How Google Maps Actually Works

Episode 08  ·  From a photograph in orbit to the blue dot on your street  ·  all sources

The map on a phone looks like a live view from above, but it is assembled from separate jobs: photographs from satellites and aircraft, measurements of the ground's height, road data with names and rules, the phone's own position from satellite signals, and a route planner that uses live and usual traffic speeds. This film follows those jobs one by one, on one ordinary city block.

This is a fully animated film. Every visual was drawn for ColdProvenance; no footage, photographs or recordings are used. Narration is a synthesized voice. The music and sound effects were created for this film. Every factual claim is sourced below. Figures such as user counts are dated; they change over time.

Sources

• eoPortal (ESA) — WorldView-3 and ESA Earth Online — WorldView-3 overview: orbit about 617 km, a 13 km strip, about 31 cm detail, a scanner-like sweep
• NASA Earth Observatory — Catalog of Earth Satellite Orbits and ESA — Polar and Sun-synchronous orbit: low orbits, about 90 minutes a lap
• Nearmap — Vertical imagery and Vexcel — Orthomosaic imagery: aerial cameras at about 5 to 15 cm detail
• Google Earth Help — How images are collected: imagery from satellites and aircraft, not real time
• Google — Ask a Techspert: How do satellite images work? (5 October 2020) and Google Maps 101: how imagery powers our map (13 December 2019): stitching, straightening and updating imagery
• Google — Keeping Earth up to date and looking great (2016): cloud-free mosaics built from many images of the same place
• Copernicus — Sentinel-2 cloudless mosaic: more than 80 trillion pixels from one year of images (May 2016 – April 2017)
• NASA JPL — Shuttle Radar Topography Mission: February 2000, Endeavour, 11 days, a 60 m mast, about 80 % of Earth's land
• USGS — 3D Elevation Program: topographic data quality levels: lidar point clouds and height accuracy of about 10 cm
• Microsoft — Global ML Building Footprints: about 1.4 billion building outlines traced by machine learning
• OpenStreetMap — About and the OSM diary milestone of 10 million registered users (September 2025)
• GPS.gov — Space Segment: the satellite constellation, about 20,200 km up, at least four in view
• FAA — Satellite Navigation – GPS – How It Works: timing signals from atomic clocks; the receiver only listens
• Google Maps Help — Find & improve your location's accuracy and Google for Developers — Fused Location Provider API: the blue dot, GPS, Wi-Fi and sensors combined
• P. Newson and J. Krumm, Hidden Markov Map Matching Through Noise and Sparseness (ACM SIGSPATIAL 2009): matching a position to the most likely road
• Edsger W. Dijkstra, interview with Philip L. Frana, Communications of the ACM 53(8), 2010, and David Gries — Edsger Dijkstra and the shortest-path algorithm: 1956, a café in Amsterdam, about twenty minutes
• R. Geisberger, P. Sanders, D. Schultes and D. Delling, Contraction Hierarchies (WEA 2008), and the route-planning literature it belongs to: road networks prepared in advance so that each search is small
• Google Official Blog — The bright side of sitting in traffic: crowdsourcing road congestion data (25 August 2009): speeds from phones combined into live traffic
• Google — Google Maps 101, on predicting traffic and choosing routes (September 2020): usual patterns plus live speeds, the Californian motorway example, and routes chosen for predicted traffic

Visuals

• All animation, maps, streets, people, vehicles, satellites and diagrams were created by ColdProvenance for this film. No footage, photographs or satellite images appear in this film.
• The city block, its streets (Mill Road, Ash Street) and its people are an invented example, not a real place. The phone screens are illustrations, not screenshots of any app.
• The café scene in Amsterdam is a reconstruction of an event described in the sources above; the people are illustrative characters, not portraits.
• Road networks, search patterns, traffic colours, the speed curve and arrival times are schematic; their numbers are the sourced figures or illustrative examples.
• Coastlines: Natural Earth Public domain, via world-atlas.

Audio

• Narration: synthesized voice.
• Music, ambience and sound effects: created for this film. No stock music, sound libraries or field recordings are used.