Google Maps Past and Present

A weblog for members of the Canadian Cartographic Association and other individuals interested in all things cartographic

Google Maps Past and Present

Published Sunday, September 10, 2006 by CCAer | E-mail this post

By now, the latest updates to Google Maps is old news, already covered by the likes of Google Maps Mania and Google Earth Blog. There have been siginificant updates to the collection of high resolution images covering parts of the United States, Japan, Norway and New Zealand.

Perhaps equally interesting is being able to compare between various Google Maps releases. Mike Williams has set up a webpage that enables users to compare two versions of Google Maps - either in satellite or in map mode. He has provided me with a listing of when the updates occurred, at least for the past 6 releases (all gleaned from the Google Earth blog):

Satellite 5 : Mar 23 2006
Satellite 6 : Apr 19 2006
Satellite 7 : Jun 08 2006 Google Earth, Jun 21 2006 Google Maps
Satellite 8 : Jul 18 2006
Satellite 9 : Jul 27 2006
Satellite 10 : Sep 08 2006

Google Earth and Google Maps were updated coincidentally in most cases in the past year. This is where some metadata would come in handy. The above listing tells users when imagery became available in Google Maps but fails to tell them when the imagery was taken. That would make Mike Williams’ side by side comparison page even more useful.

By way of Map GIS News Blog for UK, Europe and World Maps

3 Responses to “Google Maps Past and Present”

Anonymous on 8:17 AM

I agree, metadata would be very useful, this would be helpful on the main google site, rather than finding out through investigation of POI and other temporal giveways.
one example is concorde on the runway at heathrow airport. Concorde last commerical flight was 23rd October 2003
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3211053.stm
and it still shows you them in google maps and google earth...
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=heathrow+airport&ie=UTF8&z=19&ll=51.460824,-0.445078&spn=0.000849,0.003047&t=k&om=1

mapperz
http://mapperz.blogspot.com
Anonymous on 5:35 AM

That's not an example. One of the retired Concordes is stored at Heathrow, on a parking spot near the end of Runway 27R, awaiting its transfer to a static display in the new terminal building.
Anonymous on 4:56 AM

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