My Google Map Blog

December saw imagery updates on December 9th and December 17th, and we are told by GEB reader ‘MapMaker’ that there have been some updates since then.

One of our biggest stories of December was the problems with Google Earth search that were caused by an update to the way search results were displayed, a change Google made in late November. Google fixed most of the problems within a couple of weeks. It was evident from the comments that many people use the Google Earth “Get Directions” feature to measure driving distances between locations, which has become very useful for many businesses.

December also saw Google announce the long expected official deprecation of the Google Earth plugin. It will continue to work (in supported browsers) until December 12th, 2015.

December also saw the continued addition of 3D areas and we had a look at Black Rock City, New York and San Francisco. The two later locations received an update to their 3D that is of better quality than what they had previously. It was noted by readers that entering Street View in some parts of New York and San Francisco causes Google Earth to crash. Since then many GEB readers have reported similar crashes with Street View in a number of other cities around the world.

When looking around San Francisco, we discovered that Google Earth sometimes shows different 3D images depending on the zoom level.

For Christmas, we had a look at the Santa trackers and were a bit disappointed that neither tracker allowed us to track Santa in Google Earth.

We also showed you a model of Santa’s village in Google Earth, created with inspiration from the Santa trackers

The post The best of Google Earth for December 2014 appeared first on Google Earth Blog.