Speaker 1: Behind this unmarked garage door, pulling out onto the streets of Palo Alto, California, is a fleet of cars mounted with cameras, helping Google to map the world, something it's now been doing for 20 years.

Speaker 2: Here is where we're both repairing, building the cameras, keeping them maintained.

Speaker 1: Google's cameras have taken billions of images to map millions of miles in more than 100 countries, and they've come a long way since Street View images first published in 2007.

Speaker 3: This is our very first camera system. It's 500 pounds, and we needed a forklift to put it on top of the van.

Speaker 1: By 2008, the nine camera systems were 75 pounds, mounted on everything from snowmobiles to tricycles. So this allowed us to open up Europe. Europe has a lot of pedestrian areas and we can't drive through those. In 2010 came 15 camera 50-pound spheres, wearable by backpackers, underwater divers, even camels. And in 2018 came an even lighter 40-pound system I tried wearing on my back. This is like what it's like to backpack with a baby.

Speaker 3: Yeah. We went to Grand Canyon in Machu Picchu, places that you can only really walk into.

Speaker 1: With more than 2 billion monthly users, Google Maps is the world's top navigation app. And now Alphabet-owned Maps is using generative AI to keep ahead of the pack, with new consumer-facing features and AI analysis of billions of images to keep the map up to date.

Speaker 2: We're making 100 million updates to the map every single day. It's phenomenal.

Speaker 1: We went to Silicon Valley for a ride-along with Google's mapping fleet and a first-ever on-camera look at the Street View Service Center, where we sat down with the head of Maps to talk traffic, data privacy and all the changes coming thanks to generative AI. There was a time when paper maps were king. Then it was MapQuest printouts and standalone GPS units from companies like Garmin and TomTom. Then in 2005, Google made a bold move into Maps, following an idea from co-founder Larry Page.

Speaker 3: This is where we started mapping. About 20 years ago, Larry drove down some of these streets with a video camera and handed it to someone and said, hey, what can you do with this?

Speaker 1: Maria Biggs has been with Google for more than 10 years. She drove us around its headquarters in a car equipped with the latest generation Street View camera, first introduced in 2022. It's the first Street View camera that can be used on any car rather than being built in.

Speaker 3: As you can imagine, it's not tied to a specific car. We can rent a car, say, like an island. So we're going to Hawaii with these next-generation camera systems because we don't have to ship the whole car.

Speaker 1: Street View cameras are a significant part of how Google gathers data for Maps, but it also relies on satellite and aerial images, 1,000-plus third-party sources and info from local governments and directly from Maps users. All this allows it to offer Maps in a whopping 250-plus countries and territories. Now, the more nimble cameras are helping Google make updates to dozens of those countries and map at least three new ones, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Namibia and Liechtenstein.

Speaker 3: We can easily just take it to the next island without having to ship the entire car. And so some places that we haven't refreshed, collected in, say, 10 years, we're going to be able to easily move these cameras around.

Speaker 4: It used to be an extremely manual pipeline for any digital mapmaker. But increasingly, you have these various IoT devices, this combination of sensing, processing and connectivity that allows you to update this map more automatically and therefore potentially more cheaply and in a way that is ultimately more scalable.

Speaker 1: The way it works now, Bigg says, is the cameras record images locally as they're driven around by a fleet of Street View employees who ingest the images once they return to a hub. Like this Street View garage in Palo Alto.

Speaker 3: How many other garages like this are there around the world? So we have three total, one in each region, one in APAC, one in Europe and one here.

Speaker 1: Also on site here is the Street View service center.

Speaker 3: This is where all of the cameras come through when they move from different locations. This is a next-gen camera system where it has been to Australia. We did some really extreme testing in really hot tropical areas. And so we bring it back and we make sure everything's still functional. We clean it up before it goes back out to another country.

Speaker 1: More images and more detail from the new cameras also provide a rich data set for Google's AI models, resulting in a flurry of new consumer-facing features in the last couple years. One is Immersive View. Think of it like a supercharged version of Street View, using AI to fuse together billions of Street View and aerial images to show a lifelike preview of each step on the route.

Speaker 2: We use the imagery and neural radiance fields, which is a generative AI technique, to actually take a photo and transform it into a 3D representation of a place. So almost like you can look into a restaurant. And we overlay the conditions, like what is the actual how busy it is and what the weather might be, air quality.

