Imagery Update - Week of January 24th

The Google Earth and Maps Imagery team has just released another aerial and satellite imagery update!January is the month of resolutions and NASA has one of the biggest: to take us into the next age of space flight. Below is a high-resolution aerial image captured in December of the LC39A launch pad at the Kennedy Space center, Cape Canaveral Florida. Here we can see the Space Shuttle’s primary and secondary fuel tanks being readied for one of the...

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Sign up for imagery update alert

Users in the Google Earth forum often ask about the age of satellite imagery and when the content will be updated. While we aren’t able to tell you in advance when our imagery will be updated, we can now notify you after new images are added to an area that you’re interested in.With our Follow Your World application, you can register points on the globe and we’ll send you an email update whenever the imagery is updated there.In just three easy steps,...

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The California Bay Area, now in 3D

[Cross-posted from the SketchUp blog]Nearly five years ago, Google embarked on an ambitious project to work with everyday users like you to create a 3D model of every building in the world for Google Earth. We’ve made strides toward our goal adding millions of buildings to the 3D layer of Google Earth in cities across the globe. And today, we’re pleased to announce another big step in that direction with the release of expanded 3D coverage of the...

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Tips for creating a free business listing in Google Places: Adding useful descriptions and relevant categories

(Cross-posted from the Google Small Business Blog)With this blog post, we’re concluding our three part series about the Google Places quality guidelines. Today, we’ll discuss how to choose the best fitting categories for your business listing as well as how to provide a useful description. In case you missed the first two blog posts, you can find here the first post about business titles and here the second part about business types. Adding useful...

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Retiring real estate on Google Maps

At Google one of our key philosophies is to take risks and to experiment. To that end, in July 2009 we announced the ability to find property for sale or rent directly on Google Maps. This is one of the “search options” next to the search box on Google Maps, and is currently available in the US, Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Japan. In part due to low usage, the proliferation of excellent property-search tools on real estate websites, and the infrastructure challenge posed by the impending retirement of the Google Base API (used by listing...

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Google Boost: Now Appearing On Mobile Phones

Back in October we announced Google Boost, a new advertising solution to help local businesses connect with potential customers in their area. Today we are excited to announce that Boost ads can appear on Google Search results pages on Android and iPhone devices.Consumers increasingly use mobile devices to search for products and services, and Boost will give advertisers the opportunity to reach these customers exactly when they are looking for...

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Share your photos about Places

When looking for information about a place on Google Maps, I immediately look for photos to help decide if it’s the right place for the occasion I have in mind. Whether looking for images of a restaurant’s cuisine, or getting a feel for the ambiance at a local bookstore, photos immediately help me learn more about a place. A few months ago, we launched an improved photo viewer for Place pages to help you quickly and easily explore images of locations...

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See more views with the new Google Maps widget

When we launched Google Maps, we had one layer -- the map. Since then, we’ve added more than ten different ways to explore the world around you, including photos, transit and traffic information, as well as satellite and terrain views. We’ve now updated the design so that you can more easily see and switch between the various viewing options that are available.Suppose you’re planning to meet your friend for a concert at the Greek Theater in Berkeley,...

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Let Your Hotpot Friends Help You Search on Google Maps

Most of us know lots of friends, each with very different areas of expertise when it comes to places to recommend. With the recent launch of Hotpot, we made it easy for you to see your friends’ ratings and reviews listed right inside search results.While this is really helpful, and we’ve had a lot of fun with it, we often found ourselves wanting to see all recommendations by a particular friend for a particular search. Problem solved, thanks to a...

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45º imagery update for various U.S. cities

We’re now well into the new year, and to kick off 2011, the Geo Imagery team has just rolled out some refreshed 45° imagery for a number of places in the United States. So whether you already miss the places you may have visited over the holiday season, or you’re looking for new vacation spots to travel to this year, you can now escape the winter weather and check them out virtually from the comfort of your warm and dry home.Did you ever want to...

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Rebuilding L’Aquila in 3D with Google SketchUp

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)On April 6, 2009, a powerful earthquake struck l’Aquila, Italy. Three hundred and eight people died, and most of the buildings in the city center and surrounding areas were damaged or destroyed. About six months ago, we received an email from a British architect named Barnaby Gunning proposing an ambitious project: to use Google SketchUp to build a digital 3D model of the city, as it is now, in order to...

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Haiti, one year after the earthquake

[Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog]It’s been one year since the 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti, and governments and NGOs are continuing to respond, many using high-resolution images of the area. To support these efforts, we’ve updated our aerial imagery in Google Earth of the Port-au-Prince area to include images from before and after the earthquake, as well as made updates throughout 2010. These pictures provide an evolving...

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Now available: Google Places with Hotpot for iPhone

We recently released Google Places with Hotpot in Google Maps for Android, and starting now, you can have that same great experience as an iPhone app. We realize the importance of finding places you’ll love while you’re out and about, no matter what mobile device you use. And Places with Hotpot not only helps you find places near where you are, it gives you the best places to go for you by personalizing your search results.In case you aren’t familiar...

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Discover New Places From Your Hotpot Friends on Google Maps

(Cross-posted from the Hotpot Blog.)When you need a great restaurant, hotel or pub, who do you turn to first for a recommendation? Your friends. We wanted to recreate that valuable exchange with Hotpot, our local recommendation engine from Google Places, which allows you to add friends whose opinions you trust and see their place recommendations right in your search results.Because we find adding friends on Hotpot so valuable to the experience, today...

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Google Science Fair seeks budding Einsteins and Curies

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog) Are you a student who loves science? Do you have a good idea for an experiment that you’d like to share with the world? In 1996, two young computer science students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, had a hypothesis that there was a better way to find information on the web. They did their research, tested their theories and built a search engine which (eventually) changed the way people found information online. Larry and Sergey were fortunate to be able to get their idea in front of lots of people. But...

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Let’s build a better map of Southern Sudan

Sudan is preparing to vote on January 9 to decide if the South will become independent from the North. The referendum is part of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement signed in 2005 ending the Civil War, which lasted 22 years and led to the deaths of an estimated 2 million people. Analysts fear the possibility of renewed violence.Sudan is a huge country (2.5 million km2), with an estimated population of 44 million people, but it’s poorly mapped. Without basic geospatial information, it’s difficult for humanitarian agencies and first responders to...

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Mission Blue: Return to the Gulf of Mexico

With support from Google, the Waitt Foundation, Hope Spots LLC and the National Geographic Society, Sylvia Earle and Mission Blue are embarking on an expedition to the Gulf of Mexico that will take a deep look at how the region is recovering from the five million gallons of oil spilled from the BP Deep Horizon Oil Spill last year. Follow along with the expedition by checking back daily and clicking on the blue ship icon in Google Earth located off...

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