Towards the end of November, Google updated the search engine that supplies results to Google Earth. We had a look at it and were initially impressed.
However, it wasn’t long before GEB readers pointed out that there was a major bug causing certain requests for directions to fail. We had a look at this issue and suggested a work around. However, there are quite a lot of people who regularly use the ‘Get Directions’ feature using placemarks in Google Earth and the workaround was rather laborious for them, so we started recommending downgrading Google Earth to version 6.1, as suggested by GEB reader Warren Jones.
The good news is that Google appears to have have fixed the ‘Get Directions’ bug. Thank you to Warren Jones for alerting us.
London to Paris by train.
There is still one usability issue that we hope Google will look in to. For quite a number of searches, only a single result is returned. This is dependent on which part of the earth you are viewing, but it doesn’t seem to have a particularly good algorithm, and since it frequently doesn’t offer any other choices, it can be a little frustrating. It would be better to guess the correct choice, but still offer alternatives. An example of this is searching for ‘London’ which flies straight to London, UK even if you are looking directly at London, Ontario, Canada.
About Timothy Whitehead
Timothy has been using Google Earth since 2004 when it was still called Keyhole before it was renamed Google Earth in 2005 and has been a huge fan ever since. He is a programmer working for Red Wing Aerobatx and lives in Cape Town, South Africa.
And how can I save the tracks now?
Great work Google …
The path can be saved to My Places by clicking on the folder icon in the lower right corner under the directions.