not scrollable, “auto” sets the gesture handling to greedy.
• If the map is in an iFrame, “auto” sets the gesture handling to cooperative because the API can’t determine whether the page is scrollable.

*Note that there is currently no way to change the gesture handling mode for Street View; these options only affect the way gestures are handled by the map. If you’d like to see this extended to Street View in future, please let us know on our public issue tracker.

You can enable any of these four gesture handling modes by adding the corresponding field to the MapOptions object. For example:

map = new google.maps.Map(document.getElementById(‘map-div’), {
gestureHandling: ‘cooperative’,
center: {lat: -34.397, lng: 150.644},
zoom: 8
});

If the gestureHandling option is not set, the default value is auto, since that automatically chooses what we expect to be the best behavior based on what the browser can detect about the placement of your map in the page. If you prefer to always use the old map gesture handling mode for users viewing your site on mobile devices, change the value of gestureHandling to greedy, which sends all user gestures to the map.

Maps viewed within a scrollable website on a mobile device will display this overlay on touch

The option draggable: false has now been superseded by gestureHandling: ‘none’. The old option draggable is now deprecated, but we’ll maintain backwards compatibility. Developers who previously turned off map interaction by setting draggable to false will keep their existing non-interactive maps.

Maximizing the map when you need it

Many users in our user studies said they found small embedded maps on mobile devices hard to interact with and they preferred to interact with a larger map. To address this request, we’ve made the fullscreen control visible by default on mobile devices. The fullscreen control allows the user to make the map larger. When the map is in fullscreen mode, the user can pan the map using one finger. As a developer, you can enable or disable fullscreen control, by setting the fullscreenControl option to true or false in the MapOptions object. When the map is in fullscreen mode, one finger will always pan the map, since there is no surrounding page to pan.

The default setting of fullscreenControl is true on mobile browsers, and false on desktop browsers, since the problem of maps being too small for interaction usually only occurs on mobile devices.

The fullscreen control allows the user to make the map larger for easier interaction

View this demo on a mobile device to see how the fullscreen button and cooperative gesture handling mode (or auto gesture handling mode on a scrollable site) will look to your users.

For more information on the Google Maps JavaScript API, please see the developer documentation or review the latest release notes.

A big thank you to all the developers who use the Google Maps JavaScript API and provide feedback via the issue tracker. Getting feedback from developers is vital for us to be able to keep improving our products, so if you have any bug reports or feature requests, please let us know.

Posted by Elena Kelareva, Product Manager, Google Maps APIs

Originally posted on the Google Developers blog.
Posted by Israel Shalom, Product Manager

Here at Google, we’re serving more than a hundred APIs to ensure that developers have the resources to build amazing experiences with them. We provide a reliable infrastructure and make it as simple as possible so developers can focus on building the future. With this in mind, we’re introducing a few improvements for the API experience: more flexible keys, a streamlined ‘getting-started’ experience, and easy monitoring.

Faster, more flexible key generation

Keys are a standard way for APIs to identify callers, and one of the very first steps in interacting with a Google API. Tens of thousands of keys are created every day for Google APIs, so we’re making this step simpler — reducing the old multi-step process with a single click:

You no longer need to choose your platform and various other restrictions at the time of creation, but we still encourage scope management as a best practice:

Streamlined getting started flow

We realize that many developers want to get straight to creation and don’t necessarily want to step into the console. We’ve just introduced an in-flow credential set up procedure directly embedded within the developer documentation:

Click the ‘Get a Key’ button, choose or create a project, and then let us take care of enabling the API and creating a key.

We are currently rolling this out for the Google Maps APIs and over the next few months we’ll bring it to the rest of our documentation.

API Dashboard

We’re not just making it easier to get started, we’re simplifying the on-going usage experience, too. For developers who use one or more APIs frequently, we’ve built the new API Dashboard to easily view usage and quotas.

If you’ve enabled any APIs, the dashboard is front and center in the API Console. There you can view all the APIs you’re using along with usage, error and latency data:

Clicking on an API will jump to a detailed report, where you’ll see the traffic sliced by methods, credentials, versions and response code (available on select APIs):

We hope these new features make your API usage easier, and we can’t wait to see what you’re going to build next!

As we approach the end of the year, many travelers will set out on holiday road trips to visit family and friends, near and far. Whether you’re driving solo, or don’t want to assign navigator duties to your passengers, it just got easier to get around while keeping your eyes on the road with new voice commands that are simpler than ever to use.

