‘Planet surfing’ with Google Earth

Following hard on the heels of Google Local and Google Maps (May newsletter) comes Google Earth. This new product requires software to be downloaded for free to your PC (as well as a broadband connection) and combines some practical search functions with some amazing quality satellite imagery. Together, these offer a powerful and fascinating view of the world.

When you first start up Google Earth, you’re presented with some search option panels to the left of the screen, some control options below and a large image of the world (centred on the US of course!). But by typing in the name of a city you’re suddenly swooping around the world and down to the selected destination.

As the ‘flight’ slows and you get closer to the ground, the blurred image begins to clear into – in many cases – a highly detailed aerial photo of the city. You can then zoom in and out, rotate the image or tilt down towards ground level. The default setting displays the landscape in context and for many of the cities in the US, you can also select the 3D buildings option to view representations of all the buildings standing out from the ground.

As a search tool Google Earth offers many of the functions provided by Google Local, so you can identify hotels, restaurants, schools or different businesses, then find directions and distances between 2 points and save locations for later reference. You can also overlay roads onto the images. But as a global view, this product excels by providing some excellent high quality images of many places around the world.

Coverage is far from complete, however, and the search results don’t always work too well. For example, the satellite images for London are not as sharp as for other cities and the coverage of the rest of the UK is poor. However, you can sweep across the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco, see the water taxis on the Grand Canal in Venice or take a flying tour across Hong Kong with some incredibly detailed images ‘ see some examples here.

At the very least Google Earth should become a standard tool in geography classes at school. As a vision of a search tool in the future, it’s made a great start and will no doubt improve and develop over the coming months.

In an amusing twist to this product, Google also introduced Google Moon last month, to mark the anniversary of the first moon landings. Based on the Google Maps format, you can zoom in to the moon surface to view the landing points and information on each of the missions between 1969 and 1972. If you then go to the full magnification of the image, you can see what the astronauts found!

If you’ve installed Google Earth or intend to do so and have any questions, please let us know and we’ll be pleased to help.

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