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Bookmarks, Driving Directions, and Tours
You can put a virtual thumbtack in the map to mark places of note, such as your house or your workplace with detailed labels. You can get driving directions from one point to another. Once the driving directions have been calculated, you can play them back as a virtual tour.
Community
Google Earth has developed quite a following. There are several blogs and discussion boards on Google Earth where users share bookmarks, tours, hacks and tips. Google Earth Community is probably the best known of these groups.
Slow Machines Beware
Image Quality
Google gets the images from satellite photos, which are stitched together to make a larger imaage. The images themselves are of varying quality. Larger cities are usually sharp and in-focus, but more remote areas are often blurry. There are often dark and light patches marking different satellite images, and some of the images are several years old. Images are not labeled with the date the picture was taken.
Accuracy
The Center of The World
Users outside of the US may find themselves annoyed by the obvious American bias of the globe. The center of the Google Earth when it opens is somewhere in Kansas. The US portions of the map in general have more data, better pictures, and the only cities with 3D buildings. Measurements in Google are set by default to miles and feet, even though almost every other country in the world has switched to the metric system.
Overall
- Google Earth can be downloaded from the Web at earth.google.com.
- Learn how to use layers in Google Earth.