For the ultimate hands-free and eyes-free experience, first make sure you’ve got the latest versions of the Google Maps app and Google app for Android. Then, the next time you enter navigation mode or driving mode, you can simply say “Ok Google” followed by a voice command, without needing to tap or even look at the screen. You’ll always know when voice commands can be used in Google Maps by looking for a white microphone icon in the top right corner.

When you say “Ok Google”, the microphone will activate and you’ll see a circle with bouncing dots – indicating that your voice command is being heard. For example, try saying “Ok Google, find gas stations”, and see what happens. You can tap the circle to cancel an ongoing command. If for some reason you want to use a non-hands-free alternative to saying “Ok Google”, tap the microphone and simply say “Find gas stations”.

To make sure you have things set up correctly, tap the overflow menu (the button with three dots), then tap “Settings”, and finally, tap ““Ok Google” detection”. The “While driving” setting allows you to say “Ok Google” during navigation in Google Maps. If you’d like to do this anywhere on your device, you’ll need to enable the “Always on” setting (on some devices, the setting is called “From any screen”). And if for some reason you’d like to turn off “Ok Google” detection entirely throughout your device, you can do so by toggling the settings to the off position.

Once you’re all set up, the possibilities are endless. In addition to tried-and-true voice commands like “What’s my next turn?” and “What’s my ETA?”, you can now do things like “Show / Hide traffic”, “Mute / Unmute voice guidance”, and even “Avoid tolls / highways / ferries”, with just the sound of your voice. If you anticipate traffic, you can say “How’s traffic ahead?” or “Show alternate routes”. And if you want to add a little fun to your drive, you can say “Play some jazz”, “Send a text”, or maybe even “Call mom”. Here’s a cheat sheet with more of the voice commands you can use in Google Maps. Safe driving, and happy road tripping!

Posted by Raghu Simha, Product Manager, Google Maps

One of the best parts of my job at Google is 20 percent time. While I was hired to help developers use Google’s APIs, I value the time I’m afforded to be a student myself—to learn new technologies and solve real-world problems. A few weeks prior to the recent Australian election an opportunity presented itself. A small team in Sydney set their sights on helping the 15 million voters stay informed of how to participate, track real-time results, and (of course) find the closest election sausage sizzle!

Our team of designers, engineers and product managers didn’t have an immediate sense of how to attack the problem. What we did have was the power of Google’s APIs, programming languages, and Cloud hosting with Firebase and Google Cloud Platform.

The result is a mish-mash of some technologies we’d been wanting to learn more about. We’re open sourcing the ausvotes.withgoogle.com repository to give developers a sense of what happens when you get a handful of engineers in a room with a clear goal and a immovable deadline.

The Election AU 2016 repository uses:

• Go from Google App Engine instances to serve the appropriate level of detail for users’ viewport queries from memory at very low latency, and
• Dart to render the live result maps on top of Google Maps JavaScript API using Firebase real time database updates.

A product is only as good as the attention and usage is receives. Our team was really happy with the results of our work:

• 406,000 people used our maps, including 217,000 on election day.
• We had 139 stories in the media.
• Our map was also embedded in major news websites, such as Sky News.

Complete setup and installation instructions are available in the Github README.

Posted by Brett Morgan, Developer Programs Engineer

Earlier this year, Turner Sports approached us with an idea: Help us change the way golf fans experience the sport’s biggest event of the year, the Ryder Cup. Always up for helping users go where they’ve never gone before, we loaned Turner a Street View Trekker. They hit the links to collect hole-by-hole imagery at Minnesota’s Hazeltine National Golf Club, site of this year’s tournament starting today through October 2.

Over two days, the team covered the 160-acres course.

Explore the images on Google Maps, or walk the course like the pros using the Hazeltine Explorer, an interactive tour developed by Turner and Ubilabs. Along with 360-degree views, the site, built with Google Maps APIs, features custom elevation graphs for every hole, integrated video highlights and course-specific historical moments.

Fans attending the event can also make use of the Ryder Cup app’s Wayfinding feature, available on Android and iOS. Built using Google Maps APIs, the feature includes a detailed view of the course with routing instructions that account for walking paths and crosswalks. The map also displays information about on-course amenities and facilities. 




