Google Maps

The main Google Maps site includes a local search feature, finding businesses of a certain category in a geographic area.

谷歌地图

谷歌地图 was released to the public on February 9, 2007, and replaced the old 谷歌本地 . This is the Chinese localized version of Google Maps and Google Local services with coverage limited to the Chinese mainland. There are some differences in frontier alignments between 谷歌地图 and Google Maps. On Google Maps, sections of the Chinese border with India, Pakistan and Tajikistan are shown with dotted lines, indicating areas or frontiers in dispute. However, 谷歌地图 shows the Chinese frontier strictly according to Chinese claims with no "dotted lines" anywhere.

Google Moon

In honor of the 36^th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969, Google took public domain imagery of the Moon, integrated it into the Google Maps interface, and created a tool called Google Moon. By default this tool, with a reduced set of features, also displays the points of landing of all Apollo spacecraft to land on the Moon. It also included an easter egg, displaying a Swiss cheese design at the highest zoom level, which Google has since removed. A recent collaborative project between NASA Ames Research Center and Google is integrating and improving the data that is used for Google Moon. This is the Planetary Content Project. Google Moon was linked from a special commemorative version of the Google logo displayed at the top of the main Google search page for July 20, 2005 (UTC) webarchive.org . Visit http://moon.google.com/ .

Google Mars

Google Mars provides a visible imagery view, like Google Moon, as well as infrared imagery and shaded relief (elevation). Users can toggle between the elevation, visible, and infrared data, in the same manner as switching between map, satellite, and hybrid modes of Google Maps. In collaboration with NASA scientists at Arizona State University, Google has provided the public with data collected from two NASA Mars missions, Mars Global Surveyor and 2001 Mars Odyssey. At present, the Google Earth desktop client cannot access the data, but the feature is in development. Visit http://mars.google.com/ .

Google Ride Finder

Google launched an experimental Google Maps-based tool called Ride Finder, tapping into in-car GPS units for a selection of participating taxi and limousine services. The tool displays the current location of all supported vehicles of the participating services in major U.S. cities, including Chicago and San Francisco on a Google Maps street map. Visit http://labs.google.com/ridefinder .

Google Transit

In December 2005, Google launched Google Transit. This is a web application (listed in Google Labs), that plans a trip using public transportation options. Google Transit launched with support for Portland, Oregon. Information for Eugene, Oregon; Honolulu, Hawaii; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Seattle, Washington; and Tampa, Florida was added on September 27, 2006, with more added since including adding cities in Canada, Europe, Japan and Australia. The service calculates route, transit time and cost, and can compare the trip to one using a car. Visit http://www.google.com/transit .

Google My Maps

In April 2007, My Maps was a new feature added to Google's local search maps. My Maps lets users and businesses create their own map by positioning markers, polylines and polygons onto a map. The interface is a straightforward overlay on the map. A set of eighty-four pre-designed markers is available, ranging from bars and restaurants to webcam and earthquake symbols. Polyline and Polygon colour, width and opacity are selectable. Maps modified using My Maps can be saved for later viewing and made public (or marked as private), but cannot be printed. Note: this can easily be overcome by using the 'Print Screen' funtion key and simple image editing software such as Paint.

Each element added to a My Map has an editable tag. This tag can contain text, rich text or HTML. Embeddable video and other content can be included within the HTML tag. Upon the launch of My Maps there was no facility to embed the created maps into a webpage or blog. A few independent websites have now produced tools to let users embed maps and add further functionality to their maps. This has been resolved with version 2.78 .

Google Street View

On May 25, 2007, Google released Street View, a new feature of Google Maps which provides 360° panoramic street-level views of various U.S. cities. On this date, the feature only included five cities, but has since expanded to fifty-seven, with plans for more U.S. and Canadian cities in the future.

In August 2008, Australia was added to the Street View feature with nearly all Australian highways, roads and streets having the feature. In addition in that month Japan was added and the Tour de France route was added on July 2 of that year. In December 2008, New Zealand was added to street view. Australia and New Zealand are the only countries to date with almost all roads and highways featured.

Google Street View has also gained a significant amount of controversy in the days following its release; privacy concerns have erupted due to the uncensored nature of its panoramic photographs.