What Is Google Earth?

The upper right corner lets you search for any address. Most addresses require a state or country, although some larger US cities only require the name. Typing in a full address will zoom you to that address, or at least near it. Most of the residential addresses I tried were at least two houses off.

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.

Google Earth is pretty nifty, but at times it runs very slow, particularly on slower computers. As you zoom and move, images may be very blurry and slowly work into focus as new data is loaded.

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.

The image stitching technique sometimes leaves problems with accuracy. Road overlays and other bookmarks often seem like they’ve shifted. In reality, the way the images were stitched together may have made the images shift position slightly. Either way, it is not surgically precise.

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 is a lot of fun. Many of the interface elements are being incorporated into Google Maps, so it may not be necessary for every user to download it. It’s fantastic as an educational tool to let children explore the world. It has a fantastic community, and it makes planning road trips fun. If you like taking mini virtual vacations at your desktop, Google Earth is definitely for you.

• Google Earth can be downloaded from the Web at earth.google.com.
• Learn how to use layers in Google Earth.