The Good And Bad of Google Terrain

27th November 2007 | Category: Maps

Google updated their map with a hideous UI for toggling hybrid/satellite, but more interestingly, they added a new button - “Terrain”. The concept behind this is quite neat, but the implementation seems a bit lacking. The terrain is visually distinctive, but goes a bit too far with the blandness in color and the removal of city/street data. Overall, it reminds me of Google Moon or Google Mars. Seems they also lost their sense of humor and the moon cheese view is no longer available.

Maps-For-Free has done a much better implementation of topography/terrain data which is much more visually appealing and actually has me almost as excited as when I saw Google Maps for the first time. You can see a PropertyMaps implementation of the maps-for-free data in our Relief Map. The problem with this data is the zoom level restrictions, which Google does not have. Screenshots of the two are below:

PropertyMaps.com Relief Map