Today I was surfing with the google earth tool and discovered a somehow weird thing. Looking at my neighborhood in Bucaramanga (my city), called “the beautiful city”. I realized that the image appearing in google earth was +/- two years outdated.
The places where the two right stars are, now, there is a big shopping center. In the star at the left, now there is a condominium. The construction started more or less two years ago.
I couldn’t stop my curiosity and “googled” a little bit to understand how it works. First I discovered that in fact the images can be up to 3 years old. The thing that surprised me was that my city was not available in good resolution a couple of months ago, and when it was available, the images dated more that 2 years old.
Second, I realized that my naïve idea that this sharp low altitude images where taken from a satellite was not true. The zoom-in pictures are taken from an aircraft (as Google says). When did this airplane passed over my home taking pictures? I really thought that this satellite cameras could zoom-in so much to see the time in my watch (ok! I’m exaggerating).
Before Google earth existed, it was a program called Keyhole that Google bought. In fact the South Korean government has demanded changes in the program in order not to reveal the location of their military bases to their enemies. Even though this geographical information is publicly available from different sources.
If you haven’t tried this program I’m sure that lots of owws will come out from your mouth. Will this information be available someday in real-time? This could be a nice tool for terrorists! Or maybe we could be able to see some topless girls at Ibiza’s beaches… Now you’re thinking about huh?