Mountain View, Calif. – Google Inc., owner of the most popular Internet search engine, has added 360-degree views of streets and intersections to its online maps, giving users more detailed pictures of Denver, New York, Las Vegas, Miami and San Francisco.
The images show the buildings and layout of selected streets, Google said Tuesday in an e-mailed statement. Google employees collected the pictures in the past year by driving around with cameras to take the panoramic images.
Google, Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are investing in online maps to lure more users to their other sites and seize a bigger share of the market for local business advertising. Google’s maps site had 78.1 million visitors around the world in April, double last year’s number, according to market researcher ComScore Inc.
“You’re going to continue to see very aggressive investments” in maps, John Hanke, director of Google’s mapping products, said Tuesday at a conference in San Jose, Calif. “That is an endorsement of the very large economic opportunity that we see in this space.”