Posted By: Vanessa Schneider, Program Manager, Google Earth Outreach

Your app, your map style. For iOS and Android.

Cross-platform custom map styling is here—change the color palette of your maps, hide labels, vary road density and toggle points of interest. Your maps can now match your brand and style across your website and your apps!

The Google Maps APIs now support you in creating beautiful styled maps for your Android and iOS apps as well as your website using the same JSON style object.

Easily create your style

The new Google Maps APIs Styling Wizard helps you to create a map style in a few clicks. Use one of our pre-built styles or create your own style from scratch.

Access advanced options for further control over every available aspect of your map style including visibility, fills & stroke weight.

Use the styling wizard for point and click custom style creation.

Show what’s important, hide the rest

Custom map styling provides you with ways to tailor your map for a particular use case. Got your own transit stops and want to turn the Google ones off? We’ve got you covered. Want to hide highways and highlight water features? Done. You can control the visibility of labels, landscapes, transit icons, points of interest, roads and more to create the look that reflects your brand and purpose. See the samples for Android, iOS and JavaScript.

Both the iOS and the Android SDKs now support business points of interest as well; this means you’ll now see hotels, restaurants and shops on your maps. They’ll only be visible when you compile with the latest SDKs and you can control their visibility via styling.

Style once, use on any platform

When you’re happy with your new map style, you can export & use the same JSON styling object in our iOS, Android and JavaScript Maps APIs. The Styling Wizard also provides the URL for you to use with the Google Static Maps API.

To enable a custom style in your app or website, take a look at the code samples: Android, iOS & JavaScript.

You can distribute the styles with your app, fetch them dynamically, and even change them at runtime.

Custom styles now work on native iOS and Android apps as well as the web.

The Android and iOS release notes contain details of bugs fixed as well as the custom basemap styling features mentioned in this post. Read the Maps APIs styling guides for Android, iOS and JavaScript, and watch the Styling your Maps Geocast (embedded below).

A big thank you to Android and iOS developers everywhere for using the Google Maps Android API and the Google Maps SDK for iOS and submitting feedback via the issue tracker. We heard you!

Share your styled basemaps on Twitter and G+ via #mapstyle and show us what you’ve done!

Posted by Megan Boundey, Product Manager, Google Maps Mobile APIs

One of the basic features of the Google Maps app is the ability to open the app and find out which direction you’re facing in a matter of seconds. To make orienting yourself even easier in Google Maps for Android, we’ve replaced the direction arrow on your blue dot with a shining blue beam – think of it as a flashlight guiding your travels.

The beam also tells you how accurate your phone’s direction is at any given time. The narrower the beam, the more accurate the direction. The wider the beam, the more likely it is that your your phone’s compass is temporarily uncalibrated, which means that its sensors aren’t working as they should be. This can happen by doing something as simple as charging your phone or walking by a metal pole, which most of us do everyday. Thankfully, there’s a really easy fix. Any time you want to get back on track – not just when you see a prompt or notification – simply move your phone in a figure 8 motion a few times. This should immediately result in a more accurate direction.

Once you master the curving motion, you’re one step closer to having a more accurate compass when you use Google Maps on your Android phone.

Posted by: Raja Ayyagari, Product Manager, Google Maps

The world’s oceans and fisheries are at a turning point. Over a billion people depend on wild-caught fish for their primary source of protein. Fisheries are intertwined with global food security, slave labor issues, livelihoods, sovereign wealth and biodiversity but our fisheries are being harvested beyond sustainable levels. Fish populations have already plummeted by 90 percent for some species within the last generation, and the human population is only growing larger. One in five fish entering global markets is harvested illegally, or is unreported or unregulated. But amidst all these sobering trends, we’re also better equipped to face these challenges — thanks to the rise of technology, increased availability of information, and a growing international desire to create a sustainable future.

Today, in partnership with Oceana and SkyTruth, we’re launching Global Fishing Watch, a beta technology platform intended to increase awareness of fisheries and influence sustainable policy through transparency. Global Fishing Watch combines cloud computing technology with satellite data to provide the world’s first global view of commercial fishing activities. It gives anyone around the world — citizens, governments, industry, and researchers — a free, simple, online platform to visualize, track, and share information about fishing activity worldwide.

