Hi Folks,
This is for people who have been using Google Maps (or equivalently Google Earth, since they seem to use exactly the same sattelite imagery):
http://maps.google.com http://earth.google.com
It's some weeks since I last had a look around using Google Maps, and I did it again last night (with both Earth and Maps). It seems to me that the terrain images used have degraded.
1: They seem to be fuzzier, and with less vivid colour, at the larger zoom levels
2: I'm sure they are older
than they used to be. In particular, the aerial view of my own house used to show a car I owned a few years back parked at the front, from which (and from other vehicles in the neighbourhood) I inferred that the image dated from around 2002 (certainly not before 2001). And the back garden was much as it was when I moved in in 2001: green throughout, with grass and bushes.
Last night, however, there were no bushes in the back garden and at the rear was a large brown, presumably cultivated, area. Now the people before the people before me had a vegetable garden there, which tallies with the image, but the people before me did not (having turned the whole garden over to lawn and shrubs), so that puts the date of the photo over 10 years old.
Although the displayed images state "Copyright 2007", this clearly has nothing to do with the date of the photography.
I'd be a bit miffed if Google had decided to degrade the quality and especially the timeliness of their images! I fairly regularly use it as a resouce for getting an overview of an area, and until now I've relied on the imagery being not more than a few years old. If, as now seems to be the case, it may be over (even well over) 10 years, then the relevance to recent conditions is seriously diminished!
Comments from Google Earthers/Mapsters welcome!
Best wishes to all, Ted.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) ted.harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 23-Sep-07 Time: 11:48:20 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------