A journey of 5,000km begins with a single steppe

With more than 250 sunny days a year (that’s about 100 more than you’d get in bright Portland), Mongolia is known by many as the "land of the eternal blue sky.” Now you can take in some of these beautiful Mongolian blues with new Street View imagery, which takes you across 5,000km of the country’s steppes, deserts, icy lakes and rushing rivers.

Last fall we strapped a Street View camera onto a four-wheel drive pickup truck to begin capturing 360-imagery from rugged Mongolian roads. Since then we’ve also gone off-road to capture images of the country’s most beautiful places with Ariuntuul, our Mongolian Trekker operator, who carried the 18-kg Street View Trekker into the wild expanses of Mongolia’s diverse countryside.

Say hi or “Сайн байна уу” to our Mongolian Trekker operator, Ari

Take a tour of the placid frozen blues of Khuvsgul Lake, onto the Eastern Highway for a look at Mongolia’s winter sunshine, over rainbows painted across the Selenga River, across the vast and clouded horizon over the Gobi desert, and even towards the gers on the outskirts of the rapidly growing capital city, Ulaanbaatar.

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Sled across the Khuvsgul Lake, the second largest freshwater lake in Asia, with Street View

Experience the winter sunset from Mongolia’s Eastern Highway

Spot the rainbow over the shadow of our Street View truck near Selenga River

Sand, sky and clouds as far as you can see near Tsogt-Ovoo

A glimpse at the round rooftops of Ulaanbaatar

Although adventurers will spend weeks exploring the hidden treasures of Mongolia, you can now join us on a whirlwind tour in just a few clicks. Until then…have a nice journey, on Street View and beyond!

Posted by Cynthia Wei, Street View Program Manager, Google Maps

Your Timeline: Revisiting the world that you’ve explored

Have you ever wanted a way to easily remember all the places you’ve been -- whether it’s a museum you visited during your last vacation or that fun bar you stumbled upon a few months ago? Well, starting today, Google Maps can help. We’re gradually rolling out Your Timeline, a useful way to remember and view the places you’ve been on a given day, month or year. Your Timeline allows you to visualize your real-world routines, easily see the trips you’ve taken and get a glimpse of the places where you spend your time. And if you use Google Photos, we’ll show the photos you took when viewing a specific day, to help resurface your memories.

Your Timeline is private and visible only to you; and you control the locations you choose to keep. This means you can easily delete a day or your full history at any time. You can edit any place that appears in Your Timeline, including removing a specific location or giving a frequented spot a private name like -- Mom’s House or My Favorite Running Spot. This spot will then appear right in Google Maps when you’re logged in.

Available on desktop and Android, you can access Your Timeline if you’ve opted-in to store your Location History with Google. If you have this setting enabled, you may already be familiar with the useful experiences it can offer across our products, such as providing Now notifications when there are traffic incidents along your commute or reminding you where you parked your car.  With Your Timeline, you have even more ways to view and control your location data. And with last month’s launch of My Account, you can easily access and manage your Location History setting and all your Google settings in one place.

We hope you find Your Timeline a valuable and helpful tool as you explore the world around you.

Posted by Gerard Sanz, Product Manager

The Trekker Loan Program turns two!

Two years ago, we started the Trekker Loan Program, where we invite partners to help us gather Street View imagery of many breathtaking places around the world. Since then, we've added imagery from a vast variety of locations -- from natural wonders right in organizations backyards to hard-to-reach sites we would never have been able to access by ourselves.

Now with a tap of your finger or the click of your mouse, you can hike through the glorious mountainside in Spain with Generalitat de Catalunya, walk the pilgrimage route of Kumano Kodo in Japan with the Mie Kumano-kodo Society of Commerce and Industry, explore the Canadian Arctic with Polar Bears International, and even venture with the Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau across dried volcanic lava.  

Route: Racó d´en Marc, Spain

If you like to take the road less travelled, we’ve got just the thing for you. Thanks to our partner Visit Greenland, you can visit the viking ruins and ice fjords in Greenland, or go with Blue Ventures on a journey to Madagascar, the world’s oldest island, chock full of unique views and vegetation. And for those of you looking for an extra thrill, journey to the Amazon Rainforest in Brazil to soar down a zipline with our partners, the Amazonas Sustainable Foundation.

Zipline in the Juma Sustainable Development Reserve, Amazon Rainforest, Brazil

Seeing the hundreds of stunning sites collected by our partners makes it hard not to envy all the amazing locations they’re lucky enough to call home. Check out the jaw-dropping beauty of Colorado National Monument taken by Grand Junction Visitor & Convention Bureau, the impressive view of the cityscape from Sydney Harbor National Park courtesy of New South Wales National Parks & Wildlife Service, and the meandering waters of England’s Bradford-on-Avon Wharf collected by our friends at the Canal & River Trust.

Colorado National Monument, USA

To see more highlights from our 200 Trekker Loan Partners to date, see all the collections in our Street View Gallery, including those for U.S. Highlights, the Dolomites, Kyoto by the Sea, Ticino Switzerland, remote islands and many more. The world awaits your exploration!

And if you’re a nonprofit, tourism board, government agency, university or other entity interested in borrowing our camera equipment to share your favorite places with the world, apply now to be the next Trekker.

Posted by Deanna Yick, Street View Program Manager