Google Street View now available nationwide

 

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Posted on 10 Mar 2010 at 11:40

As of Thursday 11th March, you’ll be able to take a virtual walking tour of the entire UK with Google Maps. Until now, only a limited number of roads have been photographed by Google’s fleet of Street View camera cars, but the new imagery covers an extra 210,000 miles of public road, both rural and urban.

Head to Google Maps and you’ll be able to drag the little 'pegman' onto the map to see 360-degree panoramas of places as far North as Shetland and as far South as Penzance; from Pembrokeshire in the West of Wales to Ipswich in the East of England or over the sea to Northern Ireland - and many places in between.

Street View was launched in the UK in March 2009 and covered just 25 cities. By increasing availability to cover almost all of the country, the UK joins countries like Spain, France, Italy and the US, which already have nationwide coverage in Street View.

New findings from YouGov reveal how people use Street View. It shows almost two thirds have used Street View to find out where they're going and get directions. One third have used it to look at places in other countries and a fifth have used it for house-hunting.

Of course, there’s the potential for Street View to be used for illicit activites, with many people worried that burglars might look for potential targets and even security weaknesses. As ever, Street View contains only images that are already visible from public roads and blurs both faces and number plates If you don’t want your house (or yourself or your car) to be visible on Street View, you can use the 'report a problem' tool. This can also be used to flag problem where faces or number plates have been missed.

If you find that the Street View car has missed your road, don’t worry as Google is planning to revisit any areas that were inaccessible at the time later on. You can find out where the camera cars are currently driving on the Street View website.

Street View has been used for some imaginative purposes including one Google employee who proposed to his girlfriend via Street View. Police in US even managed to use Street View to find the location of a kidnapped child.

Author: Jim Martin