The success of Google Maps.
Editor’s note: This article is from the WeChat public account “deeply” (ID: deep -echo), author Zhao Yu.
The success of Google Maps.
Core Insights:
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Precise prediction of the user’s future behavior patterns is a prerequisite for the success of Google Maps;
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After finding the direction, Dream Big, be bold to imagine the end of the market;
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Only forward-looking and vision are not enough. If you look for it, you must invest fully, so that you can take the lead.
Do you remember when was the last time lost?
I believe you can’t think of it anymore. In today’s era of highly developed mobile Internet, “get lost” has become a long-term thing.
Even if you are heading to a strange country, after you get off the plane, you don’t need the guidance of the locals, you can go unimpeded – today you only need a map app, you can follow the navigation tips to the destination Ground. Large-scale navigation and mapping technologies have dramatically changed the way people look for targets. People can naturally use maps to find hotels, restaurants, schools, and find everything they want to find.
Recall that 15 years ago, this was almost impossible task.
Today, we are able to enjoy such a convenient and efficient service, and an Internet giant company has played a key role in the back.
After more than a decade ago, two of Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, envisioned the way people look for geographic location in the future, and invested in countless talents., energy and financial resources, promoted the development of the entire mobile map service industry, and finally brought us the excellent map navigation experience that we enjoy today.
Today, Google Maps is an electronic map service product with more than 1 billion monthly users. In Google Maps, people can query city political districts and traffic maps around the world, vector maps with commercial information, satellite photos of different resolutions, and street scenes in most urban streets. Whether it’s an average user or a business company with a high demand for map services, Google Maps can satisfy you.
Google Way is the latest work of Google’s official trilogy
As a deep participant in the Google Maps project, Bill Kildy has witnessed the entire process from birth to rise in more than a decade. He gathered his insights and personal experiences into a book called “Google Ways”, detailing the story behind Google Maps, and we can also glimpse the challenges that Google has experienced in building a billion-month live product. The choices made, and the thinking behind them.
“Let’s recruit talent, platform resources are not limited”
Google is not the first company in the world to provide users with electronic map services. The predecessor of Google Maps is actually a software developed by Keyhole.
Keyhole was founded in 1999 by John Hank and was acquired by Google in 2004. After the acquisition was completed, John Hank (who became the head of the Google Maps project in the future), book author Bill Kildy (who was the marketing director of Keyhole), and 27 other Keyhole employees joined Google. .
Keyhole was acquired by Google, The picture shows Keyhole founder John Hank
Before Google’s offer for the acquisition, Keyhole’s business has just gotten better. In the five years from 1999 to 2004, Keyhole started from a demo program called CTFLY, gradually formed and expanded the team, and worked hard to overcome the shortage of funds, launched the Earth Viewer for B-side and C-end users. (Virtual Earth Software), and the collaborative application KML (Keyhole Markup Language, a markup language) that can create and share geographic information, and beat the competing Esri with good running speed and excellent experience, won the first Batch customers.
In 2004, Google acquired two map agencies, Keyhole, and a four-person team from a Sydney apartment called Where2Tech. In the fall of 2004, Keyhole and Where2Tech merged, and Google provided them with near-infinite resources within their capabilities, while providing them with an important piece of confidential information: all the search queries entered by users in the Google search box. 25% are related to maps.
25% of search volume means an exceptionally broad market that needs to be explored – users’ demand for geographic information services is far from being met, and Google “makes the information of the entire physical world available.” Under the vision of being searched, it is imperative to vigorously develop an electronic map service.
“Set your goals bigger”
Google founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin
After joining Google, the author of the book, Bill Kildy, asked the two founders of Google a question: “If you look ahead, one year from now, Keyhole is generating $10 million in revenue. Ok, is it still 10 million users?”
Considering the results of Keyhole at the time, this is actually a fairly bold goal. At the time, both parties acquired Ke for Google.The goal of yhole’s trading plan is to get Keyhole to get 500,000 users. The figures that Kildi mentioned to Larry Page and Sergey Brin are already 20 times the target of payment.
But surprisingly, Page smiled and replied: “I think you should set your goals bigger.”
After a few years, Bill Kildy finally understood the words of Page and why Keyhole was acquired: Google launched a “moon landing project” on the Earth, wanting Change the way users find their way on the planet, and the Keyhole team will be at the heart of this moon landing project.
Since it’s “changing the way users find their way on the planet,” what the 10 million users in the district have, what Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s intentions are obvious: Google Maps To serve all users on the planet who can connect to the Internet, this is the real change of the world.
Data for the entire planet
In mid-February 2005, after several months of research and development and debugging, Google is preparing to officially release the Google Maps web page product to the public. This product includes:
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A fast, fluid, browser-based map;
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A huge aerial and satellite image database;
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and a more comprehensive Google search that searches for the latest geographic data.
