What are Google up to?

I am not exactly sure which category this should come under, but I know someone will be able to give me an answer to my ponderings, so here's a little thing I saw the other day.

I was driving through a village near where I live, (I live in England, if this will help?) and there was a vehicle (I want to say car.. or car sized van), with a massive set of camera equipment on the top, and and colourful and noticeable logo on it: Google.

What are they doing? I have probably just not heard anything about it, but my guess was that they are doing some kind of street level photography to go with their maps? Any ideas, or confirmed reasons? As this camera was mounted at about person height, depending on the quality of picture produced, it did seem possible that the inside of the ground floor of any buildings with windows would be viewable, just something that occured to me....

Its for the street view feature on Google Earth/Maps.

thankyou. i will have a look and find out more, i hadn't heard of that.