Google Maps and Earth

Google Maps launched its fully localised New Zealand service in December 2007, joining earlier interactive mapping services. New Zealand organisations had already spent most of a decade moving spatial information into web browsers. Public-health users could map disease information through PHEW! from 1999, Police had moved routine mapping towards a browser version of MAPS by the end of 2000, Statistics New Zealand had a free Census WebMap by March 2002, and councils and the Department of Conservation were putting property, environmental and operational information behind browser interfaces by 2003 and 2004. Google did not introduce New Zealand to web mapping. It changed the size of the audience and, very quickly, what that audience expected a map to feel like.

Those systems were built for particular jobs. A council property viewer let people find a parcel or rating record. DOCgis gave conservation staff access to centrally maintained spatial information. Police MAPS supported crime and intelligence work. PHEW! presented public-health patterns. The interfaces worked within the browser and network capabilities of their time. They were solving organisational problems with the networks, browsers, servers and software available at the time.

What changed after 2005 was the benchmark. Interactive mapping moved from something a person encountered because a government agency, council or specialist organisation had built an application into something people encountered simply because they used the web. Search, navigation, imagery and directions became consumer functions. A person no longer needed to know that a map was backed by a geographic information system. They simply expected the map to work.

The distinction keeps the chronology honest. Google did not introduce New Zealand to web mapping. It changed the scale of the audience and the expectations that audience brought back to every other digital map. The older institutional systems had moved GIS into the browser. Google Earth and Google Maps helped move mapping into ordinary digital life.

Google Earth launched internationally on 28 June 2005. Its basic proposition was immediately different from the task-specific browser maps that preceded it. A user could fly from a view of the planet to a chosen place, tilt the terrain, move continuously across the landscape and examine imagery without first knowing which agency held the relevant map. The interface invited exploration. It did not ask the user to understand layers, projections, map scales or the administrative structure behind the data before getting started. For a generation accustomed to opening GIS by choosing a project, workspace or layer, simply typing a place and flying there felt almost indecently easy.

For New Zealand users, this changed the experience of looking at the country from above. Aerial photographs and satellite imagery had long been important professional mapping inputs, but access was normally controlled by the organisation that acquired, purchased or managed them. Google Earth put an image-rich view of the landscape in front of anyone with a suitable computer and internet connection. Mountains, coasts, roads, farms and urban areas became things people could explore directly, at home or at work, even if they had never opened a GIS package.

The imagery also created new assumptions that GIS practitioners would spend years correcting. What appeared in Google Earth was not one seamless, current satellite photograph of New Zealand. Imagery came from different sources, dates and resolutions, and neighbouring areas could have been captured under very different conditions. The interface made the world feel continuous even when the underlying imagery was a patchwork. That distinction was familiar to remote-sensing and mapping specialists, but it was much less obvious to a new mass audience.

The consumer effect was nevertheless substantial. People could now arrive at a meeting having already looked at a site from above. They could send a placemark rather than describe a location in prose. They could explore a route, a valley, a coastline or a proposed development before asking a GIS team for anything. The professional map was no longer always the first spatial representation in the room.

A particularly clear New Zealand example appeared in April 2007. Tourism New Zealand worked with Google to create a 100% Pure New Zealand layer for Google Earth. A contemporary government announcement described it as the first time a tourism authority had developed an official Google Earth layer. The layer identified visitor centres, towns and scenic highlights and linked them back to newzealand.com for more detailed travel information, accommodation, transport and activities.

The example shows how the service was presented to the public. It is the workflow. A national organisation could take geographically organised information and place it inside a consumer mapping environment already used by people around the world. The map was no longer confined to the organisation's own website or a specialist GIS viewer. New Zealand information could appear as a layer inside a global digital globe.

That was a different publishing model from the first web maps. An agency no longer had to own the whole visual environment in which its geography appeared. It could supply an overlay, points of interest and links while Google supplied the globe, imagery, terrain, navigation and software. This separation made geographic publishing easier to imagine for organisations whose real business was tourism, education, communication or public information rather than GIS.

It also showed how quickly Google Earth had moved from curiosity to distribution channel. Less than two years after its launch, a New Zealand government tourism organisation was using it as part of an international marketing campaign. The audience did not need to know how the geographic layer had been prepared. They only needed Google Earth and enough curiosity to click on New Zealand.

