Google Maps Now Cover Whole World

GregBryant writes "They haven't blogged it yet, but maps.google.com has added some additional scaling-out, and maps of the entire world are available. Only country names so far (except in the US, Canada & UK) but it's still nice to finally click back & forth between the Satellite imagery and some real maps, even if their proportions don't quite match."

Professionally, I Love This

Getting satellite views of physiographic features from a readily available source is truly one of the best things to come from the internet. The only downside to the Google satellite images is that the highest resolution images cover metropolitian areas. This is great for folks who use it for urban planning, environmental impact assessments, historic studies, etc., it doesn't do much for geologists or geographers. Still, it is free.....

As a geologist it is nice to have aerial tools on line, especially when some of the other taxpayer funded sources of data have been taken offline by private companies. While I don't object to paying for data produced by private companies, I get a bit steamed with the idea that I have to pay *twice* for government-generated data. I understand the necessity to save the taxpayers money, but in the case of topographic, DEM, and DLG sources generated by the government, we have already paid for most of the cost of production; hosting is a fraction of cost for agencies such as the USGS.

Even if hosting were a significant cost, paid advertising could cover the cost and provide a good income for any company interested in providing the service for the government. The fees that some of these charge for taxpayer-subsidized data is rediculous.

Thanks again to Google.

I agree.

On a side note, am I the only one who notices that dragging the zoom bar's handle has a smooth (fatbits or whatever one calls it) zooming effect* now?

Firefox users need not apply; I see it on IE only so far, so I'm guessing it uses script and their zoom "Microsoft extension to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)." (rough translation: it's a non-standardized property) [microsoft.com]

Professionally?

If you are a geologist urban planner, or historian, why can't you buy satellite imagery? You'd get well-specified data, and not just some pictures from an unknown source. The cost of the data should be inconsequential if you have any kind of a budget. H

Re:Personally, I don't think it's worth of it

Chicks sunbathing on roofs... just imagine...

Re:Personally, I don't think it's worth of it

I used maps.google.com during a recent home-buying experience, and it was very useful. It's easier to see the different residential and industrial areas for neighborhoods one is not familiar with. It's also pretty easy to spot apartment complexes, parks, golf courses, and how close a home is to a highway.

One can also compare lot sizes to get an idea of residential density, the number of homes with pools (I live in Phoenix, so pools are very common). Being able to switch easily between maps and images makes it easy to determine what that big parking lot is a part of, such as a mall or a mental health facility. Fortunately, the images for Phoenix appear to be less than a year or two old.

Some people may prefer to live next to a mental health facility, some may prefer the mall. All this info makes it easier to informed decisions about whether or not you want to live someplace before making the decision so schedule a home visit. Granted, it didn't always work out, I remember driving up to one place and telling the realtor to keep driving.

Weird..

If I zoom in to a certain magnification, the labels of Belgium and the Netherlands are switched.. if I zoom further in, it's correct.. I do wonder what plans google has with their expansion to europe..

So....

You could always do this in Civ as soon as you build Apollo world wonder....

Well..

Getting all the country names and rough maps is a good first step for WORLD DOMINATION!

Re:Well..

Getting all the country names and rough maps is a good first step for WORLD DOMINATION!

Hey I can see your house! It's all bright and shiny, like if it was covered in, I don't know, tin-foil or something. Most puzzling...

Anyway, I'm so glad you pointed that out. After all, before google, we NEVER had detailed maps of the Earth with country names. I even thought the planet was flat...

I wish

Japan isn't there yet, apparently... Here's tokyo [google.com]... zooming in one more level on sattellite-view or two more levels on map-view results in blank data. ("we're sorry, but we don't have imagery at this zoom level for this region"). I think this has always been true of japan on google maps. So... has anything really changed?

weeeelll, not everywhere...

"We could not understand the location amsterdam, netherlands"

Google Maps Now Cover Whole World

Just great! Now who's going to clean up this mess?

Not just US and UK, actually.

