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Google Earth's New Tool Lets You Measure Distance Between Anything On Earth (theverge.com) 57

Posted by BeauHD from the as-the-crow-flies dept.
Google Earth's new Measure tool is rolling out to Android and Chrome devices that will let you measure the distance and area of things on the map. An iOS version is said to be "coming soon." The Verge reports: With the tool, users can measure the distance between two points or the surface area of a selected chunk of the map. (Now you can finally find out how far your house is from the North Pole.) Users aren't limited to simple squares, either. The Measure tool will let you select the borders of an area so it's easier to measure irregularly shaped objects like parks, buildings, or even states and countries.
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Google Earth's New Tool Lets You Measure Distance Between Anything On Earth More

Google Earth's New Tool Lets You Measure Distance Between Anything On Earth

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  • Huh? That's already been a thing since forever (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 25, 2018 @07:19PM (#56845400)

    Click the little ruler in the top bar. I can't remember that ever not being there and know for a fact it's been there for bare-minimum 5 years.

    • You could do distance measurement in google earth before apps were apps, from what I can remember.

      Are they just taking the piss here, or is some wet-behind-the-ears kids actually thinking a feature they just found is new because they just found it?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Probably just """new""" in the sense of "new on phones". Like how when Candy Crush came out, every idiot who had been too dumb to figure out how to use a computer until Apple dumbed it all down for them instantly became amazed and obsessed with a game that had been around for 20 years.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Apparently the distance between my "equipment" and the "equipment" of Kate Upton (supermodel) is 1 million miles?

    • Re:Huh? That's already been a thing since forever (Score:5, Insightful)

      by johannesg ( 664142 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2018 @03:57AM (#56846588)

      Click the little ruler in the top bar. I can't remember that ever not being there and know for a fact it's been there for bare-minimum 5 years.

      But now it's on mobile!

  • Lol (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Google does something that cartographers and map hackers have been doing for a very long time, news at 11.

  • It's not new is it? (Score:3)

    by sentiblue ( 3535839 ) on Monday June 25, 2018 @08:27PM (#56845668)
    I never tried checking the area... but I can click two points and measure distance and was able to do this on browsers a long time ago. This "new" thing must be only on mobile OS?

  • Really? (Score:3)

    by meglon ( 1001833 ) on Monday June 25, 2018 @10:28PM (#56846024)

    Google Earth's New Tool Lets You Measure Distance Between Anything On Earth

    How about.... my hand from my cup of coffee? How about now? And now? Now?

    • For that we don't use google earth, we use all the hidden web cams around you.

    • When I read that stupid-ass headline, my first thought was to ask Beau how far apart my ass and balls are.

    • When Google Maps was fairly new, I trolled a friend of mine while on the phone in the work parking lot. I was running late and complained that Maps showed an empty parking space which was currently filled.

      I was right, but so was Maps -- IF you looked at the date of the picture, which you couldn't then. Still, it made for a great excuse for being 10-minutes late!

  • It's amazing that it is now newsworthy when an app or website gets a feature that the desktop program has had since the very beginning.

    Given the ability to measure was one of the reasons why many people used Google Earth in the first place it makes me wonder WTF the app writers were thinking taking so long to implement one of the most basic and standard features their software has always had.

    What next, Office 365 gets the ability to change font size?

  • C'mon folks, us cavemen used to have to code this stuff ourselves back when the earth was still cooling. Remember Microsoft's Terraserver? Back then you could write your own front-end for it (well, you had to if you didn't want to consume the data thru Microsoft's site as there was no API). We'd calculate distance between points using Great Circle Distance with the Mean Earth Radius (6371 km) as r [wikipedia.org] in the formula, which gives you pretty good results and is my guess as to what Google's using to calculate

  • I've always wished there was a way to take an arbitrary area in Google maps and then overlay it over some other area on Google maps with a correction for the difference in projection so as to easily compare the sizes of areas.

  • Damn (Score:2)

    by XB-70 ( 812342 )
    It's still 4".

  • The answer is almost always "not far enough"

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