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10 Great Google Earth Add-Ons You Don't Want to Miss

Maps from centuries past, paths of satellites whizzing by, global warming brought to life: User-created Google Earth mashups present a dizzying array of information in a new and imaginative graphical form.

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By Alex and James Turnbull

September 02, 2008 — PC World —

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Google Earth puts an entire planet's worth of useful, relevant, and just plain weird content at your fingertips. As you saw in "The Strangest Sights in Google Earth," some things in this world are simply out of this world.

To find such wonderful sights, you can call on a large library of Earth add-ons. As authors of the Web site Google Sightseeing, we see a lot of these add-ons and collections.

What follows is a list of 10 of our favorites. Note that some of the links go straight to .kml or .kmz files, which Google Earth can read. When you open these files, however, the content may not immediately display; in that case, look in the Temporary Places folder in the Places pane.

Take a Trip Back in Time

Content in Google Earth doesn't always have to focus on in-the-present information--it often allows users to do a little time traveling too. David Rumsey, a renowned cartographer, has amassed a collection of over 150,000 historical maps, 120 of which he has used to create a fascinating layer of maps that shows how the world looked between 1680 and 1930. The highlight is the world globe from 1790 (shown), which demonstrates how dramatically the borders have shifted for many countries, especially in prewar Europe and the Middle East. (Toggle Earth's default Primary Database layers to get a better view.)

Mapping Craigslist

Earthify has a much grander name than you might expect, given that all it actually does is to take a page of Craigslist posts (from whichever locality you specify) and plot them in Google Earth. Of course, when you think about it, that kind of makes sense, given that Craigslist is all about local information. Cleverly, Earthify provides a browser-bookmark link that you can use to open, in Google Earth, the locations posted on any Craiglist page; as a result, if you're searching for an apartment, for instance, you can instantly see if the listings are close to subways, restaurants, or whatever other amenities you might be interested in. Essentially, Earthify lets you use Google Earth as a geographical newsreader for Craigslist, turning a simple idea into an incredibly powerful tool.

Follow That Plane!

Google Earth fans can be fairly obsessive, as demonstrated by one user collection that pinpoints the position of every known plane that has been spotted flying in Google Earth's satellite imagery. But FBOWeb.com helps you obtain potentially more-useful information: It employs Google Earth to provide live 3D tracking of every single plane flying over the United States. On this page you'll see links to home in on a region of interest to you (for example, New York's JFK International Airport).