Thanks to the incredible leaps in technology since then, these days you can watch the feeds from a Webcam attached to the front of a cruise ship sailing somewhere in the middle of the ocean. Take a Virtual Cruiseīack in the dark ages of the Internet, people were thrilled to log in to a Webcam on the other side of the world and see the trees outside someone's window, or the status of a coffee machine. It can't make the plane fly any faster, though.
Once you complete a free registration process, you can even search for a particular flight number and see exactly how far away the plane is from the airport. The data includes all commercial flights as well as many private ones, and it updates every minute (lagging just 5 minutes behind real time), displaying the flight path as a 3D line around the surface of the virtual globe. On this page you'll see links to home in on a region of interest to you (for example, New York's JFK International Airport). But helps you obtain potentially more-useful information: It employs Google Earth to provide live 3D tracking of every single plane flying over the United States. Google Earth fans can be fairly obsessive, as demonstrated by one user collection that pinpoints the position of every known plane that has been spotted flying in Google Earth's satellite imagery. Essentially, Earthify lets you use Google Earth as a geographical newsreader for Craigslist, turning a simple idea into an incredibly powerful tool. Cleverly, Earthify provides a browser-bookmark link that you can use to open, in Google Earth, the locations posted on any Craiglist page as a result, if you're searching for an apartment, for instance, you can instantly see if the listings are close to subways, restaurants, or whatever other amenities you might be interested in. Of course, when you think about it, that kind of makes sense, given that Craigslist is all about local information. Mapping Craigslist Earthify has a much grander name than you might expect, given that all it actually does is to take a page of Craigslist posts (from whichever locality you specify) and plot them in Google Earth. (Toggle Earth's default Primary Database layers to get a better view.) The highlight is the world globe from 1790 (shown), which demonstrates how dramatically the borders have shifted for many countries, especially in prewar Europe and the Middle East. David Rumsey, a renowned cartographer, has amassed a collection of over 150,000 historical maps, 120 of which he has used to create a fascinating layer of maps that shows how the world looked between 16. Take a Trip Back in TimeĬontent in Google Earth doesn't always have to focus on in-the-present information-it often allows users to do a little time traveling too.
When you open these files, however, the content may not immediately display in that case, look in the Temporary Places folder in the Places pane. Note that some of the links go straight to.kml or.kmz files, which Google Earth can read. What follows is a list of 10 of our favorites. As authors of the Web site Google Sightseeing, we see a lot of these add-ons and collections. To find such wonderful sights, you can call on a large library of Earth add-ons. As you saw in "The Strangest Sights in Google Earth," some things in this world are simply out of this world. Earth is a tool for exploring, not necessarily for getting directions to a new pizza place.A World of Information Google Earth puts an entire planet's worth of useful, relevant, and just plain weird content at your fingertips.
The combination really means that you have a fantastic tool for looking around pretty much anywhere in the world and getting really good, accurate images of that place at any zoom level. Of course Earth also includes Street View just like Maps, but in this case it's a far less jarring experience when you're moving between a satellite view and Street View - though you may notice discrepancies in imagery based on when the pictures were captured.
Earth includes some points of interest and can also overlay Wikipedia information for locations, but tapping on specific items doesn't give you the rich data experience offered by Maps.
You can get guided fly-by tours of certain buildings and full cities, or you can simply scroll, zoom and pan any way you want. The satellite view within Earth is dramatically higher resolution and more complex than what you'll get in Maps, and includes full 3D rendering of that satellite data so you can get a feel for the size of buildings and topography of the areas you're exploring. Even though Google Maps offers a basic satellite view, if you want to really look around and see what things are like, you need to open Earth instead. For the explorer in all of us, Google Earth is worth having around.