Full FeedMicrosoft Virtual Earth or Google Earth?
Microsoft’s Virtual Earth has partnered with DigitalGlobe to provide searchers with high-resolution mapping images. Word of this came out only two weeks after DigitalGlobe announced the renewal of its agreement with Google as one of their main suppliers of imagery. Google and DigitalGlobe have been working together since 2002.
Virtual Earth now has access to 460 million square kilometers of earth imagery with about 1 million square kilometers of images being collected from DigitalGlobe satellites daily. This growth makes DigitalGlobe one of the world’s largest catalogs of images. With how fast the world is altered with new developments, most of this new imagery goes to updating current maps.
The Rundown
According to Webster’s Online Dictionary, Earth is a total of 510 million square kilometers. According to the Encyclopedia of the Nations, the United States is about 9,629,091 square kilometers.
The updates can only come in so quickly with such a big world to cover. I looked up my city, which had a new section of highway completed over a year ago, on DigitalGlobe’s own Image Finder, and they still don’t have the highway.
Among others, DigitalGlobe supplies images to NASA and the Department of Defense’s National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. DigitalGlobe’s main competitors are GeoEye used by Yahoo Maps and Google, and Spot Image, also partnered with Google. Then there is map image provider, TeleAtlas, also partnered with Google!
I’m starting to feel like Google is a pimp. But pulling from a plethora of resources might mean Google keeps the advantage over competitors. Through TeleAtlas, at least there is the capability of sending in errors you notice on the maps here, and here and here – like that missing highway. I am still looking for where to do that with Virtual Earth.
For a side by side comparison of both Virtual Earth and Google Maps, click here.
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Read Virtual Earth Press Release
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What about all the aerial imagery from Virtual Earth? The ultracam, produced by Microsoft and now flown all around the world takes the most amazing ultra high resolution images Satellites can only dream about. The “Birdseye” images of Virtual Earth show buildings from a lower aerial angle from all four sides.
on October 22, 2008 at 05:15 PM - LINKI love competition and ultimately your readers should go check out that link with both maps. Personally I like the extra effort the research team in Colorado has done with Virtual Earth to make it more seemless, colour corrected, more professional and more accurate. Its a series task to stich together images from 1000’s of sources.
I have been searching high-and-low for a clear and easy comparison of Microsoft’s Virtual Earth against Google Maps and I have been unable to find anything more than short opinion pieces both from Google-supporters and Microsoft-faithfuls.
From a features and accuracy aspect, I have to draw the (semi-informed) conclusion that they are pretty much interchangeable - Microsoft may have “The Ultracam” as suggested by the other commenter, but Google also has their satellite.
Instead, and I think this is the case for all software - regardless of whether it is online or desktop, the defining difference is the developer community.
Google, with it’s long-running history of supporting development from within the community, has a very active developer base for Google Maps and substantial (although not 100% complete) API documentation.
Microsoft, traditionally a proprietary closed-source software giant, doesn’t seem to have as great a grass-roots support base.
On top of that, Google produce Google Maps a Google Earth browser plugin and Google Earth desktop, allowing people who want a richer experience, or a desktop application, to use that option with quite similar coding functionality.
So, unless Microsoft does something earth-shattering with their tool, I think that it must be Google FTW in this match-up.
on November 2, 2008 at 06:16 PM - LINK