- How much data does Google store for Google Earth? According to GoogleOperatingSystem blog, he found a paper from Google about their database technology and buried in there were some statistics. The database size for Google Earth (at the time the paper was written): “Google Earth uses 70.5 TB: 70 TB for the raw imagery and 500 GB for the index data.” 1 TB = 1024 Gigabytes. That’s a BIG number. This paper was probably written before the June update where they added 4 times as much satellite coverage. And certainly before last week’s update. I imagine it’s over 150TB by now…
- This isn’t directly GE related, but Microsoft has released a big update to Live Local. They now have Birds Eye views for a bunch of new cities and expanded coverage to more than just downtowns in places like Washington, DC. This is a growing threat to GE’s dominance in quality satellite/aerial photos.
- It looks like Google Earth will soon be getting support to some new languages. According to Inside Adsense blog they are releasing Google Pack in several new languages (Google Earth is part of the Google Pack). New languages: German, Portuguese, and Japanese. Google Earth is already in German. Japanese is a particularly challenging one. Maybe Chinese won’t be far behind.
About Frank Taylor
Frank Taylor started the Google Earth Blog in July, 2005 shortly after Google Earth was first released. He has worked with 3D computer graphics and VR for many years and was very impressed with this exciting product. Frank completed a 5.5 year circumnavigation of the earth by sailboat in June 2015 which you can read about at Tahina Expedition, and is a licensed pilot, backpacker, diver, and photographer.
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If you guess is right, the GE imageries are now larger than Google’s search indexes.
How big is 150 TB?
1.64926744 * 10^14 bytes or a little more than 160 billion KB.