Google Maps Adds Satellite Images

Google Maps has added satellite images to its service as of late Monday, and it’s done so in a really useful manner: one click toggles between maps and satellite photography. Try zooming in without your jaw hitting the floor. The photographs, which aren’t available in all resolutions for all areas, are a result of Google’s acquisition of Keyhole last year. Many thanks to Cam Watson for the tip; there’s also an AP wire story. As was the case with the original Google Maps announcement, this news will likely spread quickly, if only because people will enjoy playing with the satellite and aerial photography so much. As they should. (So far, the first thing most people want to do seems to be to find their house.)

Posted on Tuesday, April 5, 2005 at 1:23 AM
Categories: Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial

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Comments

Some European sites offer similar services, such as Mappy. The French Yellow Pages offer A9 style walkthroughs.

Kerim Friedman | 04/05/2005 at 4:00 PM | #

Edit: Changed the AP story link to CNN, which doesn’t require registration.

Jonathan Crowe | 04/05/2005 at 11:33 PM | #

Check out what the creative users at Flickr are doing with those Google satellite maps! The idea behind these Memory Maps is you go fetch a map of the neighborhood you grew up, upload it to Flickr and then annotate it using their tools.

http://www.flickr.com/groups/memorymaps/pool

You can learn a lot about someone from a noted map! Very cool use of Flickr’s fotonotes feature.

MJK Boston | 04/06/2005 at 4:35 PM | #

Personally speaking I don’t rate Google Maps. Sure their UI is simple, fast and uncluttered but if you look at the quality of the maps they’re nothing more than wireframe diagrams! Compare this to multimap and streetmap and you see they give you full OS mapping, and better overhead pictures. If you want a map to tell you how to drive from A to B then google is OK but if you want a map to tell you about a particular area (geographically speaking, and isn’t what maps are designed for?) then Google won’t help you. Also, there postcode data is dodgy in places, it puts my postcode a good mile from where it should be!

Jonathan Hipkiss | 04/22/2005 at 2:57 PM | #

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