With high usage of the internet in the day to day contemporary life, personal computers have transformed into an interface to a whole new world of knowledge and scope. An exhaustive library, a global classroom and a superlative ground to meet people across geographical margins! Realizing the potential hidden in Internet technology and its crucial role in the future educational, political and social scenario, endeavors are underway to improve the medium and enhance it with more innovative and functional ideas. One such contribution of immense potential is Google Earth. Introduced with a view to have a globe in the World Wide Web classroom, the feature is spectacular and far fetching from more than an educational point of view.

The governments across the international map simply cannot ignore the pivotal usage of the technology that avails a common man the ability to dive into the imageries, maps and the power of Google Search to put the world’s geographic information at his/her fingertips. The plausible concern across governments is in the wake of the fact that Google Earth allows free and unquestioned access to anyone, to extremely zoomed in views (from space down to street level and combined imagery) of exhaustive addresses on the face of this earth, without determining any right or reason or undertaking any kind of check before allowing access.

The technology is an open invitation to misuse as well. Many may say it is open to be used for evil intentions for spying, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It would without a doubt be interesting to use Google Earth and spy on your neighbor but the technology is simply not that advanced as yet.

For a clearer and conclusive perspective, it is essential to actually explore Google Earth and find out its capabilities. Developed with good intentions so as to benefit governments, professionals, tourists and children alike, the repercussion of Google Earth may not be as dull as has been depicted. The fact is that Google Earth is still an attempt to provide an Internet-based globe. The fact remains that the capabilities of Google Earth are still limited with respect to clarity and precision of location, especially outside US. Though Google Earth is continually adding high-resolution coverage of various locations on the web, most of the imageries are blurry. All the images being shown at Google Earth are photographs taken by satellites and aircraft sometime in the last three years. Google’s street-level address search is limited to US, UK, Canada, France, Italy, Spain and Germany. While Google Earth is free for personal use, enhanced versions like Google Earth Plus, Google Earth Pro etc. are available for a fee. Google Earth is not able to match up rooftop accurate position for many addresses for lack of a suitable database to support it. To conclude, the spies will have to wait some more time until some technological breakthroughs are achieved and brought about to render Google Earth more effective, robust and user-friendly, across the globe.

Google Earth Link

Link: http://earth.google.com/