Among the three functional modules, aerial photography and satellite imagery are the most difficult to implement, because Google did not have its own satellite aerial photography system at the time, and must purchase database services from Digital Globe, a company that can take satellite imagery.
John Hank, who was the project leader at the time, felt that if Google could provide the latest satellite imagery for the city with the 200 most populous people on the planet, it would be very good. But the total price of the money needed to purchase satellite images from these 200 cities is staggering: $3 million.
If you can get this budget, they can expand the map aerial and satellite database by a factor of three, and the previous database took up to five years to complete. So, I heard this $3 million.After the price, John Hank was shocked and embarrassed – he was not sure if Google management would approve the budget.
However, when John Hank and the team took the slides to apply for budgets from management, Sergey asked them: “Why is this so little? Is this all their data?”
Sergey himself has already counted, knowing that this budget does not correspond to a full database.
Daniel, a data collection engineer at Google Maps, said that this is all the data that Google Maps needs. Digital Globe’s entire database also includes some remote islands in the central ocean, satellite imagery in some sparsely populated areas of Africa, Australia and Antarctica, and even in the Sahara Desert, for a total of approximately 80 million square kilometers. But for Google Maps, from the perspective of cost performance, it is not necessary to buy this part of the satellite image.
Page and Sergey insisted that the team buy the entire database, which made both Daniel and John stunned. In fact, only the US military purchased the entire database of Digital Globe, but the two founders of Google insisted on their own opinions, preferring to invest heavily and make the products perfect.
In the end, Google acquired all of the Digital Globe images for millions of dollars, successfully covering all parts of the world, including Africa, Latin America, and the most remote regions of Asia and Antarctica. .
“Breakthrough Limits, Create Superior Products”
As the first online global map that can be used in the browser, the new version of Google Maps with satellite imagery has been a great success. A week after the release, Marisa Mayer, then a Google executive, sent an e-mail to the company, announcing that it was the most successful product release in Google’s history, even far beyond the previous release of Gmail.
But Google did not stagnate because of the initial success of the product, but immediately began to explore other features of Google Maps.
The National Campaign for Web Map Creation
The first correct choice for Google Maps is to expose the API for map products for free.
After the release of Google Maps, in addition to receiving praise from major media and users, many networksStation developers and software engineers also expressed their hope that they could use their own data to create a unique version of Google Maps for people to use. So Google freely published the API of the map product and gave up the right to use the user to upload data, thus setting off a national campaign for web page map production.
In this way, crime statistics maps, Texas Clean Coal Proposed Project Maps, maps showing Los Angeles police brutality, and bicycle traffic accident maps, and many other Google Maps-based mashup maps have sprung up. Various data can be displayed quickly and smoothly on Google Maps, and can interact with users.
This has also successfully catalyzed the birth of dozens of companies worth millions or even billions of dollars.
The birth of Uber is inseparable from Google Maps services
For example, Yelp (American public comment), Zillow (real estate trading platform), Trulia (real estate search engine), Hotels.com (good booking network), and later LBS such as Uber and Lyft (location based Services) Startups are the beneficiaries of Google Maps. It can be said that the success of Google Maps directly promotes the development of the entire LBS type industry, and has a profound impact on the industry afterwards.
Google Earth
For a web browser-based map, Google Maps is quite good, but some features of the electronic map service, such as fluid velocity, 3D terrain and buildings, measurement, annotation maps and other GIS tools, Importing and exporting datasets, etc., are not available on the web version of Google Maps. So Google added some features to the Earth Viewer, optimized the interactive page and user experience, released an app and named it Google Earth.
Only the power of the function is not enough. Page and Sergey have an indication: Google Earth will be open to users for free, because they would rather be more than tens of millions of dollars. Users and the world do a great thing.
Wait until Google Earth officially releasesAfter that, the user expressed a warm welcome to it. Only on the first day after the release, Google Earth was downloaded 450,000 times. Since a 28M file is downloaded every time it is installed, Google Earth’s download and usage rate has even had a serious negative impact on Google’s infrastructure of thousands of servers.
Google Earth has also been highly praised by the media, and PC World has described it as “one of the best free downloadable software in software history.”
In addition, Google Earth has also unexpectedly played a disaster relief effect. Since Google Earth has a common and useful feature: moving the cursor anywhere on the screen, the software returns the latitude, longitude, and altitude of the location. So when Hurricane Katrina hit the coastal area of southeastern Louisiana in August 2005, Google Earth came in handy again.
With this feature, the US Coast Guard can determine the latitude, longitude and altitude of the Earth directly in Google Earth based on the location of the trapped person, and accurate to the meter. This directly solved the problem that the former guards could receive a call for help but could not find the location of the trapped person, thus saving the lives of hundreds of people in New Orleans.
