Sometimes, using Google Maps to get directions home means a lot more than mapping out your post-work commute.
A new ad for the service features Saroo Brierley, who spent 25 years searching for his biological family after getting separated from them at an Indian train station. With the help of Google, however, Brierley was able to find his way back to the home and family he never thought he'd see again.
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Right before his fifth birthday, Brierley fell asleep on a train, waiting for his brother.
"When I woke up the next day, the whole carriage was empty," he says in the video, above. "On a runaway train, a ghost train, taking me I don't know where."
A family in Australia later adopted Brierley, but he never forgot where he came from. Brierley's adoptive mother even kept a map of India in his bedroom.
"I'd wake up every morning seeing that map, and hence, it sort of kept the memories alive," he says. "I'd have flashes of the places that I'd used to go, the flashes of my family faces."
Twenty-five years later, Brierley was browsing Google Maps, when he realized he could use Google Earth to view his long-lost home. Together with his photographic memory, Brierley used Google to trace the train he had taken, all the way back to his childhood home.
In 2012, he traveled to the spot he had been mapping, and found his mother, who then called his siblings. The family was finally reunited.
"It was the needle in the haystack, but the needle was there," Brierley says. "Everything we have in the world is at the tap of a button, but you've got to have the will and the determination to wanting it."
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Homepage image: YouTube, Google Maps