Last week while attending the Google Geo Developer Day the Google Earth team was beaming about a satellite imagery update that was taking effect for the Google Earth application. Today, as expected, that same update has come to the Google Maps satellite imagery! Thanks to the team over at Google Sightseeing for tipping Google Maps Mania off on the news! Here is an excerpt from the Official Google Blog post about the Google Earth image update, which now applies to Google Maps:(John Hanke, Director, Google Earth and Google Maps) - Replace 'Earth' with 'Maps' when reading! :):
"...we put together a little update to our database we increased our global coverage by about 4X. Google Earth now covers more than 20 percent of the landmass of the entire globe with high-resolution satellite imagery (soon Google Maps will too). When we say "high resolution," we mean the good stuff: you can see cars, houses, buildings in more than 200 countries and territories. Not every house is covered, only about two billion of them. That's our best estimate, anyway thats about 1/3 of the population of the Earth can now see their homes in high-resolution. Google Earth has had medium resolution global satellite coverage since the beginning. But that was at 15 meters per pixel. This new global coverage was produced in conjunction with our exclusive satellite partner, Digital Globe, and is at approximately 70 cm per pixel. We have even better data for many countries, up to 10 cm per pixel."
Enjoy surfing the planet taking a look at these new locations! Check out some of the Google Maps Collections (including Google Sightseeing) that have have "collections" of satellite imagery links, organized for your easy viewing. This should also have new mashup implications for these locations in the world that previously did not have high resolution imagery, such as Manila Phillippines.
Was your house not previously viewable in Google Maps? Maybe it is now.. take a look! :)
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