The checkered history of Google Street View

TechCrunch has published an engrossing piece covering the full history of Google’s controversial Street View project, from its early days as a camera stuck on Larry Page’s car to its current globe-spanning magnitude. Most interesting are stories of the project’s gradual acceptance within the company — it’s easy to forget that, when Street View was first conceived, Google Maps had yet to be launched. The idea was first pursued by a group of employees using Google’s famous “20 percent time” and was only announced internally in the third quarter of 2005, when the search giant’s expansion into location-based services had barely started. Head over to TechCrunch to find out how Street View’s uncanny ability to “teleport” users helped it to grow into one of Google’s most recognizable products.