Thought I would share - this is an incredible site/program - http://earth.google.com/. It is the next level of internet maps - based of satellite images of the earth. You have to try this!!!

You do have to download, but it is a fairly small/quick little download, then install. Overall it took less than 5 mins - but beware, I have spent HOURS on it since then, looking at places I have been and places I want to go! Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower, you can see it all !

But what's the difference to the plain google maps?

I had never seen the google maps before (map quest junkie). It looks like they are based on the same info. Not sure how the one you are talking about works, but the earth.google one starts at the globe level and you can zoom in or search for anywhere in the world.

I started by looking at places I had been recently on vacation (Germany/France) an it was pretty cool to be able to find all those places. After that I started zooming in on things like the Statue of Liberty, the Grand Canyon, etc.

Lots of fun for me - may not be your thing :-)

It looks the same to me. We've had lots of fun with this thread here.

no Capt,

very different, you can get down to 500' and tilt for almost 3D...need to check it out? thanks lady!

Can't remember if i downloaded it before, or maybe that was terraserver. I'll have to look again.

its still in its very early days as many of the cool functions are limited to major cities in the US so giving it the Googe Earth moniker is a bit like the World Series of Baseball - still I note its still in it's beta stages so it may improve soon - great if you want to fly round manhattan in 3d - no great shakes if you dont.