Can you believe it’s ten years already since Google Maps published the first Street View images? That’s right, the first image was published in May 2007, which means that now we’re celebrating the 10^th anniversary of this lovely service.

In honor of this event, Google wrote a celebratory blog post this Tuesday, where they announced that ever since 2007, they published images of 83 countries. Moreover, their special vans which they use for mapping and which are equipped with 360-degree cameras, have traveled 10 million miles.

An Important Milestone

According to the blog post, Larry Page was the one to kick off the first prototype back in 2004, together with a team of Google employees who wanted to offer people the possibility of seeing a 360-degree view of the entire world. They simply tossed some cameras into a random van, some more technology and so this gave birth to the first Street View car. Later on, in 2006, Street View started to go on the road to various cities in the US, and so the first image was born in May 2007.

A Very Useful Service

Basically, the Street View service offers 360-degree photos of major streets, taken at street level. It allows you to look through Google Maps in order to see a view of their destination. This is helpful if you want to see your destination before arriving there, for example if you need to find restaurants and stores and you’re not familiar with that area.

And Google has it all figured out. For the special areas where a van can’t reach, they also created the Street View Trekker, which is a 360-degrees camera that fits into a backpack, so it’s more portable. However, keep in mind that the photos you see there may be already outdated.