By making the Earth a globe in its desktop version, Google Maps has made itself more accurate. Here's how

Users might be looking at a major revamp of Google's navigation platform, Maps. In the latest of a series of updates that the platform has been going through since the past couple of months, the desktop interface will show a globe when completely zoomed out. 

It's an update that could now help in viewing the Earth more accurately. The tech-titan captioned its tweet saying that "Greenland's projection is no longer the size of Africa".

Up until now, the navigation platform had used a Mercator projection which projected the planet onto a flat surface. The previous projection made it easier to print onto maps and has been standardized since its inception. However, this leads to the display of a distorted image. The flat surface although managed to scale the areas around the equator properly, areas near the pole appeared larger than they really are. 

Prior to the update, in the Mercator projection, Greenland can be seen as larger than Africa, whereas in reality, Africa measures 14 times larger than Greenland. 

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In 2009, answering to one of the users, who had questioned the false impressions of the size of different continents in the map, a Google official had stated that the Mercator helped preserve the angle of roads "The first launch of Maps actually did not use Mercator, and streets in high latitude places like Stockholm did not meet at right angles on the map the way they do in reality.” he said. 

This comes after a minute update on the app platform of Maps, which allowed the users to share their location along with their battery percentage. 

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In June, Google redesigned Maps where it upgraded the explore section, adding a 'match' feature which would predict your likings towards a particular restaurant based on your previous visits and your preset preference. 

Apart from that for the iOS platform, Google introduced the 'for you' feature that allowed the users to know about their surroundings irrespective of their location. According to the company, the feature will soon find its way into the Android versions too.