At any given time, there are about 200,000 vessels publicly broadcasting their location at sea through the Automatic Identification System (AIS). Their signals are picked up by dozens of satellites and thousands of terrestrial receivers. Global Fishing Watch runs this information — more than 22 million points of information per day — through machine learning classifiers to determine the type of ship (e.g., cargo, tug, sail, fishing), what kind of fishing gear (longline, purse seine, trawl) they’re using and where they’re fishing based on their movement patterns. To do this, our research partners and fishery experts have manually classified thousands of vessel tracks as training data to “teach” our algorithms what fishing looks like. We then apply that learning to the entire dataset — 37 billion points over the last 4.5 years — enabling anyone to see the individual tracks and fishing activity of every vessel along with its name and flag state.

This data can help inform sustainable policy and identify suspicious behaviors for further investigation. By understanding what areas of the ocean are being heavily fished, agencies and governments can make important decisions about how much fishing should be allowed in any given area. Often, fish populations are so depleted that the only way to ensure they are replenished is to create “no take areas” where fishing is not allowed. Our hope is that this new technology can help governments and other organizations make decisions about which areas need protection and monitor if policies are respected.

Partners have already started using Global Fishing Watch and have committed to providing additional data sources for greater impact:

• Indonesia’s Minister of Fisheries and Marine Affairs, Susi Pudjiastuti, has committed to making the government’s Vessel Monitoring System (VMS) public in Global Fishing Watch in 2017. Ibu Susi has been a progressive leader for transparency in fisheries with other governments now expressing similar interest to collaborate.
• Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations will collaborate on new research methodologies for reporting spatial fishery and vessel statistics, building on Global Fishing Watch and developing transparency tools to support their member states in improving the monitoring, control and surveillance of fishing activities.
• Trace Register, a seafood digital supply chain company, has committed to using Global Fishing Watch to verify catch documentation for its customers such as Whole Foods.
• Bali Seafood, the largest exporter of snapper from Indonesia, has teamed up with Pelagic Data Systems, manufacturers of cellular and solar powered tracking devices to bring the same transparency for small scale and artisanal fishing vessels, into Global Fishing Watch as part of a pilot program.

We’ve also developed a Global Fishing Watch Research Program with 10 leading institutions from around the world. By combining Google tools, methodologies, and datasets in a collaborative environment, they’re modeling economic, environmental, policy, and climate change implications on fisheries at a scale not otherwise possible.

Global Fishing Watch was not possible five years ago. From a technology perspective, satellites were just beginning to collect vessel positions over the open ocean, and the “global coverage” was spotty. There has been tremendous growth in machine learning with applications in new fields. Policy and regulatory frameworks have evolved, with the United States, European Union, and other nations and Regional Fishery Management Organizations now requiring that vessels broadcast their positions. Market forces and import laws are beginning to demand transparency and traceability, both as a positive differentiator and for risk management. All of these forces interact and shape each other.

Today, Global Fishing Watch is an early preview of what is possible. We’re committed to continuing to build tools, partnerships, and access to information to help restore our abundant ocean for generations to come.

Go explore your ocean at www.globalfishingwatch.org

Posted By: Brian Sullivan, Google Lead – Global Fishing Watch, Sr. Program Manager – Google Ocean & Earth Outreach

When it comes to app development, there can be a disconnect between the robust app we intended to build and the code we actually get into a minimum viable product. These shortcuts end up causing error conditions once under load in production.

The Google Maps API team maintains client libraries that give you the power to develop with the confidence that your app will scale smoothly. We provide client libraries for Python, Java, and Go, which are used by thousands of developers around the world. We’re excited to announce the recent addition of Node.js to the client library family.

When building mobile applications, it is a best practice to use native APIS like Places API for Android and Places API for iOS where you can, but when you find that your use case requires data that is only available via the Google Maps APIs Web Services, such as Elevation, then using these client libraries is the best way forward.

These libraries help you implement API request best practices such as:

• Requests are sent at the default rate limit for each web service, but of course this is configurable.
• The client libraries will automatically retry any request if the API sends a 5xx error. Retries use exponential back-off, which helps in the event of intermittent failures.
• The client libraries make it easy to authenticate with your freely available API Key. Google Maps APIs Premium Plan customers can alternatively use their client ID and secret.
• The Java and Go libraries return native objects for each of the API responses. The Python and Node.js libraries return the structure as it is received from the API.

