Google Earth Gets Google News Layer
Darko on May 21st, 2008
Google Earth has always been educational, letting people learn about the landscapes of places and countries they’ve never seen in person. Thanks to the addition of a Google News layer, Google Earth will now also let its users keep up with current events.
Last month, a collaboration with The New York Times was unveiled, but this new development should go well beyond it. Never mind quarter-hour updates from a single source; on the LatLong Blog, Brandon Badger writes, “By spatially locating the Google News’ constantly updating index of stories from more than 4,500 news sources, Google Earth now shows an ever-changing world of human activity as chronicled by reporters worldwide.
Clicking on “Layers” and then “Gallery” within Google Earth will lead you to the Google News addition. From there, use of the “Zoom” button should bring up stories concerning as broad or narrow an area as you please.
Frank Taylor notes, “What’s really interesting here is that Google is using new advanced search techniques to determine whether a story applies to that specific location. For example, I don’t see any Paris, France stories appearing over Paris, Texas (or vice versa).”
It seems Google is conquering all sorts of issues with this release. The only possible problem is that learning about the average news story’s subject is likely to take some of the fun out of using Google Earth.
Ubuntu, Linspire, and Freespire users can now install “Google Earth” with a single click, says Linspire. The desktop Linux distributor has added support for the free mapping application to its CNR (”click-n-run”) installer, a user-friendly tool currently beta-testing for a wide variety of desktop Linux distributions.
