My Google Map Blog

An elephant can be seen here in Chobe National Park, Botswana. You can also see some other animals in the background.

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Looks fantastic!

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This is the remote arctic community Cambridge Bay in Nunavut, on Victoria island in Canada. Not sure what’s happening in this image…

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Kids chasing the google car.

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And they have an ice hockey and curling arena. According to google it is uninsulated and freezes over once they flood it in the winter!

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This is the Rhino sanctuary Khama in Botswana.

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The tour starts here, can you find any rhinos?

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Of all of the great features in Google Earth, the ability to simply zoom in and see increasingly sharp imagery virtually all the way down is certainly the most amazing. With the wide availability of tools like Google Earth, Google Maps, Bing Maps, MapQuest and others we've begun to lose sight of the awesomeness of this simple feature, but it's really quite mind-blowing. Simply by clicking a mouse you have access to terabytes worth of aerial imagery, something inconceivable less than a decade ago.

Google provides a variety of ways to zoom in and out, most of which were detailed in our Navigation post a few months ago.Try using the + and - keys to zoom in and out slowly, or the PAGE UP and PAGE DOWN keys to move more quickly. You can also use the controls in the upper-right corner of the screen, the scroll wheel on your mouse, or (my favorite) a tool like the SpaceNavigator.

Another nice feature to use while moving around is the overview map. You can turn this on and off by selecting it under the main "View" menu.

The entire zooming experience was made much nicer earlier this year when Google released their "Pretty Earth" update. This cleaned up the patchwork appearance that we had all grown accustomed to in Google Earth and helps everything to look much better from any elevation.

What is your favorite way to control Google Earth? Mouse, keyboard or something else?

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Google greeted the Street View car at the world’s 3rd tallest building, Taipei 101 in Taiwan.

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The tour features in Google Earth can be an excellent way to show historical events. A great example of that is with the various tours that Colin Hazelhurst created to show Captain James Cook's exploration of Australia, or Peter Olsen's tour that showed the fateful voyage of the Costa Concordia.

Dimi Christopoulos recently sent us a tour that he created that showcases a historical battle that took place near his village during the Greek Independence fight in 1825 against the Turks.

The site is completely in Greek, but the tour is amazing. It features various overlays, music, voiceovers and images. Even in a foreign language (to me), I was able to follow most of the action. It's very well done and I encourage you to view the full tour on his site.

Great work Dimi!