The client libraries can help you in a variety of ways. One of them is exposing the result sets in a format that makes most sense for the language in question. For example, the Java and Go client libraries include object hierarchies that are type-safe representations of the potential results for each API. This allows you to write code in the comfort of your editor with the knowledge that the compiler will catch any mistakes.

With 3 million apps and websites using Google Maps APIs, we have an important tip for ensuring reliability when using web services: call APIs from a server rather than directly from Android or iOS. This secures your API key so that your quota can’t be consumed by a bad actor, along with being able to add caching to handle common requests quickly.

A server instance acts as a proxy that takes requests from your Android and iOS apps and then forwards them to the Google Maps Web Service APIs on your app’s behalf. The easiest way to create a server side proxy is using the Google Maps Web Service client libraries from Google App Engine instances. For more detail, please watch Laurence Moroney’s Google I/O 2016 session “Building geo services that scale”.

You can learn more about the Google Maps API web services in our documentation. The easiest way to use these APIs and follow best practices is to use the Client Libraries for Google Maps Web Services. Download the client libraries for Java, Python, Go or Node.js from Github to start using them today!

Posted by Brett Morgan, Developer Programs Engineer

Back in March, we introduced a new way for people to find and compare the fastest ways to get around town by adding a new ride services tab when searching for directions in Google Maps. Today, we’re adding two more partners in the U.S., Lyft and Gett. Now Google Maps will display options from 9 ride-sharing partners in over 60 countries, allowing you to compare the fastest, most affordable ride near you, without having to download and open multiple apps.

Say you’re looking to get from the High Line to Times Square in Manhattan. When typing these locations into the Google Maps app, you’ll see a ride services tab appear alongside driving, transit and walking directions. Just tap the icon and you’ll find fare estimates and pick up times from multiple ride service partners, depending on driver availability. We’ll also show various types of services offered by each partner— for instance Lyft may also show options for a Lyft Line ride.

Ride options from Lyft will begin appearing across the U.S., while Gett will show availability within New York City. So the next time you find yourself with an appointment across the city, just open the Google Maps app on iOS or Android and take it for a spin.

By Sara Torti, Senior Product Manager, Google Maps

Over the past three months, Durita Andreassen and a few friendly sheep equipped with solar-powered cameras strapped to their woolly backs set out to collect imagery of the Faroe Islands for Street View. The 18 Faroe Islands are home to just 50,000 people, but — fittingly for a country whose name means “Sheep Island” — there are 70,000 sheep roaming the green hills and volcanic cliffs of the archipelago. So when Durita decided to document the country for Street View, sheep weren’t a baaad place to start.

When we herd about the Sheep View project, we thought it was shear brilliance. So we decided to help the Faroese by supplying them with a Street View trekker and 360 cameras via our Street View camera loan program. Last week, the Google Maps team arrived in the Faroe Islands to help train and equip the local community to capture even more (but slightly less woolly) Street View imagery.



Now that the Faroe Islands is supplied with a Trekker and 360 cameras, residents and tourists can assist the sheep in collecting Street View imagery of their beautiful lands using selfie-sticks, bikes, backpacks, cars, kayaks, horses, ships and even wheelbarrows. The Visit Faroe Islands office in Tórshavn and Atlantic Airways at the airport will be lending out Street View 360 cameras to visitors willing to lend a hoof.

The Faroe Islands have shown us that even sheep can contribute to Street View. If your hometown or favorite hiking trail hasn’t made it into Google Maps yet, grab your own 360 camera or apply to borrow one from us through our Street View camera loan program. We’re excited to see what ewe map!

Published By: David Castro González de Vega – Google Maps Program Manager

Summer just isn’t complete without a road trip. Whether you cruise Route 66 from coast to coast or take a short drive out of the city, there are plenty of quirky attractions along the way. We looked at Google Maps data from the past few years to uncover which weird and wonderful roadside attractions are searched for more during the summer months than during the rest of the year. Here’s a curated list of some trending roadside gems across the country.

Roadtrippers leaving California for the beautiful Oregon landscape shouldn’t miss the Trees of Mystery attraction just 36 miles south of the Oregon border. Despite the name, the true showstoppers are the 49-foot-tall statue of Paul Bunyan and the 35-foot-tall Babe the Blue Ox – both of which are visible from Highway 101.

