Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [104]
The watershed moment came in March 2003, when the United States invaded Iraq. McClendon, as it happens, had gone to junior high with CNN’s vice president of engineering, and the news network bought rights to Keyhole’s software in order to display 3-D views of the military campaign. Home viewers had never seen anything like these animated maps and fly-throughs and began buying copies for their home PCs, even though the software still sold for seventy dollars. The servers in Keyhole’s tiny office could barely stand up to the demand, and employees were constantly running to Fry’s, the local home electronics chain, to buy more hardware. A year later, the Keyhole team showed their software to Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and the demo was so compelling that an acquisition offer came the very next day, even though Google was in the middle of its hectic IPO. Keyhole’s aerial imagery soon began appearing on Google’s new map page, and for a while, Google Maps became a dreamy utopia, the vast majority of its users idly browsing the globe from space, not printing out driving directions from point A to point B. Two months later, when Google finally released Keyhole’s application for free as Google Earth, demand exploded. “We nearly took down Google a couple times,” laughs McClendon. “We actually had to turn off downloads of Google Earth because it was so popular. The first six days, it was nip and tuck.”
When I met McClendon at the National Geographic Bee, he invited me to stop by his Mountain View, California, offices for “the nickel tour” if I was ever in the neighborhood. He was probably just being polite and had no way of knowing the level of my obsession with digital maps; I can spend days happily adrift over the pixelized Siberian taiga or gleefully rotating the 3-D buildings of the Manhattan skyline. During the first couple of months of Google Earth’s release, there were probably plenty of weekends when I spent more time on Google Earth than I did on our Earth. To a map obsessive like me, this casual invite was like a golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.
The Google Geo building isn’t staffed by Oompa-Loompas, but it does have a few of the high-tech quirks I remember from past visits to the Google campus. When I step out of the elevator, the first thing I see is a foam-core map icon the size of a parking meter informing me that Al Gore’s favorite spot in the Bay Area is the headquarters of Current TV, a cable network founded by, well, Al Gore. (The building is littered with these overgrown versions of the little pushpins that mark destinations on Google’s online maps, remnants of a past celebrity promotion.) The oil paintings on the wall are by Bill Guffey, a rural Kentucky artist who paints cityscapes of places he’s never been, based only on Google Street View photographs. This floor of the building has an ocean theme; surfboards line the walls, and in the common area outside the conference room where McClendon and I are chatting, a few programmers are working on their laptops while lounging on a giant plaster whale.
Brian McClendon is a tall, soft-spoken man in his midforties, with a deeply creased brow that always makes him look a little more concerned than he actually is. Maybe it’s a sign of the unusual burden he carries as Google Earth’s head engineer. After all, I’ve never met anyone in charge of his own planet before. You may scoff that Google Earth isn’t a real planet, but consider: its architecture contains hundreds of terabytes of data. (A terabyte is equivalent to one thousand gigabytes; the entire text of every book in the Library of Congress could be stored in just twenty terabytes or so.) It’s a mammoth responsibility, surely more complex than being the person in