Google Maps: the map you could drag
On February 8, 2005, anyone with a web browser could do something that had simply never been possible before: grab a map with the mouse, drag it, and watch the world keep sliding into view — tile after tile loading at the edge, no page reload, no wait. Google Maps had launched.
The people who built it were four: Lars Eilstrup Rasmussen, a Danish computer scientist with a PhD from UC Berkeley; his brother Jens, who had designed the product; and two Australians, Noel Gordon and Stephen Ma, who had worked, respectively, in a clothing factory and at a petrol station before the four of them rented a spare bedroom in Sydney, called the company Where 2 Technologies, and agreed on rules — nine to five only, no weekends — in 2003.
Their first product was a C++ desktop application. When they pitched it to Google co-founder Larry Page, he turned it down without ceremony. “We like the web,” Page reportedly said. He gave them three weeks to build a browser prototype instead. They delivered in August 2004. Google acquired Where 2 Technologies the following month.
The difference between Google Maps and what MapQuest or Expedia had been offering was not a matter of better data. It was a matter of architecture. Prior web mapping services delivered a static image: ask for a new area, receive a new page, watch the screen go white and reload. Google Maps requested map tiles silently in the background as you moved, stitching them together on screen as you dragged. Ten days after the launch, a designer named Jesse James Garrett published an essay that named the technique — AJAX, Asynchronous JavaScript and XML — and cited Google Maps as its clearest demonstration. The term became one of the foundational words of the modern web.
Within weeks, developers were breaking the map open without permission. Paul Rademacher, a DreamWorks animator, reverse-engineered the JavaScript and scraped Craigslist to pin apartment listings to their actual streets — HousingMaps.com, the first Google Maps mashup, built without anyone from Google’s involvement or approval. Google, watching the chaos, released the official Google Maps API in June 2005, four months after launch. Any developer could now embed a live, draggable map in any webpage with a handful of lines of code. The number of websites doing so would surpass a million within seven years.
Jens Rasmussen designed the location pin — the teardrop marker now visible on screens everywhere — specifically so it would be narrow at its base, so the sharp point marks a spot without covering the map underneath it. It is the sort of detail that is easy to miss and hard to forget once you notice it.
MapQuest held more than half of U.S. online mapping market share the day Google Maps launched. By January 2009, Google had overtaken it. The map migrated from desktop browsers to smartphones, from destination lookup to turn-by-turn navigation, until it ceased to be something you consulted and became something you simply carried — a continuous, ambient sense of exactly where you were.
Sources
- Google Maps — Wikipedia — launch date February 8, 2005; AJAX tile architecture; API release; MapQuest market history.
- Google Maps Turns 7 — Pingdom — growth statistics, MapQuest overtake date, API adoption figures.
- How Google Maps Was Founded — YourTechStory — Larry Page’s three-week ultimatum, team backgrounds, founding story.
- What Does AJAX Even Stand For — History of the Web — Jesse James Garrett’s coinage ten days after launch, Google Maps as demonstration case.
- History of the Google Maps API — API Evangelist — HousingMaps, ChicagoCrime, Maps API launch context.
- HousingMaps and the First Mashup — Mashup Guide / O’Reilly — Paul Rademacher’s unauthorized mashup and subsequent hire by Google.
- Jens Eilstrup Rasmussen — Wikipedia — location pin design, where the teardrop shape came from.