Downtown Seattle sports a notoriously sticky tourist attraction: a wall covered in gum. Although the wall was scrubbed clean back in 2015, it returned to all its glory in no time. Road trippers who find themselves at the famous Pike Place Market need only wander downstairs to Post Alley to behold the man-made (or chewed) marvel.

Just off Route 66, weary travelers can take a break to picnic, swim, or fish at the small lake that’s home to a big Blue Whale. To cool off from their long drives visitors fling themselves off his tail, slide down his fins and pose for photos in his open jaws.

Fewer than 30 minutes from Atlantic City, travelers can take in another larger than life creation – Lucy the Elephant. Lucy is a 132-year-old elephant-shaped building that towers six-stories tall. Visitors can enter the structure and climb up to the howdah (the carriage positioned on the back of an elephant) for a picturesque view of the beach below.

Take a short detour off I-95 in Connecticut to take a trip back in time to the Jurassic period. Northeastern roadtrippers will find 40 life-sized dinosaur figures on a 1.5-mile nature trail in The Dinosaur Place. And the best part is that they don’t have to worry about any real-life velociraptors.

Next time you’re on a road trip, remember to take a break and explore the roadside attractions along your route. Google Maps can help you do just that with a variety of features like offline maps, the ability to search for places along your route, and the option to create multi-stop trips (now available on Android and iOS). After all, the journey can be just as much fun as the destination.

Posted by Pierre Petronin, Quantitative Analyst, Google Maps

Street View is one of Google Maps’ most loved features, providing users with a way to explore and experience the world around them. Developers all over the world use Street View in the Google Maps JavaScript API to make their apps more unique and exciting, giving their users a sense of what it’s like to visit a place in real life.

Today we’re making Street View even better, especially on mobile devices, by launching a new Street View renderer in the Google Maps JavaScript API. Read on for the full details of what we’ve improved!

Better display

Smoother Transitions

Transitions from one point to another in Street View now include more animation frames, creating the effect of gliding smoothly to the next location. Transitions in the old renderer looked like jumping from one location to another.

Smoother Loading Animations

The old renderer repeats images while loading new content, resulting in a stuttering effect. The new renderer uses lower resolution imagery while loading, resulting in a smoother animation when rotating an image in Street View.

Object modeling improvements

Objects in Street View look better in the new renderer because it builds a 360-degree model that considers all possible perspectives. For example, this high rise building has wavy lines in the old renderer, as opposed to crisp lines in the new renderer.

In another example: for imagery on an incline, such as a street with a steep hill, the new renderer corrects the objects to be vertical, whereas the old renderer would have shown the objects at an angle.

Better mobile support

WebGL imagery

The new renderer uses WebGL (on browsers that support it) which results in a higher frame rate and better rendering, especially on mobile devices. On mobile devices, the old renderer would display a fish-eye projection of the image, whereas WebGL allows us to present a rendered sphere that looks as it would in reality. For example, the street in the image below is straight, but the old renderer made it look curved on mobile devices.

Touch support

As mobile web usage grows, users expect familiar touch-based interactions to work everywhere. The new renderer supports the same natural touch-based gestures on mobile which have been available in the Google Maps Android app: pinch-to-zoom and double-tap-to-go. In the old renderer, zooming was only available through the +/- buttons, and movement was only possible by clicking the arrows on the ground.

Motion tracking on mobile devices

Mobile devices give developers the opportunity to provide their users with more natural ways to explore and interact with their applications. We’ve enabled support for device orientation events on Street View so that users on mobile devices can look around in Street View by moving their phone. Developers have the option to turn this off if they prefer. Please see the developer documentation for more details, or open the documentation link on a mobile device to see motion tracking in action.

Better controls

X Forward

When using a desktop device with a mouse or trackpad, users will see a small “X” at the cursor location that indicates the next camera location if they choose to move forward. Arrows indicate the direction of movement. Wall rectangles identify the direction the camera will point towards.

Cleaner street names, labels and targets

Street names and labels are now separated from controls, removing overlap issues and allowing for clean display in right-to-left and left-to-right languages.

We hope you enjoy using the new and improved Street View renderer! Also a big thank you to all the developers who use the Google Maps JavaScript API and provide feedback via the issue tracker. Getting feedback from developers is vital for us to be able to keep improving our products, so if you have any bug reports or feature requests, please let us know!

For more information on Street View in the Google Maps JavaScript API, please see the developer documentation.

Posted by Elena Kelareva, Product Manager, Google Maps APIs

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