Google Maps: “Treasure Map” mode

This is beautiful, though, I'm oddly disappointed that when showing a route to a destination, it doesn't mark the destination with "x marks the spot".

What's rather special about this is StreetView.

Some landmarks have coordinates on them. I followed the chain for a while, but then I lost it.<p><a href="https://maps.google.com/maps?ll=42.359305,-71.067467&#38;t=8&#38;z=14" rel="nofollow">https://maps.google.com/maps?ll=42.359305,-71.067467&#38;t=8...</a>

Here's Gangnam style: <a href="https://maps.google.com/maps?q=hong+kong&#38;ll=37.504415,127.035427&#38;spn=0.045961,0.104628&#38;hnear=Hong+Kong&#38;gl=us&#38;t=8&#38;z=14" rel="nofollow">https://maps.google.com/maps?q=hong+kong&#38;ll=37.504415,12...</a>

This is such a little thing that is going to be absolutely great for my nieces and nephews.<p>When getting directions, the markers and line between the start and end points are the same. They should add in a dashed line and a big black X for the destination as soon as possible :-)<p>A weekend trip to a national park can be made that much more fun by having a family treasure hunt with the kids in the back seat "navigating" the way.

Very cute little icons for landmarks in the cities. They put a bird on Portland.

Supposedly there are Treasure Chests somewhere. Not sure if you have to be in Street View to find them or not. Might be an early April fools though...

any thoughts how you would implement this? To apply the sepia filter to the street view images would double the storage used for all the images, which is huge! Alternatively to apply the sepia filter each time a image is loaded would add a lot of load to the servers, especially if the joke is spread around the world? So some kind of caching would be in place? Or is it done in browser with the flash plugin which would be the most boring option, but also the most plausible... (that would also explain why the webgl version does not work)<p>The world map is just images at different zoom levels with an algorithm that adds trees, that would not be a problem I guess?

I love this company for such projects!

Am I missing something? This looks identical to regular google maps: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/8gi8dfV.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/8gi8dfV.jpg</a>

Guys, we have started a map with all the red end points. It's here <a href="http://bit.ly/123SO9w" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/123SO9w</a> . Feel free to had your end points . so far we have two medals, a ring, two guns/revolver, a rope, a snake, a compass. It seems that some object have the shape of their initial letter (snake = S, rope = R)

Spoilers: There's a bunch of people collecting clues/locations together in this shared spreadsheet - <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ajc_VqH8uv38dFdnbnBhMlBLNjRMRmFISEFXNUFSMEE&#38;usp=sharing" rel="nofollow">https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ajc_VqH8uv38dFd...</a>

So I found 2 red letters (C at -28.30,-57.30; M at 34.61,135.73), as well as three red signs (- sign at 35.11,-75.98, 9 at 76.50,-24.01, and 1 at 68.92,40.64) so there’s probably a super secret location given by the red coordinates but I don’t know what the letters mean.

Found it: <a href="http://goo.gl/maps/67c3y" rel="nofollow">http://goo.gl/maps/67c3y</a>

The "pirate supply store" at 826 Valencia is a landmark.<p><a href="http://goo.gl/maps/1XBK4" rel="nofollow">http://goo.gl/maps/1XBK4</a><p><a href="http://826valencia.org/store/" rel="nofollow">http://826valencia.org/store/</a>

When unzooming completely (using Opera), France and Great Britain are conjoined twins. And so on for Morocco and Spain, Denmark and Norway, Sicily and the rest of Italy...<p>Now think about what History would have been...

Here's the blog post about it:<p><a href="http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2013/03/find-treasure-with-google-maps.html" rel="nofollow">http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2013/03/find-treasure-wit...</a>

just incase it doesn't work for someone else, you need to be using the "classic" maps mode - if you are using opengl mode it will not work...

Beautiful. Is this an April Fools' joke or a permanent Easter Egg? (In the latter case, I suppose it'd be fitting that today is Easter.)

I followed the clues to here 50.62,-113.81 - just north of this spot, "X" marks the spot if you look using satellite view

They shut down Google Reader then put up a pointless map hack. Recognize that putting this together took a bunch of people's time and energy, not to mention processing power, server load, etc. All reasons for shutting down Reader.<p>What is the message Google is communicating to everyone? "We're still fun, just less useful?" Sorry if I don't have room to appreciate their "corporate whimsy" anymore.

Wasn't this from last year? I'm pretty sure I remember a similar programmatic map transformation at least...

nice easter egg : following the "treasure hunt" leads to red letters spelling out "APRIL FOOLS".<p>Along each of the trails leading to the red letters, there are also hidden letters that spell out "MMC-900913" (a reference to last years google maps april fools)

FYI: this does not work if you have MapGL enabled. You just see the normal map.

This is neat and a great example of encouraging "p2p" marketing.

(Stomp Aberdeen.) Loch Ness. Monster on the map.

look at this spot, or very, very close to it in satellite view - X Marks the spot.