On 6 September 2006 Google announced Maps API geocoding support for Australia and New Zealand. The technical description sounds modest: a web application could send a New Zealand street address to Google's service and receive coordinates that could be placed on a map. In practice, it shifted another piece of specialist geographic infrastructure into a form ordinary web developers could call from code.

Earlier systems had also matched addresses with coordinates. New Zealand councils, emergency services, health organisations, commercial data companies and GIS teams had long needed ways to connect addresses with coordinates. Doing that reliably required address data, matching rules, maintenance and software. In professional systems the difference between a valid service address, a cadastral parcel, a postal address and a location used for emergency response could be important. None of those institutional requirements disappeared because Google exposed a geocoder.

The threshold for a simpler class of problem fell. A developer building a public website could use a remote service to place an address on an interactive map without first acquiring a local street database and running a GIS geocoding tool. Location functionality became available to people who thought of themselves as web developers rather than GIS developers.

This was an early example of a pattern that would become much more important later: a spatial function could be consumed as a service rather than installed as part of a complete GIS environment. Cloud services and machine-to-machine geography would later extend that architecture much further. In 2006 the immediate effect was simpler. New Zealand addresses had become something an ordinary web application could ask an external mapping service to locate.

The interface change was just as important as the data service. First-generation web GIS often behaved like a sequence of requests. The user clicked a zoom tool, the request went back to a server, and a new map image arrived. Moving sideways could mean clicking an arrow or drawing another box. Some applications opened new windows for attributes or printing. Dunedin's surviving early WebMap help material even documented browser-cache problems and other behaviours that now feel distinctly of their period.

Google Maps popularised a different interaction model. The map could be dragged continuously. Panning felt like moving a sheet beneath the cursor rather than ordering a new picture from a remote server. Zooming became immediate enough to feel conversational. Search was integrated with the map instead of being a separate GIS query form. These details changed what users thought an online map was supposed to feel like.

It would be easy to retell this as a story in which old government GIS was clumsy and Google arrived with the future. That would miss why the earlier systems looked as they did. They were designed around server-side processing, slower connections, constrained browsers, security requirements and controlled business functions. A council viewer did not need to let a user wander freely across the planet. It needed to find the right property and expose the right council information.

The historical change was therefore comparative. A public viewer built in 2003 could still be doing its job perfectly well in 2007, but its users now had another reference point. They knew maps could glide, search could be quick and imagery could sit one click away. Consumer software had started setting requirements for institutional GIS.

On 12 December 2007 Google announced the full launch of Google Maps in New Zealand. The localised service brought together New Zealand addresses, local search, driving directions, imagery, user-created maps and mobile use in a single public environment. A broad New Zealand consumer audience could now use those functions without arriving through the website of a council, government department or specialist mapping company.

The date is a better historical marker than the global release of Google Maps because it captures the point at which the service became deliberately New Zealand-specific. A person could search a local street or business, find a route between places and move between conventional mapping and imagery using a familiar global interface. The map appeared within the service people were already using. It was part of search and ordinary web use.

This also changed the meaning of a national map audience. Earlier public digital mapping had tended to be organised around information held by a particular institution. The council knew about properties. Statistics New Zealand knew about census geography. DOC knew about conservation land. Google organised the experience around the user instead. The starting point could be an address, a business, a journey or simply a place the user wanted to see.

That shift sounds obvious now because it became normal. At the time, it rearranged the relationship between the map and the organisation that supplied information. People increasingly expected to begin with a general-purpose map and then add context, rather than begin with an agency and discover whether it happened to provide a map.

The search box was central to the audience change. Institutional GIS usually began with a known task and a known dataset. A user might select an address search, a parcel query or a layer list because the application had been designed around that organisation's information. Google Maps encouraged a looser starting point. The user could type what they knew, whether that was a street address, business name or place, and expect the system to interpret it geographically.

This reduced the amount of spatial knowledge required before a person could begin. A user did not need to know which territorial authority contained a property, which map sheet covered a valley or which layer stored a road name. Search increasingly performed that translation. The map became the answer surface for a question written in ordinary language.

Local search also linked mapping more closely to commercial and everyday activity. A map could be a directory as well as a representation of roads and terrain. Finding accommodation, a restaurant or a service increasingly meant seeing where it was in relation to everything else. The geographic context was no longer a specialist add-on. It was part of the normal search result.

