Google recently acquired Keyhole, the satellite imaging company. They have now released a product which integrates satellite imagery and Google search. It’s called Google Earth, and in traditional Google style, there’s a free version. I had tried out Keyhole earlier and it was a lot of fun. Google Earth aims to be more than just fun, but that’s just for users in the United states. For users in other countries, it’s more of a toy that is a lot of fun to play with. Features like the one which flies you along the route you want to take along real roads are really cool. Users in the US, especially those living in big cities, can enjoy the integration of Google Earth with Local search, to actually ’see’ search results. The combination of actual photos with relevant search results are a huge improvement over graphical maps.
Just to illustrate the difference in the resolution of the images available, I chose Chicago in the US and Mysore in India.
The image above shows houses and cars on the streets too.
I took this screenshot as the name is shown in the way it is pronounced in my native language, Kannada, and not as it is usually done in English. That was cool. If you’re familiar with the area, you can actually identify some landmarks.