The Weekend That Saved Google Maps: One Engineer’s 1000x Impact
InfoQ Compilation | Nuclear Cola, Tina
You mightnot know this, but the existence of Google Maps, the app that revolutionized the way we navigate, hinges on a single engineer’s weekend miracle.
Google Maps, hailed as one of the greatest digital applications ever created, is about to celebrate its 20th birthday. Yet, few know that the original Google Maps wasa clunky Windows program, slow and sluggish after its acquisition. It was only after a 100-1000x engineer dedicated a weekend to rewriting the entire codebase that Google Maps transformed into a lightweight, efficient version,boasting a 10x performance improvement. It’s worth repeating: Google Maps exists today because a 100-1000x engineer rewrote all the code in a single weekend.
Google Acquires aCreative Startup
The story of Google Maps begins in 2003. Google, pre-IPO, was still in its early stages of development. That year, Bret Taylor, a recent Stanford graduate, joined Google as a product manager to develop a feature called location-based search. The basic idea was toallow users to search by location, but the lack of map references made the experience clunky and unintuitive. Few people used it. As Bret himself admitted, There weren’t many users.
Bret Taylor’s name later became well-known. He went on to co-found FriendFeed, which was later acquired by Facebook, leading him to join Facebook as CTO. After leaving Facebook, Bret founded Quip, which was later acquired by Salesforce, making him Salesforce’s Chief Product Officer. His latest role is Chairman of the Board of OpenAI.
In 2003, Bret sat down with Google co-founder Larry Page andMegan Smith, the newly appointed VP of Business Development, to discuss the state of the location-based search product. They realized the feature was incomplete and needed improvement. At the time, AOL’s MapQuest, acquired a few years earlier, was the leading internet map product. It’s worth noting that AOL acquireda publicly traded company, spending $1 billion. This acquisition occurred before the dot-com bubble burst, and MapQuest once had a massive user base. Although MapQuest still exists today, the mapquest.com website is still accessible. MapQuest essentially provides map information services with a bit of customization. Users had to print outthe maps, which naturally couldn’t display any dynamic information. When using MapQuest, users were presented with static pages, first entering their starting point and destination, and then the website would pop up another…
[Continue the article, following the structure and tips provided in the prompt. Remember to include information about theengineer who rewrote the code, the challenges they faced, and the impact of their work on Google Maps and the world.]
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