Until very recently, a PC user’s favorite time waster was held in the infamous “Google beta” stage. A few days ago, two things changed. One, it was no longer in Google beta, and two, it was no longer only just for PC users. That time waster is Google Earth.

Google Earth starts out with a view of North America. At first glance, this may seem like a 3D model of the Earth. Zooming in will show you the actual purpose of this application. Google Earth is a satellite map application. It contains many of the features of online map services, such as directions, as well as an array of features that haven’t yet appeared in online services, such as touring.

Using Google Earth

When you start Google Earth, you’ll usually want to fly to a particular location (if you know the address), search for a business (If you know the type and the area), or get directions.

Search

Fly To

The first of Google Earth’s search functions is Fly To. Fly To is essentially a search engine for every address and business that Google Earth knows about. Fly To works best if you know the address or specific name of the place you’d like to see. Once you input your search terms, Google Earth will search through its database, and then go to the results. If you get only one match, Google Earth will head directly to the placemark, otherwise the view will zoom out to include all placemarks. All searches are conducted only for the area around your view, unless you specify a city and state.

Local Search

The second of Google Earth’s search functions is Local Search. Local Search is best used to find businesses in a specific area. You input the type of business you want (grocery store, hotel, etc.), and the area to search (city and state, zip code, etc.) Google Earth will search the database and then zoom to a view that encompasses the locations of search results.

Directions

The last of Google Earth’s searching abilities is its Directions feature. You can either input the “to” and “from” addresses manually, or you can right click any search result or placemark and select either “Directions to this” or “Directions from this.” Selecting one doesn’t blank both fields, so you can right click two placemarks and have Google Earth fill in the blanks. Either way, you then hit search. Unfortunately, Google Earth gives no indication that it’s working, so it may seem like it didn’t take at first, especially if there are a large amount of steps. By default, Google Earth will zoom out to view your entire route. You can zoom in on a particular step, including the start and end locations (denoted by the green and red cars), and you can have it give you a tour of the route, which brings us to the next section.

Placemarks

In Google Earth, places are marked on the map with placemarks. When you create a new placemark, you can change the image, change the text color, define the view, as well as many other things.

Tours

An interesting and unique feature of Google Earth is the Tour function. You select either the placemarks in your “Places” sidebar or search results by clicking the checkbox next to them and click the play button (shown at right). Google Earth will proceed to zoom into the first placemark. Once it gets there, it will pause for a second (the interval is user-configurable, as are many other things, some of which will be discussed in the “Options” section), then head to the next placemark. When it hits the last checked placemark, it will stay where it is.

Layers, Borders, and Overlays

Layers and Borders

Google Earth comes with many “layers,” which merely show all the placemarks of a certain type of business or other place. There are layers for everything from golf courses to bars and nightclubs. Other layers contain borders, such as zip codes or school district zones. There’s a layer that shows interesting placemarks placed by the Google Earth community.

Overlays

Google Earth is also capable of overlaying images on the map. It will take any image that you want, and place it on the map. You can control the opacity, size, location, and orientation of the image. There aren’t many uses for this in the consumer world, but overlaying the satellite photo of a business complex with the company’s logo makes for a pretty neat effect.

3D Buildings and Terrain

Google Earth can show 3D representations of buildings, as well as push up the terrain where elevation changes are dramatic. THese make for some pretty interesting visuals. For buildings, search for Manhattan Island, and for terrain, search for the Grand Canyon. Both make Google’s Earth seem more like the real Earth.

Interface

It should be noted that I am very anal about UI. An application using Windows Classic widgets drives me nearly insane sometimes. Google Earth’s interface violates my main UI rule, use the provided widgets, to the point of being just pathetic. I don’t know about the state of the UI on Mac OS X, but the UI on Windows XP is just bad, especially considering what Picasa looks like. It’s a wonder the menus even use drop shadows, the scrollbars are these ugly, custom made ones which lack a hover state, and the preferences dialog looks like it’s running on some blocky Linux theme (not to bash Linux or anything, but looking at some of the built in themes, *shudder*). Overall, the look of the UI needs a good designer to rid Google Earth of its evils.

Preference

Google Earth has preferences for both important performance-altering functions as well as personal preference ones. You can select the size of textures, the color depth, the level of Anisotropic Filtering, the navigation mode, the tour interval, and many others. You also have the choice of running Google Earth under DirectX or OpenGL, though that’s not in the UI.

Conclusion

Google Earth is one of those “I have no real use for it, but it’s just so damn cool,” apps. While some Earth browsers may find the extra tools in the plus version good, the basic version (the one reviewed here) should do it for most. Even the basic one may be overkill for a few, in which case Google Local or competing services may be the best fit.

As a rule of thumb, any PC made in the 20th century will choke on Google Earth, and many that were made in the 21st century will stumble a bit. Those using the PC that’s been in their family since the Clinton administration need not apply.

One sentence review: While the feature set is complete, the UI is horrible, unless you’re a fan of those blocky CDE themes. Deep Thought gives Google Earth for Windows a good score of four out of five.