Logging on to Google Maps for the first time is an experience akin to finding your old high school yearbook – open it up, and you're hooked. The old hairdos, the quotes, the picture of that girl in algebra class you never had the courage to talk to – flipping through the pages becomes addictive and the hours fly by.

When folks first discover Google Maps, even with all of North America at their fingertips, they invariably head for the old neighborhood (see Dustin Dwyer's article about Googling home). But it's the next step – when they start sliding around the map to track their drive to school, for example – that keeps them exploring.

Satellite images have been available on the Web for years. But Google Maps' satellite function (which uses software purchased when Google bought the imaging company Keyhole in October 2004) has revolutionized the way the images can be used.

In addition to being difficult to access, satellite images have historically been static. You could enter an address and zoom in and out, but if you wanted to move the map a few blocks north you had to start all over with a new image. On Google Maps, which combines millions of images to create a huge map that can be continuously navigated, novices can scour the entire continent just by moving the mouse.

"[Google] took something that's been around for years (and) made it way easier to use," wrote the influential tech blogger Jason Kottke on April 6, the day after Google added the satellite feature to its roadmap site. "Suddenly this old thing is much more useful and fun to play around with."

For now, only North America is available. But Google owns satellite images of the entire world, and it's only a matter of time before you'll be able to check out Angkor Wat, Victoria Falls and the Pyramids from up high.

Exploring the world can wait. You've got North America to check out. And you'd better do it quick – it won't be long before half the country's roofs are plastered with Coke ads.

Fire Up The Satellite

Using the satellite feature on Google Maps is simple. Go to maps.google.com, and type what you want to view into the search bar. It can be an address, a business or even just a type of place (i.e. "pizza near Howard Ave."). This will bring up an old-fashioned map of the location. Next, look toward the upper right-hand corner of the screen for an option called "Satellite." Click on the button, and the screen brings up a satellite view of the same area, with pizza shops (or whatever you're looking for) indicated by a red pin Google has imaginatively dubbed the "marker."

The image can be dragged in any direction simply by holding down the button on your mouse and moving the mouse around. The geography zips by, the pictures rapidly filling in from Google's database. From here, North America is your oyster. We were able to scroll from a Planet staffer's house, over to a nearby shopping plaza and then on to the Planet offices – a drive of over 20 miles – in about a minute and a half while zoomed-in all the way.

What's even more impressive is that Google makes the maps searchable in the same way Google makes the Internet searchable. Put in a restaurant name, and a Google-eyed view of the location pops up, along with the physical address, phone number, a link to the restaurant’s website and a tab for getting directions. Information search is the heart of what Google does, and the integration of the search technology with the satellite imagery is a natural fit. The intuitive interface makes the maps easy to use, and the uninitiated should be ready to start staring at their roofs in no time. From here, the practical applications of Google maps seem limited only by the imagination of the users.

Memory Lane

The knock on blogs has always been that they’re self-indulgent and boring. And they are. Most bloggers tend to ramble like a 9-year-old on Red Bull.

But blogs can also be an important cultural force, populist diaries that connect and give voice to millions. And sometimes, they're worth checking out.

So are memory maps.

Invented by Matt Haughey, the founder of the cutting edge community blog MetaFilter, memory maps combine the easy-to-use technology of Google Maps and the power of Flickr, a photo-sharing site, to make what amount to visual blogs.

By importing satellite images of their neighborhood into Flickr, memory mappers can annotate the image with notes about the area. As viewers roll a mouse across the screen, the notes pop up at certain highlighted sections of the map. "This is where I had my first kiss." "This is my pediatrician's office." "This is the bowling alley where I had my eighth birthday party."

Of course, the office or bowling alley is often little more than a nondescript white square.

But memory maps, like blogs, allow people to share their own personal histories with the world, no matter how mundane. As of press time, a group of over 450 people had put their memory maps in a pool on Flickr, and countless others had posted their own maps on their Flickr profiles.

The maps may not all be interesting now, but before long the medium could allow people to create personalized guides to their town or a favorite road trip.