The launch of Google Earth has made Google a new peak in the technical reputation and social reputation of map services.
Google Street View
As mentioned earlier, Larry Page’s long-term goal is to allow the physical world to be searched as well. As early as 2004, he began to instill the early concept of Google Street View to engineering director Luke Vincent. In Page’s vision, the project is to take video on the streets of the city, then create a continuous strip of horizontal images and extract data (such as addresses) from them to make them searchable.
Vincent started the exploration with the task that Larry Page gave him, and made the Google Street View project bigger. He first recruited seven engineers and 17 interns, collaborated to build the first prototype of the Google Street View car, took the first pictures, and developed the “Computer Vision Pipeline” application.
Then, in the late summer of 2005, the Vincent team successfully captured the first dataset in the streets of Mountain View and Palo Alto, California, and managed to integrate it into Google Maps. A demo version. By the summer of 2006, Vincent had recruited 12 full-time engineers and rebuilt the entire system including cameras, cars and processing tools.
Google Street View car equipped with a high-definition camera
Google is also committed to the operation of the Street View project. In order to shoot more streets, Google bought a “Stanley” self-driving car company. Google and the Stanley team worked together to design a more concise second-generation Google Street View car, and collected road image information for 1 million miles of streets at the end of 2007. Today, Google has gradually expanded its Google Street View program to major cities around the world.
At the time, Google’s seemingly extremely lucrative investment showed another forward-lookingness today: whether it’s in computer visual data collection or in other areas of research, the value of Google Street View is Needless to say. In 2017, Li Feifei’s Stanford University Visual Studies Office even used the car type and location data of various communities in Google Street View images to make predictions about the demographic indicators of the community, which is significant compared to traditional community surveys. .
Google Maps Re-evolution
Because of the success of Google Maps, Jobs also actively cooperated with Google Inc. to provide Google Maps application service on the original iPhone. At the 2007 Apple conference, Jobs showed how to use the Google Maps app to order 4,000 cups of latte to Starbucks barista. He also switched Google Maps to satellite mode, leading viewers to use the iPhone to “tour around the world”, and good presentations once again detonated the use of Google Maps.
Steve Jobs shows how to use Google Maps on your iPhone
In the 18 months after the launch of the iPhone, Google Maps usage on Apple’s mobile devices exceeded the combined usage on all other computers and phones. This also made the original John Hank’s seemingly ridiculous idea in Keyhole financing PPT – “access to rich interactive maps on a pocket-sized device” – became a reality.
Since then, Google has launched a series of measures to ensure the leading position of Google Maps. In 2008, Google won the right to use the “Eye of the Earth 1 satellite” from Microsoft and used it to collect images; also this year, Google began to carry out ground truth projects, using their own collection of street view data to make maps. Get rid of the reliance on commercial map data companies; since then, Google has released a map making tool that encourages users to participate in the production of maps to build a real-time monitoring system for the Earth; Google even acquired Skybox Imaging for $500 million. Since then, Google has also been able to launch its own Earth monitoring satellites…
As can be seen from these operations, Google Maps is undoubtedly a very lucrative project, but in this matter, making money from the beginning is not the first priority of Page and Sergey. In the conference that the author of the book, Bill Kildi, attended, the two Google founders had barely asked about money—not asking about the return on investment or asking about the return on investment cycle.
They are only interested in one thing, how to make great products that truly organize the world’s geographic information.
When Google went public in 2004, Larry Page warned the buyer in an open letter entitled “User’s Handbook for Google’s Shareholders”: “Google is not a traditional company, we are not “I want to be a traditional company,” he wrote. “Sergey and I founded Google because we believe we can provide a great service to the world – to provide relevant information on any topic at any time.” The geographically relevant services provided by Google Maps are an important part of it.
Because of the success of Google Maps, the first is Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s accurate predictions of future user behavior and their ambitious strategic goals based on forward-looking forecasts. Under the guidance of clear strategic goals, they used a huge amount of resources to create excellent products in the way of “high-scoring and high-scoring”, and finally succeeded in winning the market with huge product advantages.
And time proved that the huge resources invested in the year, today actually in many dimensions, laid the advantage for others to catch up with Google’s overall technology development.
Most people find it difficult to have a forward-looking perspective like the two founders of Google. It’s hard for most companies to have the same financial strength and talent accumulation as Google. But the achievement of the Google Maps project is not only forward-looking and resources – giants such as Microsoft and Apple have tried to cut into this market, but the achievements are far less than Google Maps.
In the Google Maps project, Google’s strategic strength, strict product quality requirements, and the project team’s ultimate work philosophy are the business philosophy that truly draws on everyone’s value. It is also the underlying ability that each of us should develop consciously before the next wave of technology.