Google viewed from ground level

Google never ceases to impress me. There's its world-class search engine that usually finds what I'm looking for in the first results page and, more typically, within the first five choices. It's spooky how accurate the results can be.

Then there's Google Maps, with the ability to locate almost any place on the planet.

Google Earth appeared, and I still find myself spending hours just exploring the planet. I thought the latter was going to be hard to top, but it seems Google may be on its way to doing that.

When you click on the new feature called Street View, each street on the map has a thin blue outline. This indicates the streets that support the new feature.

A little avatar of a person appears in the middle of the browser window. Instructions say to drag the little person to any location on the map.

Photo appears

When you release the mouse button, a large rectangular window with the street address in the upper left corner will appear and float above the street map. And within the window will be a photographic image of the street itself.

Give it a try. It's really cool. And there's more.

Superimposed within the photograph is a translucent stripe that pans along with the photo whenever you move it. The stripe loosely correlates to the line of the street you see on the bird's-eye map view.

Arrows pointing toward each end of the stripe connote the direction each end of the street is heading.

Dragging the mouse within the Street View window causes the photograph to pan a full 360 degrees. As you pan, the stripe moves along with its directions to help keep your frame of reference.

Street View works with the drawn map image underneath the Street View window as well as the Satellite, and the Hybrid option that combines both of them as an overlay. So as you move the avatar, a corresponding photo of the location will appear.

Additional features let you expand the window to full screen and zoom controls that let you magnify as well as rotate. The mouse scroll wheel also lets you magnify the images.

Google has a number of vans with cameras mounted on top; as they drive, they take the pictures.

Just a few cities

Given the size of such a task, Street View currently works in a limited number of major metropolitan areas: New York City, Miami, San Francisco, Las Vegas and Denver.

Plans are in the works to expand the coverage, but my guess is it's going to take a while. And even as coverage expands, how long before the images become stale and have to be taken over again?

Even satellite photographs can take a year or more before new images replace the older ones. So imagine how long it may take with people driving around in vans.

They will have to increase the number of vehicles in the fleet by a pretty big number if they plan to get more coverage with greater frequency.

Street View is a work in progress, but Google seems to be off to a good start. Let's hope they can keep the momentum going.

In the meantime, check out the limited coverage so far. I've heard that some notable people have been caught in the images without their knowledge. Evidently Street View observers are checking out the pedestrians in the photographs as well as the streets.

The new function can be found at maps.google.com.