[foobarbecue]

Very cool, thanks for sharing. It's fascinating to me that google has put so little effort into their planetary maps since an inital burst of interest, but hasn't killed them yet. Is it just "below the radar"? I guess I assumed they would have some management process that kills zombie projects... don't they?

[imajoredinecon]

From my experience working there, killing a cute toy project like this takes some breaking change in a dependency plus nobody willing to spend a few hours every now and then to maintain it. Both of these are basically luck of the draw, so it’s not surprising to have stuff like this stick around for this long.

[godber]

Since this is built on top of google maps, I suspect the only marginal cost of keeping it is keeping the 10s of MB of (MAYBE 100s MB) of data around. The cost of the labor to delete it is probably more than another 100 years of serving it.

There’s no real money in the planetary data. All of my colleagues who worked on that have gone on to Google and to work on Google Maps or Google Earth Engine, which do generate revenue. This project ended up ultimately being a recruitment effort on Google’s part.