Hardcore Google: Maps, Earth & Beyond
In the last couple of days I’ve posted about some of Google’s lesser known search ability, which I hope you’ve found useful - and not too dull!
But moving away from big G’s traditional search method, how else can you search for things?
Step forward Google Earth…
Google Earth has been around a while now, but I’m still stunned every time I use it. The sheer scale of data involved and the speed of it is just mind blowing. If you’ve got a fast ‘net connection and a fast PC you really should try it. It’s like a virtual globe. Spin it around and visit any place on Earth you like.
The more interesting parts of the world tend to have higher resolution images and some cities are available in 3D.
You can see people queuing for the London Eye (left), or fly around the Grand Canyon (right) for example. Makes you wonder about the resolution of military images…
It’s always fun to try and find your own house, or a famous landmark or three. There are also more fascinating places to visit, and sites like Google Sightseeing and Google Earth Blog can sometimes turn up unusual sights (like huge forest fires, crop circles and oil well fires in Iraq etc) or mysteriously intriguing locations.
It doesn’t end there though. No sirrrrr-eeee. Google have also enabled people to overlay their own data onto the world, meaning you can see real-time weather, traffic, flights, lightning data (from Blitzortung.org who I mentioned a few weeks ago) and loads more different things. It’s this type of thing that really brings Google Earth into a whole different league of search - this is stuff that Google’s normal search engine just can’t handle.
A screen shot of Blitzortung’s lightning data overlay in action (above). White dots represent lightning strikes in the previous ten minutes, yellow dots are strikes from 10-20 minutes ago etc.
Oh, yes of course Google Earth will do directions too, but when you’ve got such incredible information at your fingertips, who wants to find their local Tesco anyway?
It shouldn’t take much imagination though to see how the future of search will evolve once the main Google results have been cleverly integrated and they start to pull more real-time data in. Will people be selling advertising space and writing web addresses on their roofs in future?
I’d guess Google Maps uses the same mapping data as Google Earth does, but it’s simply a 2D version and as a result, it’s very quick to use and can be viewed on much lower spec PC’s with slower Internet connections.
Ever since Google Maps was launched a while back, I’ve used it countless times. Previously I used Multimap.com for all my map needs, but I have to admit Google Maps is much slicker. Just type in a postcode, city/country and it’ll pop a map up for you. You can overlay a satellite image over the top of the results too if you really wish.
But how do you do directions? Simple. Just type something like “cambridge to leeds” or “CB1 to LS1“. Now how easy is that?
Ride Finder might be for US people only, but it’s still interesting to see how Google are experimenting with Maps data, by using near real-time data to track where the nearest taxi’s are.
Speaking of all things map like, you can also look at Google Mars and Google Moon (try zooming right in on that one…).
I think in the next post, I’ll skim through some of the other less-sexy-but-still-useful Google services. Laterz!
September 10th, 2006 at 4:54 pm
Wow, that’s really cool. I can’t believe I have never looked at it before. Brings a whole new meaning to “I can see my house from here!!!”
September 10th, 2006 at 4:54 pm
Oh and I like the new picture on the back of the blog title, its a very good photo, well shot.
September 15th, 2007 at 7:42 pm
[...] previous posts I tried to give some search tips, a quick guide to Google Maps, Google Earth and a few other bits and [...]