The Untold Story of Google Earth

Just launched my 33-min documentary: "The Untold Story of Google Earth."

The origin story is wilder and more impactful than most people realize. From $800/year enterprise software to a free tool that saved 4,000 lives during Hurricane Katrina, reunited lost families, and discovered entirely new ecosystems.

After two decades of breakthroughs in photogrammetry, street view, and satellite imagery, Google Earth is now evolving again. Generative AI is turning this digital twin into a planetary prediction engine — a virtual crystal ball.

I had the privilege of interviewing Rebecca Moore (Former Director) and Matt Hancher (Director of Engineering) to uncover the full 20-year journey.

Full Transcript: Video Essay + Interviews

Google Earth just turned 20, but few people know the origin story.

March 2003, a war begins. And for the first time in history, millions watch it unfold on a 3D globe, zooming into Baghdad on live television. Maps had never moved like this before.

Rebecca Moore: It was kind of stunning. It was fantastic. And second hand, I heard later from the Keyhole team that their servers almost crashed.

CNN saw revolutionary reporting, but the founders of Google saw the future of search itself. Not 10 blue links, but a living, breathing planet you could browse just like the internet. Two years later, Google put the entire world on our screens for free. Suddenly, this tech went from war rooms to living rooms. Anyone could fly from space to their streets in seconds.

Rebecca Moore: I opened it up and I was like, "Oh my God, this is the answer."

We thought we were building the ultimate map. Turns out we built a mirror instead. After four years inside Google's Geo team, I've watched this mirror evolve into something else entirely. We're not just mapping the world anymore, we're mapping ourselves. This is the 20-year journey of Google Earth and how this mirror is turning into a crystal ball.

Chapter 1: Sci-fi Spy Tech → Gift to the World

The idea came from science fiction. In Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, the protagonist uses a software program called Earth, a perfectly detailed rendition of planet Earth. What was fiction in 1992 became Keyhole EarthViewer in 2001.

Matt Hancher: The intelligence agencies of the world had had access to versions of this kind of technology for a long time. That's where the original capability, of course, for imaging the Earth from space had come from. But even those tools, they were designed for professionals, they were a little cumbersome. This was really the first time, even for them, that anyone with no special training could walk up to a computer, pick any place in the world, fly there, and see what it looks like and understand what's happening there, understand how it's been changing.

Rebecca Moore: It has all the satellite imagery, you can annotate it with your own data, it has all the roads. This is going to be the magic platform for us.

Keyhole was a revelation. News media and the intelligence community saw the potential immediately, but this glimpse of the future came with a hefty price tag.

Rebecca Moore: When I first experimented with Keyhole, it was $800 a year. At the start as Keyhole, it was a commercial product. They were a startup, they were selling it to the government and to real estate.

Bilawal Sidhu: Keyhole was bleeding money, burning through venture capital. They needed customers fast. But in Mountain View, the founders of a then four-year-old company called Google saw something bigger than breaking news and tools of war. They saw the future of search itself.

Rebecca Moore: Larry and Sergey had seen, Megan Smith had seen the CNN use of Earth. And at that time, they were already aware that a significant proportion of searches that people were doing on the web related to a geographic location. And they thought we should have a geo-browser that would let you search and explore information about the world in the context of a digital representation of the physical world. And that was the original idea for the acquisition, to create a geo-browser.

Bilawal Sidhu: Now with Google's resources behind them, the mission exploded in scope. This scrappy startup was about to get their first lesson in what Google scale truly meant.

Rebecca Moore: Brian McClendon and John Hanke were pitching to Larry and Sergey. At that time, Keyhole only had high-resolution imagery for the US. The rest of the world they did not. So