Speaker 1: In October, Google announced a bunch more AI features. One major one, Maps, is now enabled with Gemini, Google's generative AI chatbot. Where could I watch Sunday's football game while drinking a beer and bring my dog?

Speaker 2: Here you go. There's all these places that show up. This is historically kind of hard information to find. And now, with a quick tap, you can learn about it.

Speaker 1: Chris Phillips joined Google in 2021 to head up all of Geo, the division in charge of Maps. He showed us some of the newest AI features.

Speaker 2: This place has 2,000 reviews, kind of a lot of reading to do. We summarize it using Gemini for you right away.

Speaker 1: Gemini is also enabling voice-activated reports in Waze, which Google bought in 2013 for $1.3 billion.

Speaker 4: I'm going to try it out. There's some construction up ahead.

Speaker 1: Construction recorded.

Speaker 4: To get consumers to actually use these things, they need to be easy to use. And a voice interface is the best kind of interface that you can have in the cabin. It allows you to keep your eyes out on the road. It allows you to keep your hands on the wheel.

Speaker 1: In Google Earth, Gemini is enabling custom visualizations that can help with high-level city planning tasks.

Speaker 2: They might want to be thinking about, where should we put EV charging stations in this area? And we can help them map quickly with looking at where is the current EV charging? What are the different stores and shops? They can overlay information around population and quickly do the surveying work and help them do that to make those decisions faster.

Speaker 1: On public transit, there are now delay reports, alternate routes and details like subway entrance locations. And in navigation, AI is enabling real-time reports of weather disruptions like unplowed roads, flooded areas and spots with low visibility.

Speaker 2: And then we have this new arrival experience where when you get to your destination, we can help you with not just where to park, but even that last step of walking along the way.

Speaker 1: While AI helps curate these details into an updated experience, it's being fed real-time data that often comes from you, the users.

Speaker 2: We have over 500 million people who are contributing updates to the map every day. That's things like reviews or keeping the hours up to date and even like what to expect as far as issues on the road on the way there.

Speaker 1: But users also provide data to Google Maps passively, too. Traffic delays, for instance, are predicted in part using live information like speed and drive time from the millions of drivers who use maps each day.

Speaker 2: So what was it like on this roadway on this day of the week at this time of day? What is that historical pattern? And we use anonymized data so it's not linked to any individual user. So we aggregate that information to know the historical trend.

Speaker 4: Data ownership and data privacy have always been one of the major perception barriers that Google has had to overcome.

Speaker 1: Over the years, Google has put in safeguards to help.

Speaker 2: We built technology to blur faces and even blur things like license plates.

Speaker 1: Location history is valuable data for Google, but users can now turn off location history or delete places they've been. And some, like abortion clinics or domestic violence shelters, are auto-deleted. And in a privacy-conscious move in December, Google started keeping location history on device instead of in the cloud tied to users' Google accounts, making it tougher for authorities to access location history. And users can request blurring an area on Street View, say, to prevent thieves from analyzing their property. But there is an upside to all this data, too. It gives Google a lot of power to warn drivers of hazards.

Speaker 2: Especially when you have conditions happening like a flooded road and we can surface it for other drivers in almost real time. It really does make a difference in helping avoid what could be other problems happening on the road.

Speaker 1: Google Maps gets updated with data from Waze, where reporting is core to the experience for loyal users.

Speaker 4: Built into the DNA of Waze is this idea of two-way interaction and what has been a very virtuous cycle for Waze and therefore interacting for Google.

Speaker 2: You're continually adding updates on what you see happening on the road and will give you some more provocative maneuvers along the way when you're deciding, you know, beating the traffic and getting around.

Speaker 1: But alternate routes have also worsened traffic in some neighborhoods, where small roads can be ill-equipped to handle many cars.

Speaker 2: We use public roads, public roads that are available for driving. And we work constantly with the local authorities, the different agencies that are responsible for transportation. And they help us with what are the rules for the specific roads. And we follow those.

Speaker 4: The use of these navigation apps, whether embedded or on smart devices, is, you know, almost universal. And so we are approaching a point where there needs to be kind of a more broader, almost fleet level view, considering how can we use these services to optimize traffic flow from a social point of view, rather than just different individuals trying to gain an advantage over each other.

