Making Maps and Earth Global

Posted by Adam Smith, Geo Product Manager

To have a truly global product, you need engineers from around the world to make it happen. Over the past year we've spent a lot of time building up engineering teams in offices around the world in order to build localized versions of Google Maps and Google Earth in *all* countries. We've got a long way to go, but this week we made a lot of progress.

Google Earth now in 13 languages

We know that Google Earth is used around the world, and on May 9th we moved this effort forward by doubling the number of languages supported by adding:

Arabic
Czech
Dutch
Korean
Polish
Portuguese
Russian

This is in addition to the languages in which Google Earth has been available for some time:

French
Italian
German
Spanish
Japanese
English (UK/CA)

This is the first step toward our goal to have Google Earth speak as many languages as all of you do.

Geocoding now available in 24 countries

We realize that the first thing most of you do when you approach an online map is enter your home address. Taking an address and locating it on a map takes a bit of technological work under the hood. On Monday, we've launched support for "home finding" in five new countries:

Brazil
Poland
Czech Republic
Hungary
Portugal

There's still tons more work to do, so we'll continue to update you as we make progress.