Custom maps extended the same idea. Users could collect places, add annotations and share a mapped set of locations without building a GIS dataset in the traditional sense. That complemented professional data management while further eroding the old boundary between people who made maps and people who merely read them. Creating a simple digital map was becoming an ordinary web activity.

One of the most visible changes was the normalisation of imagery as a map background. Professional GIS users had worked with orthophotos and satellite imagery for years, and New Zealand agencies had invested heavily in aerial photography well before Google Earth. The change widened access to existing mapping functions. It was audience.

A person who had never ordered an orthophoto or loaded a raster layer could switch from a street map to an image view. This altered conversations about property, landscape, travel and development because the photograph-like surface became an expected companion to the abstract map. Roads and labels could be compared with roofs, paddocks, rivers and terrain. For many users, the image looked more immediately real than a conventional map.

The apparent realism required care. Imagery might be months or years old. Orthorectification, mosaicking, capture angle, terrain and source resolution could affect what a user saw. A house visible in the image was not proof of its current condition, and an apparent boundary was not a cadastral boundary merely because it lined up with a fence. Consumer access widened the audience for imagery much faster than it widened understanding of its limitations.

Driving directions were another example of a specialist spatial operation becoming routine consumer behaviour. Route calculation had existed for years in transport systems, network GIS and commercial navigation products. The localised Google Maps service made the result available through an ordinary search interface. Enter a starting place and a destination, and the map returned a route.

Users obtained the result through a simple interface. There was no need to select a network dataset, set impedance values or understand graph algorithms. The route appeared as a normal property of the map. The technical work was hidden behind the service.

That hiding of complexity would recur throughout modern digital mapping. Spatial analysis did not disappear. It became embedded in products whose users did not need to know that an analysis had occurred. Directions, address matching and later traffic estimates increasingly became expected features rather than specialist outputs.

Google Earth also supplied a remarkably simple bridge between professional and consumer mapping through KML and KMZ. A GIS practitioner could export points, lines, polygons or image overlays and send them to someone who did not have the same GIS software. The recipient could open the file in Google Earth and immediately see the information in a familiar three-dimensional context.

KML was used alongside shapefiles, geodatabases, spatial databases and other data structures. It was usually a poor choice for maintaining complex authoritative datasets. Its strength was distribution. A KML file could carry enough geography and description to communicate a result, mark locations or publish an overlay without requiring the recipient to reproduce the author's GIS environment.

New Zealand agencies adopted that convenience in different ways. The Tourism New Zealand layer demonstrated a deliberately public version in 2007. LINZ later exposed geodetic marks in KML so they could be viewed against imagery and terrain in software such as Google Earth. Other public agencies and councils generated KML or KMZ from map services and data portals. During the Canterbury earthquake recovery, agencies used KML to exchange and publish geographic information.

KML also helped blur the boundary between making a map and sharing geographic data. The recipient could inspect, navigate and reuse the shared geographic content. They could switch other layers on and off, zoom to a location, inspect attributes and combine the overlay with the wider Google Earth environment. That was modest compared with a full GIS, but it was enough for many communication tasks.

The Google Maps API pushed the same idea into web development. A website could place its own locations or thematic information on top of a familiar map without building the whole navigation, basemap and rendering environment from scratch. The period called these combinations “mashups”, a term that captured the improvisational character of the early web. A developer could take data from one source, a map from another and create a new public service.

The barrier to putting an interactive map inside a website had fallen. Organisations that would never have funded a dedicated GIS viewer could add location to directories, tourism sites, property services, event pages and other applications.

This broadened the group of people who could make maps. GIS professionals remained important where data quality, spatial analysis, coordinate systems or authoritative information were involved, but they were no longer the only people capable of putting an interactive map online. Web developers could treat mapping as one component among many.

This was also a change in how websites were assembled. Earlier institutional web GIS tended to be a destination in its own right. A user entered the mapping application, worked inside its interface and left when the task was finished. The Google Maps API made it increasingly normal for mapping to occupy only part of a page. A property listing, tourism page, business directory or event site could contain a map beside text, photographs and other services.

That design change made geography easier to add, but it also made the map less self-contained. The website might own the business information while Google supplied the basemap, geocoding or navigation. Another service might provide photographs or user comments. The finished experience depended on several systems that the user experienced as one page. This compositional model would later become normal across digital services.