Speaker 1: And there's a risk tied to how reliant users have become on Google Maps, when it can't get everything right. In one extreme example, a man died when he drove off a collapsed bridge in North Carolina in 2022. His family sued Google, alleging Maps suggested the route despite being warned of the collapse two years prior. International destinations pose their own challenges. In Jakarta, for example, ride-hailing app Grab is making its own map of the Indonesian capital's complex streets after its delivery drivers complained that Google Maps often got it wrong.

Speaker 4: When you set the challenge of mapping everywhere, rather than just in the major markets where things are most commercially viable, that is a real challenge for any map maker.

Speaker 1: But now, with AI and nimble new cameras, that could change.

Speaker 2: Because we won't have to rely on these big rigs and all this equipment, we can have a smaller unit that can get to more places.

Speaker 1: But already in major markets, Google Maps dominates by staying up to date with accurate road details, something that was notoriously lacking when the top competitor, Apple Maps, launched in 2012.

Speaker 5: It feels like a half-baked product, the data isn't great, and it's not the quality and the experience you would expect from an Apple product.

Speaker 6: CEO Tim Cook officially issuing an apology for the Maps app, Cook saying, quote, with the launch of our new Maps last week, we fell short on our commitment to our customers.

Speaker 1: Today, Apple Maps has come a long way, with some estimates putting it around 500 million monthly users, although it's far behind the 2 billion monthly users Google Maps has acquired since 2005. When its deep data set made it unique among maps.

Speaker 4: What made it so revolutionary was the search capability, combined with the completeness of the location database and it being an exploration tool and a solution to find something that you didn't even necessarily know where it might be or the address for it.

Speaker 1: But how much Google spends on Maps and how much money Maps makes is unclear. Google's parent company, Alphabet, doesn't break out Maps in its earnings reports, rather clumping it with other major services like Search and YouTube. One of the only estimates comes from a 2019 Morgan Stanley report, forecasting Maps would go from 2.95 billion in revenue in 2019 to 11 billion in 2023. That's a big chunk of the 18.3 billion in total estimated revenue of the whole navigation app sector in 2023. How it makes money largely boils down to one word, advertising. Do certain results float up higher if they are advertisers with Google?

Speaker 2: So we're always focused on giving people the result when they're searching for a restaurant or a place that most accurately fits what they're searching for. So we're always going to narrow it down into what you're looking for. And merchants have the opportunity to actually pay for advertising in order for their place to show up in that list.

Speaker 4: It shouldn't even be readily apparent to the consumer that they're being advertised to. It could be giving priority to certain search results. It could also be something as simple as showing logos and branding in little POI pin drop visualizations.

Speaker 1: Another moneymaker for Maps? Selling a software interface with detailed data to solar companies looking for new customers. Think highly accurate rooftop images, measurements, elevation and shading for 480 million plus buildings across 40 countries. Google also sells access to its Maps platform to developers from the likes of Wayfair and Domino's, who've built more than 10 million sites and apps for things like food delivery, ride sharing and real estate. One example, in 2019, Uber said it paid Google 58 million for its mapping technology over the previous three years. And Google's Android Automative Operating System, with Maps of course, powers the infotainment systems in minicars by makers like Polestar, Volvo, Honda, GM and Ford.

Speaker 4: Speed limit changes, number of lane changes, road geometry changes. We all know how frustrating it can be when that gets out of date in our cars. And so automakers want the absolute best there.

Speaker 1: And as robotaxis and self-driving go mainstream, accurate mapping is crucial and naturally a business opportunity for Google, too.

Speaker 4: Alphabet has Waymo, who are slowly but surely becoming very successful in the robotaxi space, expanding their geographic footprint. And very famously, they use digital maps as a key part of their technology workflow there.

Speaker 1: Waymo dominated the U.S. robotaxi market in 2024, and passengers in Phoenix can hail one of the fully autonomous cars directly from the Google Maps app. As for what's next, AI and self-driving cars themselves could, eventually, be a better alternative to the user reports that help keep Waze popular and Google Maps accurate.

Speaker 4: I think an ambition for Waymo and something that we see from almost every other autonomous vehicle platform provider is to try to close that loop and to use the same vehicles that benefit from the map to also contribute to the creation of that map. It could also just be a lot more reliable and exhaustive because you're not relying on a human being to notice something.

Speaker 3: Is there any future where the Google mapping is happening on self-driven cars without a driver? I mean, that would be a great thing to do, right, because then they're collecting a lot of places where people are going. And so that would be great. But there's not yet. No, no plan. Got it.