Ok, Google Earth is totally cool, you (i.e. I) could easily waste hours on it, but it sure is tough to find some things.
We have a French foreign exchange student coming over in a couple of months, and we've emailed her parents, and they've emailed back, saying that they live on Rue de So-and-so and you can find it on Google Earth near the Louvre. It was as good an excuse as any to install Google Earth, and so after installing, I type "Louvre" into the search field, and get "Your search returned no results" ( hey, isn't the Louvre kind of a famous place?). Ok, I type "Louvre, Paris, France" and still get "no results." Ok, I type in "paris france" and we at least fly across the Atlantic and get fairly close.
I finally try "The Louvre", and finally we find out where the place is (side note: for kicks, if you use Google Translate to translate "louvre" from English to French and back again, you end up with "the hood"...).
Then I zoomed in and out and scanned around for the street, and couldn't find it. I typed the street name into the search field, and got "no results." I find through the FAQ that many streets are not yet searchable. So I google for a street map of Paris, and find one, and use that info to find the street on Google Earth (about a mile away from the Louvre, I haven't yet checked to see if the GE measuring tool will do kilometers - did I mention that the Google Earth measuring tool is pretty cool too?).
What was cool was that I could make and save to a file "placemarks" on the map, so we could email back "here's our house", "here's our school", and "here's how our kids walk to school (and your kid for the time she's here)." I did find an already existing placemark for the school, but it was off on the wrong street :-(
I also found some inconsistencies between Google Maps and Google Earth, like when I tried to find one of my favorite parks (a short hike with gorgeous views, and optional longer hike), and found it on Google maps, but it was not marked on Google Earth. Also odd was that I could not find the park in Google maps by searching for the park name, but there it is labeled on the map (not indexed yet, I suppose, just like the street names in France).
Also cool was that when you make placemarks, you can add comments, and share them with the entire "Google community." Though I don't think I'll be sharing the location of my house any time soon :-)
