Google Data

In the days since Hurricane Gustav first appeared on the radar (swiftly followed by several other storms), a team of Googlers has been gathering information we hope will be useful to residents of the affected regions and the relief agencies working to …

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post explaining why our map of Georgia was blank, and letting users know that that we would soon be adding more data to the region. As promised, we’ve just released new data for Georgia and a number of other countries. Th…

Ever wondered where you can find 15,000 geoscientists in one place? Head over to the Google Geo Developers blog to read a guest post from John E. Bailey of the Alaska Volcano Observatory. The post discusses what to look forward to at this year’s upcomi…

As menacing Hurricane Gustav approaches the U.S. Gulf Coast, we’ve added a “Hurricane Gustav” folder under the “Weather” folder in Google Earth.Expand the folder to find the latest advisory from the National Hurricane Center, a forecast track (also fro…

Every now and then, we mention that you can do a search in Google Maps or Google Earth using latitude and longitude coordinates. But sometimes the coordinates are just what you’re looking for, so here’s a quick tip on how to find them. In Google Earth,…

This week, we’ve added another layer to the Gallery in Google Earth. Spain-based Wikiloc aggregates thousands of GPS tracks for various outdoor activities provided by its growing user community. The layer not only lets you display the GPS tracks in Goo…

Looks like it’s time to replace that rickety compass with a few hundred of your favorite cattle. Ok, not that you would – but according to a team of German zoologists and the research they did using Google Earth, apparently you could. Using Google Ear…

My reconnaissance of the Beijing Olympic Time Trial all started in December 2007. My coach Jim Miller and I traveled to Beijing, China to not only check out and ride the Time Trial course, and to experience the heavily publicized pollution problem firs…

Here’s a brief primer on some of the shortcuts you can use while browsing Google Maps. With your mouse, you can zoom in and out: double left-click to zoom in on the area you’re clicking, and double right-click (also known as Ctrl+Click for Mac users) t…

If you’ve been consoling yourself for not being in Beijing by jaunting around in the Google Maps 2008 Summer Games website, you’ll find further comfort with this great mashup from Earthgamz.  Check out the placemarks for athletes’ hometowns and t…

As students prepare to head back to school, it seems like a good time to share some fun ways to use Mapplets to get students and curious minds interested in discovering new places. To start, you can grab their attention with dynamic 360º panoramas of …

The poet John Donne once said, “No man is an island” – and for those of us who’ve had the opportunity to see our users map their world, we believe in the collective knowledge of communities sharing what they know best about the places where they’ve liv…

The recent conflict in Georgia has raised some questions about how Google Maps has handled mapping in that part of the world. The most obvious question is, why doesn’t Google Maps show any cities or roads for Georgia, or its neighbors Armenia and Azer…

Organizing the world’s spatial information means benefiting from the collective knowledge and experiences of people around the globe. Making this information universally accessible enables you to discover the world and its places, not only as they are,…

The 2008 Summer Games will soon commence in Beijing and will run from August 8th to August 24th. You may have noticed that we recently updated our satellite imagery in Beijing, have added detailed bilingual maps in China, and have created a collection …