Have you ever looked up an address on Google Maps? Did you check to see if your house appeared on Street View? Did you wonder if borders and country names appear the same everywhere? You probably answered yes to some of these questions, the same as we would have done. We invite you to learn about the most curious stories and the most mysterious cases involving Google Maps. For many, it is an everyday technology that we naturalize. We use it to know the best route to our destination and also to explore tourist places we have never been to. We use it all the time on this channel, to be able to tell our stories with animated maps and to determine the precise distances between two points on the map. But Google Maps, like Earth and Street View, not only did not always exist, but they have little-known functions and even captivating stories for those of us who enjoy geography. In principle, these are not neutral maps. The thing is that they are not fixed and immutable, as one on paper could be, but something happens that could be counterintuitive: they are maps that adapt to the reader. One of the most obvious cases is that of Russia and Ukraine. If we enter Google Maps from any other country, we will see this scenario: two dotted lines, one north and one east of the Crimean peninsula, indicating disputed borders. However, this can change: if we enter Google Maps from Russia, we will see a single, continuous line, which indicates that the border is located here. And if we do it from Ukraine, however, Crimea will change hands and the international border will be here. A little further east we can see a similar situation: if we enter the version of India, we can see the regions of Ladakh and Jammu and Kashmir within that country. However, if we do it from another location we will see these dotted lines because Pakistan maintains a claim over the area. Another case is found in the Mediterranean. We have learned the history of the island of Cyprus, which for the international community is a single country but in practice something much more complex happens. Well, if we enter from almost all over the globe, we will see Cyprus in the south and these dotted lines in the center of the island. But if we access from Turkey, we will also see the lines that mark the disputed border, but the name of the country that we will see is the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, which is a state allied to the Turkish one but has no more recognition than that in the international community. . Finally, another obvious example occurs in North Africa. We have spoken several times about Western Sahara, that region disputed between Morocco and the Sahrawi people. We see this image almost everywhere on the planet, with a dotted line marking the disputed border. However, if we enter from Morocco we will not see any of that: instead, a country appears that extends without interruptions towards the south. One of the best-known features found within Maps is Google Street View. We may also have gotten used to it, but the idea of being able to travel anywhere on the planet is revolutionary. Likewise, there is still a long way to go before the entire Earth is available. Currently, 92 of the 195 internationally recognized countries do not have official Google Street View coverage. That is, half. Many are small islands. In Oceania, these 12 States still have no official data to explore. That is, they were not visited by Google cars or bicycles. In Asia there are 19 other countries where we still do not have a generalized Street View. Among them, very diverse countries, such as Syria in the Middle East to Myanmar in Southeast Asia. Europe is the continent with the greatest coverage. Only these eight countries remain outside this technology. Only in 2023 did Germany join, which had a regulation that prohibited it for twelve years. In Africa, however, the presence is much lower. These 35 countries have not yet had Google cars on their streets taking images with their cameras. Finally, America has 18 countries without coverage, the majority of them small, with the exceptions of Paraguay and Venezuela. However, there are some oddities in this listing. For example, in China there are official images taken by Google, but they are very few. We will only be able to see some museums and tourist places but not navigate the streets of Beijing easily. On the contrary, there are other countries that have great unofficial coverage, such as Barbados and Vietnam. That is, other organizations or people took a huge amount of images and uploaded them to the platform, which allows us to explore a large part of its streets. Many people, we may be among them, spend hours visiting random places. We will not always find scenes as curious as this in Japan. We don't dare to guess what happens there, but you can leave us your guesses in the comments. But Street View not only serves these curiosities, but also to do justice. Gioacchino Gammino had been part of a mafia clan in Italy and was even sentenced to life in prison. He was arrested in 1984, but in 2002 he managed to escape from his prison in Rome. He was on the run for no less than 20 years, until the Italian police managed to locate him with this image. I was buying fruit in Galapagar, Spain. After he was caught, he confessed that he went more than 10 years without calling his family so they couldn't track him down. Another case that was clarified two decades later occurred in Palm Beach, United States. William Moldt had disappeared in 1997, aged 40. No one ever heard from him again until 2019: a neighbor who was exploring the area on Google Earth discovered this image in a lake. It was a white car that caught his attention. The police took care of the matter and discovered that Moldt's body was inside. It is speculated that he lost control of the car, ended up underwater and was unable to escape. But just as some things can be discovered, there are others that are well covered and we cannot see them since they are pixelated or directly covered. This is the case of Jeannette Island, which belongs to Russia and is located here. But when we get closer this happens to us: instead of an island we see everything black. It is full of conspiracy theories on the Internet about this topic, but we do not want to take responsibility for any of them. Another striking case is that of Sentinel del Norte, perhaps one of the most incredible stories we learned about on this channel. There lives an isolated people for thousands of years that rejects any contact with the outside world. In this case, if we zoom in with Google Earth we will have an image that, voluntarily, is of very poor quality. Not only curious people and researchers can be fascinated by this technology, but also artists. The Italian Emilio Vavarella launched an exhibition that focuses on different striking aspects. On the one hand, it detected a large number of images that appear incorrect due to the way they were taken. But he also found these unique images, in which you can see the faces of the people who were collecting the images. Likewise, it seems difficult to find a life story in which Google Maps has had as much impact as that of Saroo Brierley. This is an Indian boy who, when he was five years old, had gone out with his brother to help his family. But Saroo got lost: he boarded a train thinking his brother was on it and it wasn't. On board the train he traveled more than 1,500 kilometers until he reached Calcutta. There he had no way to communicate with his family and at the same time he was adopted by an Australian couple. Saroo was able to grow up and study on the island of Tasmania with his new family. But he wanted to know his origins. He didn't have much information, since what he remembered was very little. However, after years of searching on Google Earth, Saroo was able to locate the spot where he had taken the train. In this way, he was able to return to India 25 years later and reunite with his mother, who had remained in the town in the hope that he would return one day. The young man told his story in an autobiographical book that was made into a film in 2016. Lion, also known as A Way Home, was nominated for best film at the Oscars. In much of Latin America you can find it on Prime or Max and it is a good opportunity to shed a few good tears. Did you know any of these stories? Which one was most striking to you? Leave your comment below. 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