You bring up a good point, this is actually really bad. It's bad because the kind of position Google is in, because of its brand power, because of its authority in the modern world. They cannot joke around like this at this point. They need to take this down.

> And this is what brings fake information into the world.

Others are saying "you don't have a sense of humor" -- wrong response. I remember when I was younger my older brother explaining to me and my dad how Google works... by some pigeons sitting in a large building behind keywords because they're quick and have great vision. Yeah he bought the prank. I'm surprised he believed it, because he was pretty bright (did math + EE double major in 2 and a half years, now a manager at a large successful tech company). But this happens, all of us have blind spots, jokes like these hit us in bad ways. Even really smart folks can be had. This is like the stupidest and most contemptible kind of humor really.

And the world you paint, where excessive care must be taken to avoid even the slightest possibility of confusion, is deeply dull and boring. It's the same attitude that's led to such widespread bland corporatism.

You should be skeptical of everything Google tells you, like every other organisation. If anything, this should be a pointed reminder of that fact.

> You should be skeptical of everything Google tells you, like every other organisation. If anything, this should be a pointed reminder of that fact.

Okay so you're driving to your parent's house and open up Google Maps for directions, are you going to start doubting its directions?

There is a difference between a joke being made by a person or a small company vs. implanting fake information in a source (Google Maps) which is taken prima facie by almost everyone in this day and age to be true and accurate.

Since you're on this site, I will assume for now (for sake of explaining my point) that you have a lot of knowledge on tech related stuff but perhaps have a blind spot in your medical knowledge. Suppose you have some illness and you go to research it at a popular and well-reputed site which claims to have information about medical illnesses. The site in the middle of nowhere has a joke about some random fact about the human body that someone without a medical science background could easily spot but you couldn't. You see now how this could suddenly fuck up your understanding of things and propagate down in your knowledgebase to then start affecting your decision framework? I'm tired and my example is a little far-fetched but I think you get the point I'm trying to make. Google can joke around come april time, but this kind of bull shit in "google maps" is not acceptable. My niece could easily take from this that human beings have the technology to pull off something like this in the way google is showing and make wild and inaccurate extrapolations that will confuse her.

I think this is mostly harmless.

To use your medicine example, it'd be more like looking up a webMD article for the common cold and seeing one about the common cold in martians. Don't we as readers and observers to think critically about what's presented to us? This reminds me of people who take outlandish and impossible Onion article headlines, don't bother reading the story, and then share it with shock and indignation on social media.

Also, in the example of your niece, this would serve as a good learning point for her then. If someone is confused by this, I'd say it's harmless confusion and it's something that's safe to be confused about.

> Okay so you're driving to your parent's house and open up Google Maps for directions, are you going to start doubting its directions?

If it tells you to drive into a lake, yes, you should doubt it.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/woman-follo...

Reminds me of this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/06/15/seven...

That article seems to be very carefully worded to imply that the navigation system was involved in the accident, without coming out and saying so.

> A woman following her car's sat nav on a foggy night took a wrong turn and ended up driving into a lake. [...] she lost her way and drove down a steep boat launch into Lake Huron. [...] Local police said the way the harbour’s boat launch is built means a wrong turn taken on a rainy night would come as a shock.

That is to say, when she drove into the lake it seems to have been because she wasn't following the directions, and this, combined with the fog and a confusing design for the boat launch, caused her to not realize that she wasn't on a regular road (albeit the wrong one) until it disappeared out from under her.

The article then concludes with some statistics about GPS causing distracted driving, without either connecting them back to the news item at hand or comparing them to distracted driving caused by non-electronic navigation.

Okay so you're driving to your parent's house and open up Google Maps for directions, are you going to start doubting its directions?

If it says something totally ridiculous, of course! The existence of services that provide information is not an excuse to ignore individual logic and reasoning.

You see now how this could suddenly fuck up your understanding of things and propagate down in your knowledgebase to then start affecting your decision framework?

If I Googled for my symptoms, and came across a page that said I have "Googleitis", and all of the information around that was about "Google's April Fool's Day Googleitis Prank" then I'm not sure it would.

My niece could easily take from this that human beings have the technology to pull off something like this in the way google is showing and make wild and inaccurate extrapolations that will confuse her.

Information is messy, people are fallible, confusion isn't harmful.

Google maps for a time suggested you swim across the Atlantic ocean if you requested walking directions from NYC to Europe, this is clearly ridiculous and a good example. While usually providing useful information you still have to think and use some common sense. Another good example is that google might be providing what it thinks is correct information but might be out of date, for example there are people who pay attention to the nav and drive across bridges that have been washed out because they didn't pay attention to the physical signs. Trusting google is not a replacement for common sense and logical thinking.

we can assume that this is google's kind of paper city :)

Smaller version of paper town, a paper office.

These have been around since 2009. Still neat though!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Moon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Mars

Yep, I remember them being part of Google Earth. IIRC they had one of the night sky as well.

They still have https://www.google.com/sky/

They're now a lot more detailed.

Open it, spent some time on Mars and Moon, then come back to Earth view and enjoy the blue planet... How gorgeous our Mother Earth is!

Street view on Mars, with rover: https://www.google.com/maps/space/mars/@19.098134,-33.250752...

Check out the Apollo 11 landing site:

https://www.google.com/maps/space/moon/@0.6813909,23.4602739...

Your link dropped me off in a rainforest in the Kongo.. Are you sure that's where Apollo landed? I was kinda hoping for some crater on the moon....

It works for me. Are you on mobile or something?

The Kongo is where the real fake studio was. The conspiracy theory of the moon landings being faked in a studio at Area 51 was just cover for the real conspiracy.

Information wants to be free.

