Today I had some time left in which I had nothing to do and so I tried out some stuff. This time I had my focus on Google Maps but don’t ask me why, I really don’t know it

First thing’s something for the people who want to get a higher zoom level:
Let’s start with an example of the famous tv tower in Berlin. If you go to the maximal zoom level, you’ll see the following
normal max. zoom level
Now it’s getting interesting. Just click on “Link to this page” and afterwards, change the variable “z” to 20:
higher zoom level
So, we get a higher zoom level and also 21 works
and once again a higher zoom level

OK, that was the first part, now we come to the second one. I’ve also done some “reversing” stuff on the satellite view. Let’s go back to our tv tower and have a look at one of the images in the satellite view. The URL contains a variable named “t” which’s the one of interest. First the length of the variable is interesting because length(t)-1 is the actual zoom level. So if we delete the last “t” in our variable, the zoom level changes from 19 to 18, just see the example here. Now you might ask, what “trtqtrqtsstttrtqrqt” means. This is very easy to describe. First, just visit the URL with “&t=t”. Now we see the whole world and now it’s important to know what “q”, “r”, “s” and “t” means for Google Maps. Just try out, what happend when you use the URL “&t=tr”. Yes right, we get the upper right part of the image before. Now change the URL to “&t=ts” and you’ll see the bottom of the right side of the image. OK we get it I think, this means we can define where we want to zoom in the way you see on the following image:

Now you can for example save all images in a specific area simply by get every image you need over the URL, which’s very comfortable when you’re writing a tool for doing that.

As a small summary:
The length of the variable “t” is the zoom level minus one and the characters says which part of the last zoom level we would see in the actual level.

Hope some of you enjoy playing around with it