Google Earth Pro Now Available Free

HughPickens.com writes Google has long offered a Pro version of Google Earth for $399 per year that includes some pretty cool extras not found in the free version. Now Rick Broida reports at Cnet that you can get Google Earth Pro absolutely free. All you have to do is download the installer, run it, then sign in using your e-mail address (as your username) and license code GEPFREE. Features include: Advanced measurements: Measure parking lots and land developments with polygon area measure, or determine affected radius with circle measure; High-resolution printing: Print images up to 4,800 x 3,200 pixel resolution; Exclusive pro data layers with Demographics and traffic count; Spreadsheet import: Ingest up to 2,500 addresses at a time, assigning place marks and style templates in bulk; and Movie-Maker: Export Windows Media and QuickTime HD movies, up to 1,920x1,080-pixel resolution. If you've ever been involved in a property dispute, you'll know how acrimonious they can get. Google Earth Pro includes parcel data that definitively defines property boundaries. "Do you really need this? Probably not, as Pro was created with business/enterprise users in mind," writes Broida. "Let's be honest, [Google Earth Pro has] entertainment value that's virtually impossible to measure."

Comments

Utility

[Iamthecheese]

Just as Google Maps and friends has saved millions of man-hours and probably hundreds of millions of dollars from people not being lost sufficiently wide adoption and awareness of these advanced features may save an immense amount of temporal and fiscal expense.

Common usage combined with other services can, for example, create self-aware communities, allow public input for city planning, resolve boundary arguments, help individuals planning to, for example, install a swimming pool, and provide data for planning crop layouts.And that's just off the top of my very non-expert head. I think the implications of this are far broader than may be immediately recognized.

Hyperbole

[ohnocitizen]

The prevalence of hyperbole in modern journalism is virtually impossible to measure.

parcel data that definitively unreliable

[UziBeatle]

parcel data that definitively defines property boundaries.

  BOGUS statement.

  As soon as I downloaded this I zoomed in on the area
I live in (somewhere in N. Galveston CO. , Texas)
and saw immediately the property lines were wrong.

Not by a small margin either. All property lines along
the road I live along were shifted by offset of around 20 to 30 feet.

  A further look at neighboring streets showed similar
offsets.

  In the linked article to the story the blog clown stated
this wondrous GM Pro could cheaply solve property disputes (or words to that effect).

    Yah, right. Nope. Might cause trouble but not a tool to cheaply determine property boundaries.

Unreliable, therefor useless.

  Anyone else care to check theirs? I imagine it varies region to region how useful it is but bottom line if wrong in this area it is most likely wrong in other far flung areas.

Re: parcel data that definitively unreliable

[Anonymous Coward]

The truth is that the definitions of the property boundaries are exactly accurate, i.e., 100' N/S and 50' E/W. The issue is that how the surface features interact with those property boundaries is only an approximation.

I work daily with this using a GIS systems. We have a custom-crafted map where an expert spent a lot of time doing what's called "rubber-sheeting", meaning stretching and squeezing the photo layer to make it line up as closely as possible with the lot lines layer, and it's still plus or minus a few feet, more than enough to preclude using it to settle a property dispute.

The ONLY way to settle a boundary dispute is to hire a surveyor. Be precise in what you want, you want a boundary line located, you do NOT want a "survey" which is more more complicated and much more expensive.

Re: parcel data that definitively unreliable

[Bobberly]

As a data custodian for our county cadastral data I can attest that using the data for ANY purpose other than tax assessments is not recommended. Parcel data is meant to track ownership. It is not meant to be an accurate representation of survey data. It never has, and never will. Just because it "looks" ok when you overlay it with an aerial photo doesn't mean it should be used for any determination of property lines. This is why every time you buy a house a professional surveyor comes out and re-checks everything. We all know the house didn't move, but surveyors can't even agree on a the same location of a corner marker. Where do you think all this error goes when you try and do a countywide fabric of parcels? For a kick, ask your county assessor for the parcel line data.. including COGO attributes. Then look in amazement as your 120 foot property line is actually 118.5 feet on the map to make it fit inside of decades of mapping error. I've tried to reach out to Google many times to offer an update of our data to reflect new subdivisions. I never got a response. The product looks pretty and functional until you actually try and do something that matters with it.

Mac and Windows PC only.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly not Linux.

Re:Mac and Windows PC only.

[rabbin]

This installed for me over WINE http://dl.google.com/earth/cli...

However certain things like the search function are not working for me.

Re:Mac and "PC" only...oh, I see.

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

UPDATE: Oh, I see what you mean. Instead of honestly saying "Huh? Linux? What's that? We've forgotten!", Google is quietly sending Linux users a copy of the previous version (6.0.something) of the "free" Google Earth (that's what's in the "GoogleEarthLinux.bin" file), and appears not to have bothered with Google Earth Pro.

I knew I shouldn't have put my pitchfork and torch away so quickly. Friggin' Google. As much as I love playing with maps, Google can take a long walk off a short pier - I'm not desperate enough for their "product" to mess around with WINE.

Re:Free?!

[Applehu Akbar]

High-priced products are a corporatist conspiracy.

Free products are a corporatist conspiracy.

This is starting to sound like when the Church of Warminetics predicts that carbon warming will cause flooding and droughts.