Google provided lists of some of its top street-view destinations for its users last Tuesday. The Burj Khalifa was the tallest building, followed by the Eiffel Tower and the Taj Mahal. The tech giant marked 15 years since it began its massive and highly contentious project to photograph streets in minute detail worldwide.

Google Street View panoramic photographs have become commonplace for millions of people, yet initially, it sparked several legal proceedings and shouts of grief from privacy activists.

The US tech giant marked the occasion with a raft of new features, including an updated version of the “time travel” tool, allowing users to view earlier photographs shot by Google’s cameras.

According to Google, Indonesia is the most popular country for Street View, followed by the United States, Japan, Mexico, and Brazil. Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital, was the most searched city, ahead of Tokyo, Mexico City, Sao Paolo, and Buenos Aires.

The company claimed in a blog post that it had acquired 220 billion photographs and travelled more than 10 million miles since it released images of San Francisco, New York, and Miami.

Since then, it has supplied armchair travellers with panoramic vistas ranging from the summit of Everest to the depths of the Great Barrier Reef.

However, as Google’s reach grew, it garnered considerable criticism and years of investigation from regulators in various European nations – vast areas of Germany are still not covered by Google.

Source: Khaleej Times