Google Maps and Google Earth for Authors — Location Research Without Leaving Your Desk

Every fiction author writing about a real place faces the same problem: how do you make a reader feel like they're there when you've never been? The specific architectural detail of a Paris side street. The way a particular stretch of Scottish coastline sits relative to the nearest village. The elevation change between two points a character is supposed to walk in under an hour. These are the details that ground a story in physical reality — and getting them wrong breaks the spell for readers who know the place.

Google Maps and Google Earth, used together, answer most of these questions from your writing desk. They're free, they're detailed, and they've been improving continuously since 2005. This guide covers how to use each one effectively for fiction research, world-building, and scene setting — and introduces a few complementary tools that fill the gaps they leave.

Google Maps — Street-Level Scene Research

Google Maps (maps.google.com) is the day-to-day research tool for authors writing contemporary fiction or any story set in a real, navigable place. It's strongest at the street level — the details your reader experiences from the ground rather than from above.

Street View — Walking Your Scene Without Being There

Street View is the single most valuable Google Maps feature for fiction authors. Click anywhere on a mapped street and step into a 360-degree panoramic view taken from a camera car driving through that location. You can turn in any direction, zoom in, walk forward and backward through the street, and look up at buildings or down at curb details.

For fiction, this means you can walk down the specific street in Edinburgh where your protagonist runs from pursuers, stand at the intersection in Chicago where the confrontation happens, or look at the unremarkable storefront in a small Ohio town that your antagonist uses as a front. The architectural style, the signage, the quality of the pavement, the trees, the sight lines — all of it is visible and useful.

Route Planning and Travel Logic

Google Maps calculates routes between any two points using walking, driving, cycling, or transit modes and gives realistic travel times. This is essential for checking the plausibility of your story's logistics: can your character walk from the hotel to the museum in 20 minutes? How long does it take to drive from a rural safehouse to the city center? Does the route your character takes pass through the neighborhood you described?

The distance measurement tool (right-click on any point and select 'Measure distance') lets you draw straight-line distances between points — useful for understanding the geography of a chase, an escape, or a journey even when roads aren't involved.

Location Detail and Atmosphere Research

Maps include detailed information about businesses, landmarks, parks, transport hubs, and points of interest — with photos, user reviews, and operating hours. For contemporary fiction, this data helps flesh out background settings authentically. The photos attached to any location on Maps are often more useful than professional photography because they're taken by ordinary visitors showing what the place actually looks like in normal lighting, on a regular day.

The satellite view in Maps also shows roof-level detail useful for planning scenes that involve buildings, yards, parking structures, or rooftops. Toggle between satellite and map view to understand both the visual and the spatial layout of any location.

Google Maps Costs and Access

🔗 maps.google.com

Google Earth — Terrain, Geography, and History

Where Google Maps excels at street-level detail, Google Earth (earth.google.com/web or the desktop app) provides the wider geographic context — terrain, elevation, landscape, and the ability to look at places from any angle or altitude. It's the tool for understanding how geography shapes story: why a fortress was built on that particular hill, how a valley creates a natural ambush point, what a river delta actually looks like from above, how far a character can see from a mountain pass.

3D Terrain and Landscape Visualization

Google Earth renders terrain in three dimensions using satellite elevation data. Tilt the view to see mountains, valleys, coastlines, and cityscapes from any angle. For authors writing stories where geography matters to the plot — battles, pursuits, wilderness survival, sailing, mountaineering — the ability to see actual terrain in 3D rather than a flat map is genuinely different from anything Maps provides.

The 3D building models in major cities add architectural context. Stand at street level in Earth (similar to Street View but integrated into the 3D model) to understand how a city's buildings, streets, and open spaces relate to each other spatially.

Historical Imagery — Research Through Time

This is Google Earth's most distinctive feature for fiction authors: the ability to view satellite imagery from different dates going back to the late 1990s for many locations. Click the clock icon in Earth to access the historical imagery slider, then move it backward through time.

For historical fiction authors, this is invaluable — you can see how a neighborhood looked in 2005 versus 2020, how a coastline has changed, whether a particular field was developed or empty in a given year. It's imprecise (satellite imagery shows what's visible from above, not what it looked like at street level) but it provides geographic and development context that's otherwise difficult to research.

Voyager — Guided Exploration for Research and Inspiration

Earth's Voyager feature (the compass icon in the navigation) contains a library of interactive guided tours on geography, culture, nature, and history. These are genuinely useful as research starting points: a guided tour of historical trade routes, a geological feature series, a cultural geography collection. For authors who know their story needs a specific type of location but haven't fixed the geography yet, Voyager can surface real-world places that fit.

