[3] Three kinds of drawing tools were available: placemark (a single point of interest on the map), line (for drawing roads, railways, rivers, and the like) and polygon (for defining boundaries and borders, adding parks, lakes and other large features).

The approach encouraged by users and by Google was to trace features such as roads from the existing satellite imagery.

As users made more successful contributions, their edits were less closely monitored and may have been published on the map straight away.

[5] As of 6 March 2016, the service was available in Bangladesh, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Cambodia, Canada, Costa Rica, Croatia, Czech Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Denmark (not including Greenland and the Faroe Islands), Egypt, El Salvador, Estonia, France, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, India, Iran, Iraq, Italy, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Macedonia, Malaysia, Mexico, Moldova, Morocco, Nepal, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Puerto Rico, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Taiwan, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, the United States, Venezuela, and Vietnam.

[12] Map Maker required contributors to grant Google a "... perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display, distribute, and create derivative works of the User Submission".