gisblog.net

Some days ago, the Google Earth Team announced an improvement of Google Local (and Earth) by adding two more zoom levels. Old news, actually. I read it, tried it, and… found out that I don’t really care. My area is still not covered by high resolution imagery, and it doesn’t look like this will change in the near future. But during the last few days I kept wondering about the reasons why Google added new data. What is the targeted group of Google Local? I understand if they provide solutions for address and route finding tasks. And it is neat to see your route on top of satellite images instead of using boring abstract maps. But new zoom levels won’t improve anything here, your route won’t change by just adding more details to the background. And which additional information do we have? With the new data users are able to distinguish between different people. You might be able to detect the color of cars, and maybe other interesting stuff. So, does Google in reality address the little voyeur in everyone of us? Is it just to satisfy our curiosity?

Microsoft’s competitor application, Virtual Earth, always had, until now, a tiny bit better zoom level. So, the next we can expect is to see, as an answer, a new bar in the zoom scale of their application? Did anyone notice, that these satellite pictures become more blurry the more you zoom in? You won’t really find more information by increasing the zoom level… Their competition should better focus on the global coverage, not on introducing crazy zoom levels for some urban areas in Europe and/or U.S.

Patrick Maué @ Friday, 27. January 2006 ,14:24 :: filed under unter News, Webmapping :: RSS comments .