Google Earth is a free
downloadable application for personal use. Users can also
choose to buy one of two paid services: a higher-end
consumer version, Google Earth Plus at $20/ year, and Google
Earth Pro, for professional and commercial use, now
$400/year. The paid versions offer a variety of tools for
measuring, drawing, saving, printing and GPS device support.
The images seen in Google Earth have been taken from cameras
mounted on planes and satellites. The image database ranges
from several months old to a few years in age, and it is
refreshed periodically. There are no real time images in the
service. Different areas are covered at different
resolutions. At the lowest resolution, large geographic
features such as mountains and lakes are visible, and at the
highest resolution, detailed features of the earth such as
buildings and cars are visible.
When you first start the Google Earth application, your view
is of the entire earth. You can either use the control
console or Google Earth's search functions to zoom in on a
specific location. Google Earth has three primary search
features: Fly To, Local Search and Directions, each accessed
by buttons at the top-left of the application.
- The "Fly To" feature accepts
an address, place name, cross street or simple
Latitude/Longitude coordinates and zooms you quickly in to
the specified location, typically stopping at an altitude of
about 3,000 feet above ground. From this point, use the
controls to zoom, tilt, pan or rotate the view. Additional
layers allow you to overlay data points of geographic
interest over images. These include shopping areas, gas
stations, stadiums, schools and churches, crime statistics,
and more!
- The "Local Search" feature
works just like Google Local, accepting a business type and
a location in search fields.
- The
"Directions Search" feature offers driving directions to and
from places in the U.S. Canada, and western Europe.
Google Earth allows you to
save searches and placemarks as "my places" that work like
bookmarks. You can also create folders within the My Places
folder, allowing you to pull together all the information
you need for a visit to a specific city, for example, and be
able to recall that information with a simple click of the
mouse. You can easily email or share saved searches in an
XML format called KML.
For the Real Estate
industry Google Earth can be used to -
- Identify
homes from the MLS and give buyers
fly-over tours of properties'
and neighborhoods,
searching features like schools and shopping.
- Evaluate sites using the
built in Google search for competitor locations and existing
sites.
- Take clients and
colleagues on aerial tours of any property.
- Email an image or view,
cut and paste images into PowerPoint.
Google Earth Plus (for $20
per year) has additional features including -
- Higher resolution imagery,
for better prints or use in PowerPoint presentations
- GPS support, which can use
data from GPS devices such as those made by Garman or
Magellan
- More sophisticated
annotation capabilities, with the ability to draw objects on
the surface of the earth, highlight an area and so on.
There are very specific
requirements for running Google Earth, including the age of
your desktop PC or laptop and the kind of video card you’re
using. Apple Macintosh computers
are not supported at this time. Windows-based desktop PCs
older than 4 years old and Windows-based notebook PCs older
than 2 years old may not be able to run it. While Google
Earth is a broadband application, it's something you'll want
to try even if you have a dialup connection.
To learn more and to download the Google Earth application,
go to
http://earth.google.com. |