Google Earth seems to be popping up everywhere these days.  Twice last week I've seen its logo appear in the top right hand corner of the TV screen.

The first time was on a British Airways advert which scrolls and zooms into different destinations before showing the price of a BA flight there.  There's nothing that surprising about this as it's got to be a lot more cost effective to use Google Earth than to create this just for the ad.  I wonder if this would be covered by the standard user agreement.  It would also be interesting to work out how much Google would have had to pay to do this amount of TV advertising themselves.

The second was on Channel 5 news.  They were using it to show the location of a suspected Iranian nuclear base.  The detail was very good and you could see every building that they were talking about, not bad for the middle of the desert. My parents live on a farm in the north of England which has a number of barns, sheds, cottages and yards but you can't see that on Google earth.  You can see my house in London in a lot of detail and can even see that only my car is parked outside. 

So the level of effort that Google puts into the scanning of different locations is about the same for central London and the Iranian desert.  Is there any need for military satellites anymore now that Google has entered the market. 

The thing is this works both ways if we have it so does everybody else.  Therefore is Google the saviour of the free world or actually just another tool in the terrorists arsenal.

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