Find treasure with Google Maps

Archeological analysis has confirmed that our Google Maps Street View team has indeed found one of history’s long lost relics: a treasure map belonging to the infamous pirate, William “Captain” Kidd.

The map was found on a recent expedition in the Indian Ocean, as part of a deep-water dive to expand our underwater Street View collection. Captain Kidd was rumored to have buried his treasure around the world, and tales of a long-lost treasure map have lingered for generations.

When Dr. Marco Meniketti, an independent archaeologist, confirmed that this was Captain Kidd’s 315 year-old map, we were very excited. However, as seen in the video, the map contains a variety of encrypted symbols and is not readily decipherable. We need your help to decipher these symbols and find Captain Kidd’s treasures; therefore we’ve decided to digitize the map and make it accessible to everyone.

Our digital version allows anyone to explore Captain Kidd’s long-lost treasure map

To access Captain Kidd’s treasure map, click here or on the “Treasure” button in the top right corner of Google Maps. If we all work together, we can solve the mystery.

Be sure to follow the Google Maps G+ page as we work together to decipher the clues to Captain Kidd’s buried secrets.

Tatsuo Nomura, Software Engineer, Google Maps

Update: 4/1 6:44a (JST) Due to our nascent nano-scanner technology we weren't able to scan to the closest zoom levels. If you come across a blank map, zoom out to get back to the treasure map.

Update: 4/2 12:16p (PDT) Upon further analysis of the hidden clues in the map, we've confirmed that the map does not belong to the famous pirate William Captain Kidd but was instead created by a Google engineer as a joke. April Fools!

Visit the Google Maps G+ page to follow the clues to these hidden letters

Imagery on Google Maps of Fukushima Exclusion Zone Town Namie-machi

From time to time we invite guests to post about items or interest and are pleased to have Mister Tamotsu Baba, Mayor of Namie-machi, Fukushima, Japan, join us here. - Ed.

Namie-machi is a small city in Fukushima Prefecture sitting along the coast of the Pacific. We are blessed with both ocean and mountains, and known as a place where you can experience both the beauty of the sea and the forests. Tragically, however, since the nuclear accident caused by the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011, all of Namie-machi’s 21,000 townspeople have had to flee their homes.

Two years have passed since the disaster, but people still aren’t allowed to enter Namie-machi. Many of the displaced townspeople have asked to see the current state of their city, and there are surely many people around the world who want a better sense of how the nuclear incident affected surrounding communities.

Working with Google, we were able to drive Street View cars through Namie-machi to capture panoramic images of the abandoned city exactly as it stands today. Starting today, this Street View imagery is available on Google Maps and the Memories for the Future site, so anyone from Namie or around the world can view it.

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Here is one of Namie-machi’s main streets, which we often used for outdoor events like our big Ten Days of Autumn festival that saw 300 street stalls and 100,000 visitors.

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Many buildings, like this one in the foreground, collapsed during the earthquake, and we still have not been able to remove them. We are also unable to repair damaged buildings and shops nor prepare them for the potential impact of further aftershocks.

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This image shows an area located one kilometer inland from the Pacific Ocean. In the distance you can see Ukedo Elementary School. Nearby Ukedo Harbor once proudly boasted 140 fishing boats and 500 buildings, but suffered some of the worst tsunami damage. After being set off-limits, we have not been able to clean up the wreckage on the side of the road, including the many fishing boats that were washed several kilometers inland.

Ever since the March disaster, the rest of the world has been moving forward, and many places in Japan have started recovering. But in Namie-machi time stands still. With the lingering nuclear hazard, we have only been able to do cursory work for two whole years. We would greatly appreciate it if you viewed this Street View imagery to understand the current state of Namie-machi and the tremendous gravity of the situation.

Those of us in the older generation feel that we received this town from our forebearers, and we feel great pain that we cannot pass it down to our children. It has become our generation’s duty to make sure future generations understand the city’s history and culture—maybe even those who will not remember the Fukushima nuclear accident. We want this Street View imagery to become a permanent record of what happened to Namie-machi in the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster.

Finally, I want to make a renewed commitment to recovering from the nuclear hazard. It may take many years and many people’s help, but we will never give up taking back our hometown.

Posted by Mr. Tamotsu Baba, Mayor of Namie-machi, Fukushima, Japan

(Cross-posted and translated from the Google Japan Blog)

Create, collaborate and share advanced custom maps with Google Maps Engine Lite (Beta)

Maps are useful for visualizing and sharing information about places around the world. For enterprises, Google Maps Engine has been providing businesses with professional tools to help them organize large datasets, make decisions, and give their customers important details about their locations and services.

Of course, experts aren’t the only ones who love to make maps. Today we're launching Google Maps Engine Lite (Beta), so any mapping enthusiast can now create and share robust custom maps using this powerful, easy-to-use tool. You can import small spreadsheets of locations onto a comprehensive map, visualize those places through a variety of styling and drawing options, and organize and compare up to three different data sets for your non-business purposes.

Here are a few examples of maps that’ve been created with the new lite edition of Google Maps Engine.

The MAPA Project, a nonprofit dedicated to African conservation, used Maps Engine Lite to map the locations of “shark spotters” — trained observers who watch the water for sharks — along the False Bay coastline in South Africa. Spreadsheets of Shark Spotters locations and recent white shark sightings were both imported to create the map below. Learn more about how to recreate this map through this tutorial.

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Here’s another close-to-home use of this advanced custom mapping tool. I enjoy checking out local hikes with my dog, Amos, so I created a map using trail heads from San Francisco Bay Area Hiker and information about the different pet requirements on each route. The resulting map also denotes which hikes require a leash, and is great for sharing with my friends and other dog-loving hikers in my community.

If you have already created My Maps, you can import your existing My Maps, layering them with still more information to make them more detailed and helpful than ever before. These My Maps will continue to be available for people who want to create simple custom maps, and will eventually be incorporated into Google Maps Engine Lite.

Import your My Maps to Google Maps Engine Lite

While there is plenty to play with today, Maps Engine Lite is still in beta and available in English only, and we are eager to learn more about how people use it as we continue to build out more capabilities for the Maps Engine products.

To try Google Maps Engine Lite for your own custom mapping needs, visit mapsengine.google.com/map.

Posted by Beth Liebert, Product Manager