Google has met its fair share of opposition for its Street View project, but, despite plenty of cases and people upset at their privacy apparently being invaded, the company has been moving ahead at a healthy pace adding more and more imagery to the service. Starting today, Google is greatly expanding its coverage of the UK, where Street View launched last year, which will now cover more than 99 percent of the country's roads, both rural and urban.

With this big, new wave of Street View imagery, the entire country is virtually covered, meaning that the UK joins the US, France, Spain and Italy as countries with near total coverage. In all, Google Street View now covers some 238,000 miles (383,000 km) of roads in Britain. That's an extra of 210,000 miles over the existing roads in Street View.

Google launched Street View in the UK precisely one year ago with 25 cities, about 12 percent of the country's roads, being available at that point. Since then, it has been gradually adding more locations, but nowhere near the amount of imagery it is now unleashing.

Despite some isolated issues and controversy, it looks like the service has been as much a hit as it has been pretty much everywhere else it has launched. A survey commissioned by Google indicated that the launch led to a 30-percent increase of the company's mapping service, Google Maps. Most people used it to check out a place where they were headed and one third looked at images from abroad.

Street View hasn't been welcomed everywhere with a few small towns and villages making headlines for stopping the Street View cars from shooting in that location with concerns about privacy, specifically that it would lead to a wave of criminal activity. At the time of writing, the impending surge in burglaries hasn't yet occurred, leading to speculation that the worries may have been slightly exaggerated.