A few months ago I was looking at pictures of my shop, we noticed that as we zoomed in the pictures changed dates. The trucks in the yard were bought, sold or moved.
It wasn’t google maps, I forget which one it was. Google still doesn’t show my house in the photos, I’m a quarter mile into the fuzzy squiggly area.
Just to clarify, the Steve Fossett search thing was a special update with new imagery captured specifically for that search over a limited area.
Frankly I find it pretty amazing that most of the globe is covered by decent reolution imagery only three or four years out of date, but then my neighbourhood hasn’t changed much in the past 15 years or so. Seems like most of America is being subdivided and concreted over faster than the aerial photos can keep up with. 
I suppose it’s no surprise that different areas of the map are different ages; for what it’s worth, the section near my house was taken between October 2003 and February 2004, on a Sunday morning before 7:00 am local time. 
This was determined using the Construction Progress Dating Method on a local bridge, in conjunction with the examination of local parking lots (a farmer’s market which runs on Sunday had started setting up, but a church with a 7:00 am service had an empty parking lot).
The picture of my house is from before April 2005, because neither of my cars are in the driveway, and one has been there constantly since then. My house is in Dallas, TX, you’d think it was updated more frequently. There’s also an empty lot next to where I work where there is a CVS now.
Here, in my little rural college town, the imagery has no sign of a big construction project that was started six years ago. Of course, I may be missing it, since the resolution looks to be a whopping 30 meters around here. That alone implies that the imagery is pretty old…
Of course, the farmland about a mile out of town has sufficiently high resolution that I can see each crop row…
I’m trying to date Belfast from the photo of my daughter’s house.
The white fence down the garden path is still intact, so its more than a few months old, but the new shed and kitchen extension are there so no earlier than mid-2004.
Strange way to remember how fast time flies, I was dating that from when I was watching the news on the Boxing Day tsunami with my girlfriend, before our daughter was born or her old house was renovated.
EDIT: From the cars parked outside, its also possible to see that her neighbours have changed within that time too 
Google Maps and Google Earth show images of the New Orleans area and the Mississippi Gulf Coast Post-Katrina.
Notice that there are a few new features on Google Maps. The Hybrid option is no longer available. The street names are visible in Satellite mode now. There’s also a feature called Terrain, which doesn’t show much differently from the Map function…maybe because everything here is pretty flat.
My house in the New Orleans suburbs was taken a little over a year ago. It was still vacant (I lived in Mississippi for 2 years after the hurricane). There were no cars parked…I have two and one is always at the house.
All of the hurricane debris was gone and it was obviously late spring/early summertime based on the color of the lawn and the azaleas in bloom across the street. The swimming pool was full of water and green with algae…I drained it around the end of September and it stayed drained until around March.
Also the Grass Cutter People were doing the lawn at the house next door…I can see their truck and trailer parked in front of the house. It had recently rained.
In my area, it seems to have been updated about six years ago. The remodeling on TikkiDad’s old house is completely done but the new house on the next lot over hadn’t been been started. Also, a nearby school hadn’t been demolished and rebuilt yet. It reopened four years ago.
The entire Western half of my small city is so grainy that you can’t see anything, at any zoom level. It’s been that way since I first discovered Google Maps, which I think was shortly after it first appeared, whenever that was.
If you go to the Layers menu on Google Earth and turn on Digital Global Coverage you’ll see icons appearing on the images which reveal the exact date the satellite image of each area was taken.
This is fun, test your memory with Googlemaps.
The new library has been constructed but the old maths building is still standing, so the image must be no later than a few weeks old, but definitely less than a year old.
30th August, 2007, according to DGC.
I know that our property has a mish-mash of two different times - the shadows from the trees are facing opposite directions! At least one part is about two and a half years old - I can see my truck pulled up to my half-finished garden.
The google earth photos of my area are about 3 years old. The Microsoft ones are about 6 to 7 years old.
Actually, I’ve just noticed that they’ve recently upgraded my area to higher-resolution images (you can now zoom in to the very highest zoom level without losing imagery), but the actual images have got older! The tree in my front garden which blew over in (I think) 2005 has now reappeared on the photos.
The views of the area around my house can be dated between mid-November 2006 (new shingles are visible) and June 2007 (when my neighbour sold 2 of the 3 stretch limos visible in driveway). Judging by the grass colour and tree foliage, probably early to mid spring 2007. The satellite shot shows “Imagery ©2007 DigitalGlobe”.
Side question: How long before Google puts up its own satellite?
The images of our neighborhood used to be from about 4 years ago, but now they’re from last year. You can tell from the new construction going on at the edges; I have friends living in brand new houses that are dirt lots in the images.
Where are you finding that? I tried switching on the relevant layer in Google Earth, but I just get a mishmash of loads of overlapping squares and dates, which you can only see when zoomed out, so it’s impossible to see which date is the one for the area you’re looking at. FWIW I didn’t even see a 30 August 2007 for the area in Belfast you were looking at. There was a 2007-09-30, but also loads of others nearby. I can’t see any easy way of finding out which pic you’re actually looking at. 
That’s an interesting point. Google Maps has never had detailed imagery of my neighborhood – only a blobby, low-resolution image of the entire town. I live in a small college town, so I never thought that was a big deal. Then recently I looked up my address in maps.live.com on a whim – I could clearly see my daughter’s new car parked in our driveway. Google still hasn’t caught up to that yet.