Google Earth Blog

The amazing things about Google Earth


Correcting map errors in Google Earth

We’ve been getting quite an influx of questions about how to correct map errors in Google Earth lately (address in the wrong location, point of interest is missing, etc), so I thought it’d be worth revisiting that.

To start, you don’t actually fix the errors in Google Earth; you fix them in Google Maps, and those corrections are synced into Google Earth over the course of a few weeks.

To suggest a correction, simply right-click on an area inside of Google Maps and choose “Report a problem”.

report-a-problem

The following screen will pop-up and will walk you through the process:

report-problem.jpg

I’ve suggested quite a few edits to my local area, and all have been accepted into Google Earth/Maps and helped make my town more accurate. I’ve updated street names, new roads, closed restaurants, etc.  I’m a heavy user of the GPS navigation features on Google Maps for my Android phone, so having an accurate map is very important.

The “report a problem” feature is a great tool to help make Google products more accurate for everyone. To learn more about how this process works, you can visit this page in the Google Maps support system.

Likely Syrian missile targets in Google Earth

With the increasing threat of military action by the United States against Syria, ForeignPolicy.com has mapped out the 36 locations in Syria that are most likely to get hit by a US missile.

syria-maps

The locations are primarily chemical weapon sites and air bases, along with some military installations.  Along with their Google Maps view of it, you can also view the data in Google Earth to get a different perspective on it by using this KML file.

syria

Things are certainly getting tense in this situation, and I expect we’ll see many more maps produced to help explain what’s going on.  If you come across any that are particularly compelling, please leave a comment below and let us know about them.

(via Google Maps Mania)

The best of Google Earth for August, 2013

August brought a variety of interesting and informative stories to us.  Here are a few of our favorites from the month:

I finally got my hands on a Leap Motion controller to try it out with Google Earth.  It’s really cool, but ultimately not as useful as my trusty SpaceNavigator.

Millions of kids went back to school, so we shared some great ways to use Google Earth in the classroom.

Google pushed out quite a bit more 3D imagery, continuing a rapid expansion in that area.  They also released fresh Street View imagery in a variety of areas around the world.

We showed you a neat way to view the ice on Mount Everest.

The “Kazakhstan Pentagram” that was making the news had a rather boring outcome.

We looked at some ways to use Google Earth to understand geomorphology and view ecological disintegration.

We took a look at some ways to track the massive Rim Fire in the western United States.

We walked through a very cool Street View-powered corn maze.

What was your favorite story of the month?

DigitalGlobe now has 4 billion km2 of imagery in their archive

Without the company DigitalGlobe, Google Earth would not be nearly as compelling as it is.  As we discussed last year, DigitalGlobe is responsible for much of the imagery that you find in Google Earth.  Earlier this year they looked at the past 50 years of the satellite industry, and just recently they reached a major milestone: 4 billion square kilometers of imagery in their archives.

Here is what they had to say about this amazing accomplishment:

DigitalGlobe recently reached a major milestone – the company’s archive surpassed 4 billion square kilometers of high-resolution satellite imagery. As the leader in commercial satellite imagery content, DigitalGlobe now has an archive containing enough imagery to cover the globe’s landmass 27 times over. With its current five satellite constellation, DigitalGlobe is adding a billion square kilometers every year to the imagery archive, an area expected to increase even further with the launch of its newest satellite, WorldView-3, next year.

You can view the full blog post here. Below, we’ve also included the first image ever taken by DigitalGlobe’s satellite, Ikonos, which is the first satellite to collect commercially-available, high-resolution imagery launched in 1999. We’ve also shared a more recent image to showcase how DigitalGlobe’s imagery has progressed.

Sunken ships in Google Earth

A recent article by Mark Fillman of Ocean Cruises featured shipwrecks that then linked to various sites, but it only showed a handful of shipwrecks that can be found in Google Earth. There are far more than that can be seen in the MyReadingMapped’s five Google Maps of Sunken Ships, representing several hundreds of sunken ship sites, but only a fraction of those ships can be seen in Google Earth because some are above water, while others are below water.

sunken-ships

To help fill that gap, MyReadingMapped assembled 43 shipwreck images in a 4-part article of The Shipwrecks of Google Map, complete with links to each location. Those shipwrecks that can be seen underwater are in another article.

Many other visible ships are abandoned ships in ship grave yards, or musem(ed) ships. In any case there are hundreds of shipwrecks, abandoned ships, and museum(ed) ships that can be seen in Google Map and all these  links make it easy for ship enthusiasts to find them.

[UPDATE by Frank]: as commenter SpiderX22 mentions below, there’s an excellent collection of visible shipwrecks curated by the Google Earth Community since at least 2006 which I wrote about back then. It currently has nearly 2000 placemarks of visible shipwrecks around the world organized by several categories.

If you’re looking for more, you can also find a large collection of shipwrecks over at Google Earth Hacks.