The Null Device

I can see my (old) house from here

Google Maps has added Australia. (And New Zealand as well, while they were in the neighbourhood.) It looks like a fairly comprehensive map covering the entirety of the vast country, from the major cities to small country towns and rural roads. Interestingly enough, their Australian maps actually show property boundaries in grey; perhaps a lot of the data comes from land titles databases? There don't seem to be any discontinuities along state borders, of the sorts that happen on the borders of European countries, so presumably the data is fairly uniform across Australia.

There is not yet a maps.google.com.au, and searches for Australian locations yield little ("melbourne australia" will get you on the right page, though anything below that, like, say, "northcote australia", a street name or a post code, draws a blank), though if you go to the US, UK or Japanese site and drag, you can get to the wide brown land with green bits around the edges.

There are 3 comments on "I can see my (old) house from here":

Posted by: Andrew

Fri May 19 08:04:22 2006

It includes obscure QLD mining towns (I looked up my old place) so I'd say it's pretty complete.

Posted by: gjw
http://the-fix.org
Fri May 19 12:14:16 2006

It is quite complete (Check out the detail of the Birdsville track around the SA / QLD border - you can't get much more remote than that), but it's really no different from what has been offered on Multimap or Whereis for years now. Well, the property boundaries are nice. And the Google interface is nice. But I don't for the life of me understand why it took them so long to get their hands on the dataset.

Posted by: acb
http://dev.null.org/
Fri May 19 15:18:47 2006

Multimap and its ilk suck dead bunnies through a straw. The window's too small, clicking on arrows to move around is bordering on play-by-mail map navigation, and the area around the window tends to be spammy with ads and promotional links.

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