Haughey, the first memorymapper, thinks the 21st-century cartography craze will fade. "I think it's most likely a temporary blip thanks to this new view at Google Maps," he wrote in an e-mail. "Folks will probably do this months or years from now, but I think the excitement over the new feature at Google was … [about] letting thousands of folks get a new picture into their past lives."

And letting us, if we weren't too bored, take a look.

What The Google?

Scanning Google Maps is not only entertaining (in an I-can't-believe-my-ass-fell-asleep kind of way), it can also lead to some interesting discoveries.

Because individual photos are gathered over time through multiple passes of the satellite, then stitched together, some areas can wind up with wrinkles. One side of a city looks to be in the midst of a balmy summer, while across town the trees are bare. In one shot of downtown Dallas, some of the buildings even seem to overlap.

Some satellite pictures have been intentionally distorted or blurred in order to cover flaws, such as cloud cover during photography. In other cases the manipulation is intended to obscure specific places from view. The infamous Area 51 was a popular topic on the first wave of blogger satellite discussion. Though the camera was far too high to catch sight of Alf or any of his extra-terrestrial buddies, satellite shots of the mysterious government installation were some of the first to hit the Web.

Someone wasn't too happy about that: The "base that doesn't exist" is now blurred. The White House and parts of Walt Disney World have also gone under cover.

But there are plenty of oddities readily visible to the Googling eye. A 49ers game in progress in San Francisco. A strangely ship-shaped land formation in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. A giant triangle containing huge concentric circles carved into the desert north of Las Vegas. Messages of support for the troops, pictographs of animals, even an unintentional depiction of Pac-Man, have all been found. How long it takes before the Virgin Mary is spotted is anyone's guess.

Another favorite find is to catch a glimpse of something flying. In addition to planes clearly parked at airports, there are dozens of aircraft flying through the satellite images, including a blimp off of Clearwater Beach. And is that a U2 spy plane?

Guide from the Galaxy

It happens all the time.

Someone, somewhere, has an idea. A "Support Our Troops" bumper sticker. A chip clip. A portable storage unit. They're all things you could've thought of, stuff you could've done first.

But you didn't.

And you didn't think of Google Sightseeing, either.

But three Web designers from Edinburgh, Scotland, did. James Turnbull, his brother Alex, and their friend Olly Jackson launched Google Sightseeing less than 24 hours after the satellite feature hit the Web. Their site – a collection of satellite images featuring tourist spots, particularly weird or beautiful areas and American architecture, all pulled from Google Maps – got 15,000 hits the first day.

"Why bother seeing the world for real?" is the site's motto, and originally the programmers thought it could act as a de facto vacation. Here's Disney World. There's the Washington Monument. Anyone wanna go to Mt. Rushmore?

But as more and more visitors submit their favorite satellite images, Google Sightseeing has become a means of finding places that might otherwise go overlooked. It's like a Google Maps Rough Guide, pointing out the hole-in-the wall gems that you'd never stumble onto on your own, but the cameras did.

For instance, who would've known to look for the farm in Queen Creek, Ariz., with the giant image of Oprah mowed into it?

James Turnbull says that interest is not slowing down. "It's a very contagious game," he wrote via e-mail. "Each post makes you think of something else you could look for."

Even his family has gotten the bug.

"My fiancée has been planning our honeymoon in New York, my mother has been searching for the world's largest tree and my father-in-law-to-be wants to find a certain type of freight train," he wrote.

But once his mom finds her tree, she may have to wait to get the image put up on the site. For now, Google Sightseeing is just managed by the three men, all of whom have full-time jobs. There's a backlog of 1,600 submissions to get through. "We just can't read them fast enough!" Turnbull wrote.

Even if they didn't think of it first, lots of satellite scanners want a piece of Google Sightseeing, or at least to be a part of it.

Turnbull wants to take the next step.

"Seeing these places that are so far away and I'd never thought of visiting before has made me desperate to see all of them," he wrote.

He's making the scrapbook before he goes on the trip.

This article appears in Apr 27 – May 3, 2005.