Design Google Maps
Last Updated: December 31, 2025
What is Google Maps?
Google Maps is a navigation and mapping service that helps users find locations, get directions, and explore geographic areas through interactive maps.
The core functionality includes rendering maps at various zoom levels, searching for places, calculating routes between locations, and providing real-time traffic updates.
Users can view maps in different modes (road, satellite, terrain), get turn-by-turn navigation, and discover points of interest like restaurants, gas stations, and landmarks.
Popular Examples: Google Maps, Apple Maps, Waze, MapQuest, HERE WeGo
What makes Google Maps fascinating from a system design perspective is the sheer diversity of challenges it presents. These challenges are very different from each other, yet they all need to work together seamlessly.
Serving map tiles requires handling millions of requests per second with sub-second latency. Location search demands sophisticated text matching and geospatial indexing. Route calculation involves running graph algorithms on a network with billions of edges. And real-time traffic requires ingesting and processing data from millions of devices simultaneously.
This system design problem tests multiple fundamental concepts: geospatial data structures, caching at scale, graph algorithms, real-time data processing, and geographic distribution. The interviewer can steer the conversation in many directions depending on your experience and the role.
In this chapter, we will explore the high-level design of a mapping and navigation service like Google Maps.
Let's start by clarifying the requirements: