Google Street View works like a time machine.

Departure 19 million kilometers of roads around the world, Google Street View cars since 2007 have collected a huge archive of photos. It would be foolish to delete old images, because over time they acquire historical value. Moreover, you need to make these photos available for viewing, Google decided and developed a “time machine” - a separate slider that takes you into the past, showing every picture taken at this place over the past seven years. The feature is available in the desktop version of Google Maps, so far only for a small number of accounts.

The availability of a “time machine” is indicated by the clock icon in the upper left corner of the screen. If you see a clock, then right now you can explore the grandiose construction, which were conducted in major cities. For example, the Freedom Tower in New York or the stadium for the World Cup in Fortaleza (Brazil).


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The Time Machine shows how the builders rebuilt the destroyed territories in Onagawa (Japan) after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.



There are also more mundane options for using the service: for example, to see how advertising on billboards has changed or the price of gasoline near gas stations.

Archived images are available in 55 countries. In Germany, the “time machine” is prohibited by law, even though the algorithms are automatically removed from the photos of the person and the number of machines before publication.

Photographs, if possible, are brought to a general perspective and aligned. In the case of Onagawa, the pictures do not coincide a bit, because the earth has moved about 3 meters in relation to the GPS coordinates.

For most urban species there are 2-3 snapshots of different times, but for the centers of large cities the number of “time casts” can reach up to 20-30. Unfortunately, for technical reasons, many photographs from the archive could not be brought to a “common denominator”, so even now there are many interesting things left in Google’s bins.