Found Apollo 15 https://www.google.com/maps/space/moon/@25.6586063,2.9440356...

The images are of quite a high resolution — they're even better than what you can get with celestia [0] and the (amazing) best surface and normal maps (by John van Vliet) [1]. Compare [2] and [3].

Celestia still has advantages — nicer zoomed out view (due to lack of "striping"), better navigation, arbitrary point of view, offline access. (Also, the lack of sufficiently detailed planetary maps adapted for Celestia isn't technically a flaw of the program itself.)

[0] https://celestiaproject.net/

[1] http://celestiamotherlode.net/catalog/mars.php

[2] https://i.imgur.com/0R70L1r.jpg

[3] https://i.imgur.com/VUPhwIw.jpg

Nice landslide on Mars https://www.google.com/maps/space/mars/@3.8915157,-44.053898...

That landslide looks like it's about 10km across. That's absolutely incredible!

On that note, the scale bar in the bottom is almost impossible to use - it's not in a place where I can easily compare what I'm looking at to what the bar represents - mainly due to the placement of the controls. Having it on the left of that grouping would be much more useful

i've always wanted them to float that scale bar, so i can drag and rotate it.

Few months back I was looking for a map/poster of Mars and was quite surprised that there weren't that many good options. Almost all of the available full coverage images/maps were based on the ancient Viking data. Investigating bit deeper, apparently the modern high-resolution instruments have imaged only small portion of the surface, so there isn't a simple way to create complete map from those. Additionally, stiching the captured images apparently is highly non-trivial because the images have been taken over such long periods and from different angles etc. Different instruments have also different spectral responses, rarely being exactly plain normal rgb.

If some image processing wizard would want to make a stab at merging all the different image sources, I think the results could be quite spectacular. The data is mostly there and publicly available, it just needs massive amounts of processing.

I'm missing Google Street View on those.

I wonder if there is enough panoramic photography to create street view for the various landing sites and traverses.

There is definitely not enough. There were only two people on the moon at a time and a good part of the time they were doing things other than taking pictures.

Hell, not one of them checked Facebook!

Found street view for the Curiosity Rover: https://www.google.com/maps/space/mars/@-4.5895,137.4417,533...

Strangely though there's no 'Search Google Maps' box for the Moon or Mars maps, so you have to search around a bit.

I don't think they're available in the web client, but if you 1) download google earth 2) View -> Explore -> Moon 3) In the layers panel, Moon Gallery -> Apollo Missions -> [Double-click the logo of your favorite] -> Click a Camera icon -> Click the Panorama itself, you'll fly into the terrain-aligned panoramas taken during the mission. (Sorry it's so confusing to find, we (joint google/nasa project) did this in 2009 for the Apollo 11 40th, when the tools weren't quite as good as they are now). Enjoy!

This renders me speechless.

Admittedly, my initial comment sounds a bit sarcastic, we were joking in the office here, but I was really impressed actually. But now I am speechless.

I have to try that when I come home.

What are you talking about? They have 100% coverage for all streets on both planets.

Canals, on the other hand...

Technically correct.

Although I think you'll end up with a divide by 0 error. :)

/pedantry

It's there in Mars - Check

https://www.google.com/maps/space/mars/@18.705293,-33.003305...

Is that Sojourner?

Actually Pathfinder but yes, it is. Sojourner was the little rover.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Pathfinder#Landing_site

To make this work on Firefox mobile, first activate desktop mode, and then click on any link.

Can't really understand why a perfectly capable device is access denied without such trick, it clearly works.

Google does this with several of their sites, intentionally making them worse on Firefox (Desktop or Mobile). Firefox Mobile actually already fakes a Chrome Mobile UA in some situations to get around that.

Examples include the Google Search, Google Maps, or YouTube.

I simply configured via about:config the above mentioned UA faker for Google’s sites to fake Chrome’s UA.

We're in for a sequel of "Only works in MSIE." Brace yourselves.

Just take a look at Signal Desktop, WhatsApp Desktop’s Beta, Google Inbox during the Beta, or nowadays Google Earth.

My 5 year old son has recently become fascinated with the solar system, and Mars in particular. He's really interested in Olympus Mons too, which is why I was bummed to see it was mostly missing from the map. Why would there not be enough images of the second largest mountain in the solar system? Is it because it's too tall?

Hey, Olympus Mons. The SCP wiki decided to start giving me nightmares about it! http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-2886

They do have altitude data. Hold control and drag the view, and you'll be able to explore it in 3D. As for why there's not much in the way of imagery, I'd guess it's because Olympus Mons is at least 40 million miles away at any given point.

It's kind of cool clicking around on Mars, looking at the places I recognize from KSR'r Mars Trilogy.

Does anyone know where Olympus Mons is? Ever since I was a child I've been fascinated by the idea of the tallest mountain in the solar system!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympus_Mons

https://www.google.com/maps/space/mars/@18.5922828,-133.6897...

Still looking for the Ares 3 base.

Darn. I was hoping to be able to get directions.

I can understand it not doing interplanetary directions, but it doesn't have any public transport data at all for any planet but Earth. ):

Disappointed there is no route planner on Mars

Do they have a VR version of this, yet? I like Google Earth VR, but really want to try Mars and the Moon.

"This link is not supported in the mobile version of Google Maps."

Go Mo Google!

Shame the whole planet is completely black until you zoom right in though.

Why are there big strips of much high res imagery on the moon?

ooh! ooh! now do https://www.google.com/sky/ (pretty please)

I wonder when we'll get directions on moon and mars

Where is the Watney Triangle?

What? No street view??

https://www.google.com/maps/space/mars/@19.098134,-33.250752...

Doesn't work with Chrome Zoom > 100%

I can see my house!

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