They have satellite imagery of a very large piece of Denmark too: Clicky, clicky [google.com], looks just like the real thing to me. :-)

For Europe, there is a better map site

I find http://www.map24.com/ [map24.com] to be superior to google maps. Even for the areas which google maps do have map data.

Re:For Europe, there is a better map site

I suspect that google may license their data/technology, if not buy them up altogether.

According to their website, map24 are already cooperating [map24.com] with google.

There is more detailed info for big cities...

A lot of big cities are already gathering images and info (including satellite imagery) and making them available. Portland, OR (big?) has Portland Maps [portlandmaps.com]. Not as slick as Google, but it sure would be neat if google listed links to other map/info sources for a region you're looking at on their map. I think listing relevant links is something they can handle. Paris Metro? Utah Topo? Disneyland bathrooms?

Israel will be angry...

When zooming in, the "Gaza Strip" and the "West Bank" are labelled first. The label "Israel" does not appear unless one zooms further in.

No, that's what Israel lobbied for

After heavy pressure from Israeli lobbyists, the US Congress enacted "shutter control" [cdi.org] specifically for Israel in 1997. Satellites using US technology aren't permitted to image Israel with a resolution of greater than 2 meters per pixel. That's why the images of Israel are so lousy.

Re:Nice going, jerkwad

Classic. Equating criticism of Israel. the state, with white supremacy and anti-semitisim. Fuck you. The OP wasn't even criticising, just stating facts, yet you have to pull out that tired, old, card. Maybe the Jewish conspiracy theories would die if we could have an honest disscusion about Israeli politics, without screaming "Nazi!" and hiding behind accusations of racism.

Re:Nice going, jerkwad

For an overview of the lobbying effort, see "MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF COMMERCIAL HIGH RESOLUTION IMAGING SATELLITES IN THEORY AND PRACTICE" [isanet.org], by Lt. Col. Peter L. Hays, USAF. He writes "Then, in June 1996 the Wall Street Journal reported that Israel was lobbying the White House to restrict all U.S. commercial remote sensing of their territory to resolutions of no better than three meters." The cite is "Israel Asks White House to Place Curbs on 3 U.S. Satellite-Surveillance Firms," Wall Street Journal, 17 Jun 1996.

This is a well-known issue in the imaging world.

Governmental Paranoia

I wonder what bit of US government paranoia caused this:
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=38.889145,-77.00879 6&spn=0.008122,0.008690&t=k&hl=en [google.com]
but not this:
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=38.897502,-77.03659 4&spn=0.008122,0.008690&t=k&hl=en [google.com]

political ramifications

It is interesting how they dealt with certain political issues. Kashmir is a bunch of dashed lines. Israel, too. Taiwan is labelled as such. The only thing that really throws me is Hong Kong. I thought that was officially part of China for the last 5 years.. I can't figure out what is going on with cyrus and the many lines through it. Anyone know what's up with that?

Now all we need is a cool body suspension ....

interface and we can feel like superman or neo flying around the world...

Shameless Plug (Google hacks?)

I've been working on a full-earth terrain renderer for the last year, similar in style to Keyhole or Worldwind. The addition of worldwide outlines on google is wonderful, because yesterday afternoon I finally started to add a google maps data source to my application. Until now, it limited to WMS servers such as http://onearth.jpl.nasa.gov./ [jpl.nasa.gov]

It's not nearly complete yet, because I still haven't properly handled the projection google uses (so the image is off near the poles), and it breaks at high detail levels, but these should be easily fixed within the next couple days. It should easily scale to the best data Google offers in the future.

There is one screenshot at the bottom of the page. The quality is fairly low, but that's because it's being rendered on a 5 year old laptop (I'm currently away from home).

http://cs.ucsb.edu/~richards/terrain/ [ucsb.edu]

I have no idea if I'll ship this with google maps support (since it is against their TOS), but it was fun to do.

actually, there were a lot of changes

If you interested, I've tried to make a full list of changes [andrewhitchcock.org] on my website. That website has side by side picture comparisons of the old and new. Some things they did as well: darkened minor streets, changed the projection, added one-way arrows, added some major building landmarks, and changed the size of the images being sent.