Google released its “Streetview” feature on Google Maps today. It is an amazing (free) service that will revolutionise my house hunting efforts. If you are unfamiliar with Google Streetview, it is a add-on feature (to the currently awesome Google Maps product) that allows you to jump down to street level and view photos of almost anywhere you can think of.

Google Streetview Australian Street/Road Coverage

Google Maps is ultra fast vector mapping software that allows you to search the country for streets, roads, parks etc. They also supply a “Satellite View” that allows you to see roof tops and parkland, roadways to sports stadiums.

Earlier in the year (I think this year) Google added street numbers to all the blocks, this added a great amount of win to their already superior service. Every night as we search for real estate, this amazing tool [Google Maps] allows us to find a property, even when the agent doesn’t list the address of said property. We simply look for a unique feature of the house, roof shape, gardens, background landmark or something as simple as the number on the letter box and then we use Google Maps (with Satellite View) to  find it.

Once we locate the block and the address, we used to take a closer look at it from the sky using whereis.com, a Sensis product. The Whereis product used to have far greater zoom ability so we would jump over there. However, not to be outdone, Google (within the last month) upped their resolution and zoom function to an amazingly superior level. You can literally see dogs in backyards, flowers in bloom and even make out the type of material a roof is made of. So forget the Sensis product, it is now (again) too slow, full of ads, and generally an inferior peice of software.

However, today marks another win of epic proportions as Google added the Streetview feature for Australia. We are the third country to receive this awesome technology, after the USA and France!

The photos are generally about 8 months old (I’ve read), and their elite software automatically blurs out faces and number plates. If they happened to miss something, you can report it using a simple form.

Anyway, the product is fantastic. There only seems to be one problem, they forgot the street I live on. I checked our street sign tonight and noticed someone had put a “nofollow” tag on it, I guess that’s why the Google Streetview car skipped us

Something wrong with my META data perhaps?