And before long, yet another company was founded. Though pixels were beginning to proliferate, high-resolution imagery was mostly limited to U. Civil engineers also purchased it for the ability to sketch out location information when planning construction projects. NIMA experienced an immediate return on its investment.
Within two weeks, the U. NIMA was supporting joint staff in the Pentagon, and to sense how effective a strike was after-the-fact was very labor and imagery intensive.
With Keyhole, we were able to streamline that process. EarthViewer quickly gained public exposure through TV news coverage using its battlefield imagery. McClendon approached Castle with his EarthViewer demos. The network routinely used EarthViewer to preview story locations during broadcasts. When the U. But Keyhole was a small company, and scaling up its computing infrastructure to handle more traffic was expensive. For its vision to materialize, Keyhole needed more capital to scale up imagery procurement and to build powerful data infrastructure to store high volumes of imagery.
And they wanted to buy. As part of the acquisition , the Keyhole team maintained control of the program as it evolved. Most personnel, including McClendon and Jones Tanner had since departed Keyhole , became executives at Google, developing their software unrestricted by the need to keep a startup afloat. Once at Google, the program began to operate on an entirely different scale. Google also provided access to a rapidly growing user base already hooked on its web search platform.
Additionally, pre-release engineering refinements focused on adding data around the globe, making the program accessible to non-English speaking users, and simplifying features. Finally, Google Earth launched in June The software exploded in the commercial marketplace. Keyhole brought to Google a new form of interactive information that mimicked the real world and helped people understand their place in it.
In , Google released Google Earth Enterprise for organizations seeking the capabilities of Google Earth but with private data in a secure, offline environment. The GEE suite included three software components: Fusion, the processing engine that merged imagery and user data into one 3D globe; the Earth server that hosted the private globes built by Fusion; and Client, the Javascript API used to view these globes.
Whether to disseminate that data after creating proprietary globes in GEE was, and still is, up to the user. This was the final evolution of the EarthViewer enterprise suite used by the Pentagon at the outset of the Iraq war. In the years following its launch, government agencies, businesses, and state municipalities began to deploy GEE at internal data centers to produce 3D globes using sensitive or classified data.
The city of Washington, D. Arguably the largest user of GEE is the U. It let you see your house, from space. Probably for the same reason Microsoft barely put up a fight as Google outpaced it with search, email, browser, and just about every other consumer service.
Microsoft, the corporation, didn't seem to care very much about the people who actually used Terraserver, and it didn't care about the vast amount of data about consumers it was gleaning from how they used the service. They saw the value of the information.
From the outset, the plan was to make a database. Microsoft didn't really care what information it contained, it just had to be big. The biggest in the world, something that would test the scalability of Microsoft's SQL database products.
According to a USA Today article from June 22, , the initial plan with Terraserver was to list every single transaction in the history of the New York Stock Exchange online and make it searchable. But that was only a half terabyte of data. Microsoft needed something larger. In , the United States Geological Survey was in the process of uploading greyscale satellite photos and other aerial images from its archives onto the internet. Wouldn't it be interesting, and perhaps useful, they thought, if someone put searchable satellite images on the internet?
The timing was more-or-less perfect. The images, along with some from recently declassified Russian military photos, totaled just over 2. The idea for Terraserver was born. Gray put Barclay, who Rossmeisl called "the brains of the project" in charge, and he got to coding. He was a database guy—Terraserver was the first website he'd ever made, and it was the first project he'd ever tried that had anything to do with mapping, which proved to be quite a challenge. Barclay quickly ran into an age-old cartography problem.
He decided that using a standard Mercator map projection, which is what you see in the image above, wouldn't work because it distorts the sizes of land masses as you move north and south on the projection.
After trying a few things, Barclay came up with the idea of creating "mosaic" images that would be automatically generate based on where you're clicking on the map. Basically, the images given to Microsoft by USGS were stitched together but were then chopped into smaller images that could recenter themselves on cue. The very first demo we did, I chopped Bill Gates's house in half, which was not very good," he said.
These innovations proved to be revolutionary, and the "mosaic" strategy is now the "underpinning of Google Earth and Google Maps," Barclay said. While increasing access to the software was seen as positive, most people interpreted this as a sign that Google would no longer be providing much support. Google announced the deprecation of Google Earth Enterprise shortly after revealing that Google Earth would be made free.
At the time it came as a surprise. In a interview a GEE engineer, Avnish Bhatnagar, stated, "GEE has always been a very niche product, focused on a very important user base, but percentage-wise, a very small one… the adoption rate was much, much lower than what Google likes to see for its products. After deprecating Google Earth Enterprise, the company announced they would provide support for the product for two years.
As the end of this period neared, there was enough continued interest in the software that Google decided to make it open source. The biggest change was the move to a browser-based app instead of desktop software. Most long-time Google Earth Users, expressed disappointment that the version removed many of the features they felt made the software useful.
From a product perspective, there are essentially three Google Earth products currently available, two of which Google actively supports. Google created its Geo division by acquiring three companies in , just before going public: Keyhole, Where 2 Technologies, and ZipDash.
Using Google Maps as a base, Google can create a framework to index the physical world in the same way it indexed the World Wide Web. Within this larger context, it's clear that the Keyhole acquisition was primarily for technology that organized and rendered satellite imagery at scale. While Google did probably think there was potential in Google Earth as a paid GIS software product, this effort was most likely a bonus that came along with acquiring the Keyhole codebase.
Essentially Google Earth was a opportunistic spin-off of a larger project.
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