Google Earth is celebrating its 20th birthday, and to mark the occasion, Google is bringing historical Street View imagery to the service. In a blog post, Google said the anniversary update allows users to “explore the wonders of the planet from even more viewpoints, whether it’s a bird’s eye view or at street level.”
From today, when you load up Google Earth you’ll see a new option for historical imagery in the toolbar, which allows you to move back and forth between now and years gone by. Seemingly predicting that you might be overwhelmed by the prospect of having the entire planet at your fingertips, Google offers some suggestions. You might want to look at a timelapse of Berlin between 1943 and the modern day, in which time the Berlin Wall was built and fell, before the city underwent huge urban transformation. You could also observe the rapid expansion of Las Vegas since the 1980s, or how Houston’s NRG Stadium was built on top of what was just farmland back in 1944. Some Maps users have even used the historical view to look up, say, pictures of their homes from years gone by, occasionally finding imagery of lost loved ones in the process.
Google also announced further updates to Google Earth, including new AI-driven insights for professional users in the US. Urban planners will soon be able to access information about things like tree canopy coverage and surface land temperatures of different areas of a city using built-in Gemini insights.
Google Earth first launched in 2005, and according to Google was downloaded 100 million times in its first week. It’s had a number of major updates over the years, adding features such as searchable wallpapers and 3D timelapse videos.
