Another environmental consultant here. I use it every day because the reports I write require an aerial photograph and historical research. The photos are more up-to-date than those on Terra Server, and are in color instead of black-and-white. This means they are not only easier to read, but I can compare the photos and see how the area has changed in the last 10-20 years. And, of course, it is infinitely more efficient than what we did in the bad old days, which was order aerial photos from USGS.
On a more mundane note, I love that I can put a site marker on the photo and print it out that way. Before Google Earth, I used to have to cut out little “Site Location” arrows by hand and tape them on. Very annoying.
I’ve noticed it being used on TV News shows. They used to need a graphics department for that, now they can bounce around on Google Earth to show proximities for multiple locations, or pinpoint obscure places.
I´ve used it for doing first pass location engineering for oil well pads, working out access and egress routes for remote oil well drilling locations and on one occaison to express my confidence in the geology departments mastery of the subsurface environment but suggested they should really consider not specifying a surface location on the side of an old ravine.
Yes maps and all sorts exist and were available, but GoogleEarth is really very convenient.
I’m an avid geocacher. When we take trips, I’ll generate a .kml file for the trip and plug it into geocaching.com to generate a query for all caches 5 miles on either side of the highway. Makes for a much more interesting drive.
I used it while planning for last year’s trip to Europe. In almost every city I visited I had a mental image of the city’s layout. I would know where the train stations in each city where situated, where the principal attractions where, etc. It was a great help.
Currently I’m using it to help plan next year’s bike ride across Canada. I’m mostly using it to visualize the vertical climbs in British Columbia, so I’ll know exactly what is between each destination. While a normal map can tell me distances, Google Earth can show me that what should be an easy 40km on a normal map is actually a steep 40km incline which will exhaust us.
Well, Google Earth’s “Street View” (Now in more than 40 US cities) allows anyone to get a closeup view of the front of your house, including a 360’ view of the street.
I suppose that would be useful to say, burglars or kidnappers.
I used it when I was working on a political campaign to plot the location of homes that had signed up to display a sign in their window. We also used it to print out a detailed map of the district so that we could plot routes through it.
Use it for initial site plans on various architectural projects. It makes a nice background to overlay a SketchUp model or rendered site plan onto for context of a project relative to the surrounding streets.
Not an essential thing, but I drive past a dairy frequently, and it appears that the dairy is right on a county line. I was able to use Google Earth to figure out which county the dairy was in.
Is there any advantage to installing Google Earth vs. just using online Google Maps with satellite view? Do you get higher resolutions, more info, more features, or what?
There are more features with Google Earth, and often the resolution is better (or, at least, you can keep zooming in after Google Maps has stopped, though it might be just a zoom of a more pixelated image).
I know that Autodesks Civil 3D package comes with an “export to Google Earth” feature that allows civil engineering work to be overlaid onto the Google images for a very realistic “3D” view of what a project will actually look like. You can also take the GE image and bring it into AutoCAD, and get all the elevation, latitude, longitude etc data directly from Google. It’s pretty cool.
You can do this on the free version. The weekend before last I took a contour map, overlaid it on GE and printed out the relevant section. Instant combined contour/aerial photo map for a hike we were doing.
Well, I don’t know if this qualifies as useful, but I use it for discovering interesting things in my local area - then I go and visit them. It’s good for finding interesting hidden lakes, footpaths, coves, shipwrecks, etc.
One rather significant GE feature not available on Google Maps is 3D terrain. For available areas (US, mostly), you can click a checkbox, and then tilt down, and see the contours of the land. Google Maps doesn’t do this.
One of my major hobbies is map-making for railroads (see www.richegreen.com for some of my completed projects), and I use google earth constantly when making these. maps.live.com tends to have BETTER quality imagery for the northeast (and the great birds-eye view too), but Google Earth is perfect for the measuring tool, to determine how long a track siding or platform is, or its exact placement.
I used this to confirm the name of the florist I used for my wedding. Couldn’t remember the exact address, but I knew the intersection, so I checked the street view and read the sign. Sure beats accidentally directing someone to the florist down the street.