5 secret Google Earth features you need to try

Google has long been an educational tool for many. The search engine is the most used search tool in the world by far and the company has put out many great applications over the years. From Gmail to Google Maps and Google Docs, it has been at the forefront of both personal and professional everyday apps. Most people are familiar with Google’s apps and Google Earth is no exception.

Google Earth is a mapping tool that allows users to see what a location looks like by way of a 2D or 3D visual. Google has sought out most corners of the Earth in order to take a photo and integrate it into this application. Google Earth mostly provides a view of a specific street, town, city, or location at some point over the past few years. It allows you to see a bird’s eye view as well as a street view of what the destination looks like.

Anyone who has used Google Earth before knows that it starts with a view of the Earth as a globe and scrolling in and out will zoom in and out on the world. But there are other uses and features for Google Earth that you may not be familiar with. Let’s see what some of these are and see how you can utilize them in your life. Because being as educated about the world as you can is only going to help you figuring out where you’re going.

1 You can go somewhere you’ve never been

Feeling lucky?

Before you type in the address that you want to find, you can go somewhere that you probably have never been before. When you click on the search bar on the top left of the page, you’ll see that there is the phrase “I’m feeling lucky.” If you click that, Google Earth will spin you around the globe and highlight a location that you’ve never visited before on the app.

My first time doing it, I was sent to the Tainan Grand Mazu Temple in Taiwan. Google Earth provided me with a description of the location, linking to its Wikipedia page, giving me the address, the phone number, and what year it was opened. It also let me save it as a part of a project as well.

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If you click Next at the bottom of the description of the place that Google Earth has sent you, it will choose another destination and whisk you away. My second location was a lake in Poland named Skanda. It included photos that people had tagged of themselves on Google as a part of the visual box.

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Measure how solar efficient a location can be

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A new feature that is offered in Google Earth is the real estate and clean energy tool. To the right of the search bar, there is an icon with two wrenches. If you click that, a pop-up box will tell you that this is a way to generate the best view for potential real estate development. There are two buttons you can click: one for building design and one for solar feasibility.

These services are offered as a part of a partnership with Delve by Sidewalk Labs. By choosing the building button, you can map out an area of land that you want to build upon and Google Earth will give you the perimeter and the area of your site. Then you can generate it in Delve to see how a building would look in that particular location. If you choose the solar feasibility option, it allows you to again map out an area that you want to build on and Delve will give you how easy it would be to power the building by solar by using panels on roofs and in parking lots. This is an especially helpful tool for developers and those that work in sustainability.

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3 Customize your layers in Google Earth

Choose the view that you want

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At the bottom of the left hand side of the screen, the layers configuration lets you see the kind of view that you want. You can also press Command B to bring up the menu. It will provide as specific a view of the surrounding area that you’ve zoomed in on as desired. You can see a clean look from up above, which doesn’t show you roads, borders, places, or labels. You can opt for the exploration look which includes all of those settings.

Picking the everything view will show you all borders, labels, places, roads, transit, landmarks, and water. This gives you the most complete and educated look at the surrounding area that you’re looking at. You can also customize what you want to see on your map by clicking or unclicking any of the features. Other features that are hidden in layers are the ability to see a timelapse from 1984 and now of a location, exploring photos from around the world, see where 3D coverage is available, see what the cloud coverage looked like over the past 24 hours in a location, and more.

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4 Control Google Earth with your keyboard

You don’t need a mouse

While you might think the only way that you can zoom in on your location is by scrolling the scroll wheel towards the location on your mouse, you’d be wrong. There are 33 different keyboard shortcuts that you can use to manuever around Google Earth. You can find them by clicking the Help menu at the top left of the screen and scrolling down to Keyboard Shortcuts.

From simple commands like starting a new file with Command, J to Adding a Placemark with Up, Command, and P there are so much you can do without the need of your trackpad or mouse. By pressing the Page Up button, you will zoom in. Page Down will zoom out and Up, Page Up will decrease the camera altitude. Up, Page Down will increase the camera altitude. Just by pressing the R key, you can reset your view and choose another location.

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5 Race around the world faster with Google Earth

You can take a slow or fast pace

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Any time you choose a location, Google Earth will spin you around the globe and settle on that location. But if you think that the application is taking too long to get you where you want to go, you can speed up the process. In the Settings tab under the Tools menu, the top option is about the Flight Animations. You can turn it off entirely, so that the next location will just show up on your screen without any type of visual effect. But, if you want to keep it on, you can toggle the animation to be faster or slower, based on your preference.

The final aspect to this is choosing the Fly End Animation. You can opt for a Cinematic animation which will swoop around the surrounding area and continually move to show you what is there. The Orbital animation is less intense and will swoop but not give you as grand of a view as the Cinematic animation. Then you can just turn off all animation and it will just bring you to that location and stay put on it from up above. The customization of Google Earth is smart to set up if you’re someone that is spending a lot of time using it.