Google Maps Vs. Google Earth

A couple of years ago I was part of a Beta test for some features our City was adding to their website which required the use of Google Maps.

The version of Maps I was using for our City was at least one version newer than the one that was available to the general population so it would seem that there are certainly different versions flooding around at any point in time.

I just looked at my house from both Earth and Maps satellite views and both give the exact same time view. Same cars parked in the same places, lawn chairs & trash cans in the same spot, I mean the two are interchangeable.

Google Earth in most but not all locations will have a date at the bottom showing when the pic was taken. In most cases the satellite view or airplane view is not the same date as the street level view. Could be a year or more difference

Not all satellite views are different and of course the street views are done at different times.

The point was that I was wondering about is why some of the satellite views were out of sync time wise. In all my searching for ATM locations, I never found Google Maps to be newer than Google Earth. Most views are identical.

Up until recently, GE had a more current view of my location than Google maps. The GE view was 5/17 and the GM was 9/15. The street views were and are the same. 5/15. GM now has the same date view as GE.

In my neighborhood my block of "street view" is from August 2008, the rest of the neighborhood is from March 2012, can't do the block without repeating a street so it gets missed.

The difference in clarity of the two is pretty amazing, started using HD sometime between 2008 and 2012.

The date on the satellite says "imagery 2017, map data 2017" but at a minimum it's older than 2015 because behind my house in the shot my wife's car is one she traded in in early 2015.

Some places will have a date off to the side with pics from several years ago. Really stands out how much better cameras have gotten since way back when

what would you attribute the increase in quality to?
lenses, sensor resolution. anti-shake, post processing,....?

I think it's everything you mentioned. Camera quality has really improved so much. They are mounting very high quality cameras under the international space station that is going to be something to see. I haven't checked lately to see when they will finish. Who would have thought 20 years ago we would have such great cameras on a cellphone much less standalone cameras

Both seem to be around the same time, but I do notice quality differences. Thanks for letting us know

Google wants Earth to reign supreme, but to many individuals already adopted GMaps.

Here's a comparison in the image quality of my block compared to the rest of the neighborhood;

https://s20.postimg.org/4w4ssvvzh/block.jpg

https://s20.postimg.org/vih9hv06l/blockhd.jpg

Most people do not even realize what is driving the advancements in electronics today. Chips are getting smaller and smaller and using much less power. That's one of the reasons that Google satellite and earth views are getting better.

Intel and AMD are the 2 big guys leading the charge. They are squeezing more and more computing power into the same package. Both are trying to eventually build CPUs at the "Molecular Level". That means that an element would be 1 molecule wide. That's a major leap, because I don't think that science has developed an instrument that can see an atom yet.

What does this mean for satellites and the cameras they use? (or any digital camera) It means higher and higher resolution at lower and lower prices. Look at the price of cell phones with 12 Megapixel cameras. The prices keep dropping and the megapixels keep increasing inside the same physical area.

Memory is getting faster and cheaper. Newegg has a WD 1 Terabyte Solid State Drive (SSD) for $289.99 (USD). The first 1 TB hard drive was around $500 (USD), I think.

The down side to all of this - it's becoming easier to build very small high resolution spy devices and that's good for government spy types and Google, but not good for the private citizen being spied on by another private citizen.

I believe that it is a lag in update information. there are different teams for each site and earth appears to be more image oriented where maps is more navigation oriented.