For GIS practitioners, it introduced a new kind of boundary problem. The spatial component could be technically easy to embed while the organisation's actual data remained difficult to maintain. A map could look polished even when addresses were inconsistent, coordinates were poor or attributes were out of date. Consumer mapping therefore lowered the barrier to publication faster than it lowered the barrier to good geographic information management.

It also changed who controlled the interface. When an organisation used a commercial consumer map as a component, some design, data and service decisions sat outside its own systems. Updates to the external platform could improve the experience or alter it without the organisation rebuilding its application. That dependency would become much more important in the later history of APIs and cloud services, but its practical roots were already visible in the mashup era.

Professional GIS continued to support specialist data management and analysis. Google Maps was not a cadastral system, an enterprise asset database, a statistical production environment or a substitute for controlled operational mapping. Google Earth could display an overlay very effectively while still being the wrong place to maintain the authoritative version of that data. Professional work continued to depend on coordinate systems, metadata, editing rules, spatial databases, analytical methods and governance.

Accuracy requirements also remained different. A geocoder that was useful for finding a shop was not automatically suitable for dispatching an emergency vehicle. An image that was useful for recognising a farm was not automatically suitable for survey work. A route intended for a consumer journey was not the same thing as a transport model. Mass-market mapping widened access without erasing the reasons specialist spatial systems existed.

The effect on GIS teams was more subtle. Users and managers became harder to impress with a map merely because it was interactive. They had already used Google. They began asking why an internal viewer could not search an address as easily, why panning took so long, why imagery was unavailable, or why sharing a result still required more effort than sending a link or opening a Google Earth file. Consumer experience had become part of requirements gathering.

Professional teams also used the new tools themselves. Google Earth could be a quick way to orient someone to a place, test whether a coordinate was wildly wrong, discuss a site with a non-specialist or distribute a KML result. These were useful jobs precisely because they did not require the full GIS every time. The consumer tool joined the professional toolkit without replacing it.

Other web services also widened the audience after 2005. OpenStreetMap activity was established in New Zealand by 2007, and in March 2008 LINZ formally permitted its data to be incorporated, modified and derived in OpenStreetMap with attribution. The two models were very different. Google offered a global commercial service and developer platform. OpenStreetMap built a map from community contribution and reusable geographic data. Together they show how quickly digital mapping escaped the boundaries of conventional GIS organisations.

Interactive mapping became familiar to a wider public. People who would never call themselves GIS users began making geographic decisions through digital maps every day. They searched before driving somewhere unfamiliar. They inspected an aerial view before visiting a property. They shared placemarks, looked for businesses and used maps inside websites that were not primarily about mapping. Geography became an interface to ordinary tasks.

That wider audience also became less tolerant of the distinction between “mapping software” and the rest of the web. A map was expected to search, move and respond like other digital interfaces. It could sit inside tourism, retail, news, community information or government services without announcing itself as GIS. More people used interactive maps through interfaces that concealed the underlying GIS software.

By the early 2010s, this expectation was firmly established. Google was adding location prompts and inviting users to help improve map information, while organisations across New Zealand were publishing data and applications into a web environment in which interactive maps were already familiar. Attention increasingly shifted to who could obtain the underlying data, which software could be used to work with it, and how applications could consume spatial services directly.

The first browser GIS systems had proved that geographic information could leave the specialist workstation. Google Earth and Google Maps changed what happened once it got out. Instead of encountering interactive mapping only when a particular institution chose to provide it, New Zealanders increasingly encountered mapping as a general-purpose consumer service.

That shift altered expectations more than the underlying principles of GIS. Addresses still had to be matched to places. Routes still had to be calculated across networks. Imagery still had capture dates and positional limitations. Authoritative datasets still had to be maintained. The major difference was that many of those complexities were now hidden behind interfaces simple enough for millions of people to use without learning the language of GIS.

For the profession, this was both useful and inconvenient. It created better ways to communicate geography to people outside the field, but it also removed the novelty from basic interactive mapping. A GIS team could no longer assume that a pan-and-zoom map was impressive in itself. The harder work increasingly sat in data quality, integration, analysis, governance and designing services that behaved as well as users now expected.

Open-source tools were widening the technical choices available to practitioners, open data was changing the terms on which authoritative geography could be reused, and mobile systems were carrying GIS further into the field. Google’s contribution to that sequence was to make the audience enormous before many organisations had finished adjusting to the browser at all.