Did you ever check your home address using Google Earth?
drt on Jan 19 2007 at 1:51 am | Filed under: Satellite Tracking
I did!
It’s a handy tool, and you can use your mouse to pinpoint the location and get the lat/long info of your home address, or any place you pick. Of course, you have to pray that Google or whatever databases they use have all the satellite mosaics for that particular area with the resolution you would like to see. From time to time, I saw that there were patches in certain area that contained no high resolution data at all.
In the beginning, I like to use the street address to get to the location on Google Earth or other database. For example, before going out to see a real-estate property I’m interested, (Yes, I did that as a hobby too. :-)) then I will use the satellite image databases, and zoom it to see as much detail as possible before I go. However, soon I found that not only Google Earth, but most of the mapping databases contain some location errors. And by looking at the picture of my house for example, I think they are using the same satellite image source no matter it’s Mapquest, Terra-server or Google Earth. Also, some of these images are few years old. You can see for example that some of the new buildings would not be in the satellite images at all but an empty field instead.
Here is an example. Google Earth will put the mark to my house if I enter the number of my neighbor five houses down the street instead of my home address number. I think it should be okay for Mapquest-type applications, where the users are looking for driving directions only and the marker doesn’t make any difference. But imagine this. When you plug in the address of a Methodist Church and the marker marks the building next door with a label - “Holy Spirit Catholic Church” on the location of the marker…. Would you like it if you’re from the Methodis Church, or from the Catholic Church it Google Earth turns it around? This is no joke. I saw that in one of the popular mapping software accidentally. While preparing this blog, I went to check and I found that the label on the street has disappeared, but the marker is still pointing to the same location if I put the address of the Methodis Church. I think, this may not the databases problem for my city alone and your location may have the same problem as well. But most of all, I just hope that my neighbor home would have never become a target of someone using GoogleEarth to mark it! 
Why don’t you try to check your home address either on Google Earth, Google Map, Yahoo Map or Mapquest? Enjoy!
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drt,
thanks for your comment and advise on my blog. these days wordpress plug-ins and independent hosting leaves me green with envy, knowing how much I am leaving on the table.
hope to work around that by the end of the first quarter.
meanwhile, if you please, i would love to exchange links with your site. if you agree, let me know by mail so we could both add our respective links to each other’s site.
Hey, I’m curious on why you changed URLs?
Hi Philomena,
Thanks for your visit. Once I know how to move my favorite links from the right side bar to the left, I will select and add more new links and arrange them based on their categories. However, this is a low traffic site. I’m sure if you write (or have you written one?) review of John Chow’s blog, he would add a link to your site and you will get a better visibility than here.
Kenric,
I didn’t configure MySQL database when I started my first blog. Soon I found that I couldn’t change the header image, I couldn’t move all the comments and I thought it would be much easier for me to start a new one then learning the trick to set up the database there, creating new folders and moved all the postings and comments.