Google Street View Now Covers 50 Countries, Adds Hungary and Lesotho

Google's Street View lets users traverse the globe a step at a time, offering up first-person panoramas of famous locales, distant destinations and local streets from the comfort of an armchair -- or a mobile phone.

Now, with the addition of Hungary and Lesotho, Street View has added its 50th country to its roster.

"We launched Street View in 2007 in five U.S. cities to give you what we called a 'feet on the ground' experience and have since been growing the program to make it more comprehensive, accurate and useful for everyone. Today, we've reached 50 countries with the launch of Street View in Hungary and Lesotho and are significantly expanding our coverage in Poland and Romania, among other locations around the world," Google writes on its Europe blog.

The views of Hungary include much of Budapest, on both sides of the Danube River. The views of Lesotho, a tiny African nation surrounded on all sides by South Africa, include mountain scenery and high-altitude lakes.

Google's also added plenty of new data for countries it already covers. "This is also the largest single update of Street View imagery we've ever pushed, including new and updated imagery for nearly 350,000 miles of roads across 14 countries," says Google. "We're also refreshing and expanding existing Street View coverage in France, Italy, Poland, Romania, Russia, Singapore and Thailand. And, we've added new special collections of a host of picturesque spots -- using our Street View Trike technology -- that include Portugal's Pena National Palace, or the Sha Tin Che Kung Temple in Hong Kong or the Kilkenny Castle in Ireland."

While some privacy advocates worry about Google's extensive catalogue of satellite and street-level data, the added openness has had international benefits - Google enables public cartographic efforts to map gulags in North Korea, for example.

In six years, 50 countries. Only about 146 to go.