In May 2013, Google's vice president took to stage and announced that Google was aiming to build "a perfect map of the world". An honourable notion with almost utopian connotations -- and why shouldn't it? After all, Google has been at the forefront of leading the biggest change to mapping since the 15th century, when maps went from manuscript to print. Now they're online and taking advantage of satellite imagery, maps are more detailed, accurate and multi-dimensional than they've ever been, but could such a thing as the perfect map ever exist?

History tells us no, and that we should be wary of anyone -- any state, any organisation or any company -- that declares a wish to create one, says Jerry Brotton, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary University London and author of A History of the World in Twelve Maps. "As soon as you hear anyone saying they're making a perfect map of the world, alarm bells should ring because they're trying to sell, metaphorically, a certain ideological vision, a certain kind of product. They're trying to push something, be it religious, political, ideological, commercial, whatever it might be," he says.

Shutterstock

Acknowledging a map's agenda

That's not to say, of course, that Google is authoritarian, but it's important to recognise that behind every map ever made there is an agenda shaped by the ideas of its age, and therefore the view we're being presented with will always be partial and contain some kind of bias. Take the Ordnance Survey maps, for example, which are much beloved by British hikers, but which were originally designed for use by the military. For the likes of modern cartographers such as Google, Apple and Microsoft, the agenda that drives most of their products are things like dominating search and, of course, accumulating profit, argues Brotton, and that will always come through in the focus on searching for businesses in the services they provide.

The problem is that they still maintain that rhetoric that they're trying to be very liberal and support minority groups, but that just cannot be Jerry Brotton, QMUL

There's more to it than that though, says Jessica Pfund, who is a programme manager for Google MapMaker. "It's not necessarily about commercial gain, it's about the philosophy of what's the right thing to do -- although I'm sure it makes us money as well.

The next billion people are now just coming online and having good maps of these places, places that you care about, is extremely important in having the internet make sense for the next billion," she says.

Brotton, however, sees Google's claims of being propelled by altruism as contradictory and at odds with the commercial purposes it serves. "The problem is that they still maintain that rhetoric that they're trying to be very liberal and support minority groups, but that just cannot be when you get into the situation where you're just trying to chase and generate an enormous profit," he says.

Pfund argues though that Google's core mission statement means that the company too is mapping for both causes. "Clearly it's still in our commercial interest, but I think it's really impressive and part of the reason I continue to work at Google is because they have this mission to organise the world's data and make it universally useful and accessible and I think that means going to every little corner of every country and making sure it's correctly mapped on our map."