Google Accelerating Building Footprint Generation
February 2020
In a recent interview with Wired, Google’s CEO said that “in the last year alone, Google has mapped as many building exteriors as it did cumulatively in the 10 years prior.”
In early 2018, Google’s developer website listed Google Maps as having “100 million buildings”:
And then a year later, in April 2019, Google said that it had added “110 million buildings, all drawn algorithmically, in the first half of 2018”.
Taken together, all of this suggests that Google has added at least 110 million buildings over the past year.
But Google didn’t add all of these 110+ million new buildings at once—rather, it added them in several phases. My rural hometown in Illinois, for instance, received its new buildings on August 5, 2019:
A week later on August 12, 2019, San Francisco received its new buildings. Footprints were added for Chase Center, San Francisco Police Headquarters, and many other buildings:
But Google wouldn’t upgrade London’s buildings until February: