Burj Khalifa tops Google Street View buildings list

Gulf Today Report

Dubai's Burj Khalifa tops Google's Street View buildings list of the world's most visited sites, followed by the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the Taj Mahal landmark in India, according to Google.

Google celebrates its fifteenth anniversary of the application dedicated to panoramic images for geographical locations.

In terms of countries that attract the most visitors through the service, Indonesia tops the list ahead of the United States and Japan.

A picture shows the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

The European list also included Spain, Italy and France.

Google launched its Street View service in 2007 at the initiative of Larry Page, one of the founders of the giant group.

Google's California office was the first place the service was made possible to explore through panoramic photos taken from a specially hired safety bus.

In total, Google Street View contains 220 billion images stored on its service, which spans more than 16 million kilometers in nearly 100 countries. The image acquisition system with cameras, lidar (laser) and global positioning system (GPS) and calculation tools, has developed over the years.

A picture shows the Taj Mahal in Agra, India.

Next year, Google hopes to have an integrated system weighing less than seven kilometers, allowing manual transport.

Cars aren't the only vehicles used to power Google Street View cameras.

According to the sites, backpacks, ships, scooters and bicycles, as well as bikes for transportation on snow and even camels, have been used.