Google Earth’s Hit 350 Mil

Google Earth, despite the rumors late last year that it would be discontinued pretty soon and merged with Google Maps, is still going strong at it. It has reached the 350 million downloads mark and is still looking strong and with a big future ahead. Needless to say, it is one of everybody’s favorite past time tools on the Internet.

It has served the communities in more ways than one, it helped during
the California fires by providing accurate imagery of the land, it was used in critical humanitarian efforts from the mountains of Pakistan to the deserts of Sudan, it played a key role in the discovery of plane wrecks and it was all the difference between despair and peace when all of that happened.

The team in charge of it thought the 350 mil mark is a good reason to present a short history of the product, so they wrote a post on the Google Long Lat blog. It’s not too long, it all started with the creation of Keyhole back in 2001, by Chikai Ohazama, nowadays’ Google Earth Product Manager, a company that focused on creating a dynamic, three-dimensional, interactive map of the U.S. with satellite and aerial imagery. Next, up came Google acquiring the company and here we are today, with a successful product on our hands and hundreds of millions of fans worldwide.

I guess it is a time for boasting, so here is what Chikai said about it: "Google Earth is available in 13 languages and has been downloaded over 350 million times by people from around the world. People tell us that the reason they use Google Earth is because it covers the areas they care about with high resolution detail – whether it's Timbuktu, Cabo San Lucas, or Whitiangia, New Zealand. No other online mapping provider in the world offers this global reach with sub-meter resolution imagery."

"In fact, we cover more than a third of the world's land surface and half of the world's population with this sort of 'high definition' imagery. [..] Google has been able to provide this unique global imagery by partnering with hundreds of aerial and satellite imagery providers around the world. From the small town of Castillia, Colombia to National Geographic photographers like Michael Fay, we are constantly working with new content owners to include their imagery in Google Earth. It turns out that our global imagery database is helpful for reasons even beyond our expectations," Chikai Ohazama said.

I guess the rumors last year were totally unfounded and, by the looks of it, Google Earth is here to stay.