Google Earth Costs and Access

🔗 earth.google.com/web

Complementary Tools Worth Knowing

OpenStreetMap — The Open Alternative

OpenStreetMap (openstreetmap.org) is a community-built, open-source world map maintained by volunteers. Its data is often more detailed than Google's in specific domains — public transport networks, hiking trails, building footprints, and places of local interest that Google's algorithm deprioritizes. For authors writing about trail systems, rural areas, non-English-speaking countries, or urban infrastructure, OpenStreetMap frequently has more granular data than Google Maps.

It's also the base data for dozens of specialized mapping applications: cycling route planners, transit maps, hiking trail guides, and historical map overlays. If Google Maps shows you a blank space where you need detail, OpenStreetMap is the next stop.

🔗 openstreetmap.org

The Wayback Machine — How a Place Looked Online

The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine (web.archive.org) captures snapshots of websites over time. For authors writing about a specific business, organization, institution, or neighborhood, the Wayback Machine can show what a local restaurant's website looked like in 2008, what a city's tourism site said about a neighborhood before it gentrified, or what a building's official page showed before it was demolished.

This is a different kind of location research than satellite imagery — it captures the human layer of how places presented themselves rather than the physical geography. For contemporary and near-historical fiction, it's a surprisingly rich source of authentic detail.

🔗 web.archive.org

Mapbox — Custom Map Creation

Mapbox (mapbox.com) is a developer-oriented platform for creating custom styled maps. Most authors won't need it, but for those producing enhanced ebooks, author websites, or supplementary reader materials with custom maps (a fantasy world map styled like a real atlas, or a real-world thriller map highlighting key story locations), Mapbox provides the tooling. Free tier is generous for personal use; commercial use is usage-based pricing.

🔗 mapbox.com

Practical Research Workflow for Authors

For a scene set in a real location, a typical research workflow:

• Google Maps Street View: walk the specific streets, intersections, and buildings in the scene. Note architectural details, signage, street width, sight lines, and ambient environment.

• Google Maps satellite view: understand the spatial layout — how the buildings relate to each other, what's across the street, where the nearest transport or parking is.

• Google Maps route planning: verify your character's travel logic — time, distance, and route plausibility.

• Google Earth 3D: understand the larger geography — how the neighborhood sits relative to the city, how terrain affects movement, what the area looks like from elevated viewpoints relevant to your scene.

• Google Earth historical imagery: if the story is set in the past, check what the area looked like in the relevant time period.

• OpenStreetMap: fill in any gaps in Google's data, particularly for public transit, trails, or detailed building footprints.

• Wayback Machine: if the scene references specific businesses, institutions, or local culture, find period-accurate website snapshots.

For World-Building Authors — Layering Real Geography Under Fiction

Authors writing fantasy, science fiction, or alternate history often use real geography as a structural foundation for fictional worlds — a fictional city built on the terrain model of Edinburgh, a fantasy coastline that maps to the actual Norwegian fjords, a fictional country with the climate and agricultural patterns of a specific real region.

Google Earth's 3D terrain is particularly useful here: you can study real geographic features — how rivers carve valleys, how mountain ranges block weather patterns, where natural harbors form — and use that understanding to build fictional geography that feels physically believable without being identifiable. The goal is geographic logic, not geographic copying.

ScribeCount Author OS — Where Your Location Research Lives

The research you do in Google Maps and Google Earth has two destinations in your workflow: your current manuscript, where it informs specific scenes, and your author knowledge base, where it builds the location library that informs every book set in that world.

AuthorVault in the ScribeCount Author OS is where the structured catalog data about your books lives — including the location and world-building data tied to specific titles and series. For series authors, AuthorVault maintains the geography of your story world as a catalog-level record: which locations appear in which books, the established details that must stay consistent across titles, and the series metadata that prevents continuity errors as your catalog grows.

Comparison: Google Maps vs. Google Earth for Author Use Cases

Conclusion

Google Maps and Google Earth are among the most powerful free research tools available to fiction authors — and they're underused. The combination of Street View's ground-level detail, Earth's 3D terrain and historical imagery, OpenStreetMap's data depth for specific domains, and the Wayback Machine's human-layer research covers the vast majority of location research any fiction author needs without leaving their desk.

Use them together. Start with Maps for the specific scene and its street-level details, move to Earth for the larger geographic context and terrain, supplement with OpenStreetMap where Google's coverage is thin, and check the Wayback Machine when you need the human layer of how a place was experienced rather than just how it looks from above.

Then store what you find. A note in your current manuscript is a starting point; a record in AuthorVault is the long-term asset that makes your fictional world consistent across every book you set there.

— Randall