Google turn Street View into a time machine

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It doesn’t appear to have been officially announced, but Google have turned Street View into a time machine – enabling users to see older images of streets.

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Google have been updating their Street View photos every couple of years since the service launched in 2008 – so by now they’ve got a huge database of history taking place. Brilliantly, they’ve finally made it available to browse. In some places, they’ve done as many as four passes – so you can really see things change, like with the redevelopment of this theatre in Leicester:

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Interesting too, even when no archive images are available, Maps now also displays the date (to the nearest month) when the photos were taken.

Historians of the future are going to love this.

James O’Malley
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