Explore, Search and Discover

Use your mouse, keyboard or trackball to navigate the world. Grab the image with your mouse to move around. The navigation compass allows you to manipulate the view in multiple ways.

Drag the right slider up and down to zoom in and out. Drag the top slider left and right to tilt the view. To rotate the image, spin the navigator’s on-screen wheel.  

Whether you are looking for a specific address,  the intersection of two streets, a city, a state, a zip code, or a country, just type it into the "Fly To" box and hit Search.

Google Earth features integrated Google Maps searching that allows you to find businesses in any area.

For example type in "hotels in San Francisco" in the search box and hit the search button. Google Earth will fly you to a viewpoint showing 10 search result icons on the map. The search result links are present on the left panel. Click on the icon to get more details about the business.

Click the "Directions" tab to get precise driving directions, as well as a fly-through preview of your route.

Enter the starting and ending addresses and click on the search button. For directions to a business, click on the "From Here" or "To Here" link in any balloon window. Click the "Play" button located under the directions and Google Earth will fly you along the route.

When exploring a location, you can turn on various layers of mapping information such as roads, shopping and services, geographic features, 3D buildings, gas, and food and lodging, among others.

Click on any of the icons, and you’ll see a bubble with more information about that place.

Find rich multimedia information from the web community and popular sources like National Geographic. Explore the left sidebar and look for the Geographic Web and Featured Content layers

With Google Earth, you can see 3D buildings from the ground up in many places around the world. Tilt the screen to see the buildings in 3D. Similarly, the terrain is also mapped in 3D, meaning you can see mountains, valleys and canyons in vivid detail.

Just double click a Google Earth file (.KML or .KMZ) that you found on the web or received from your friend to view it.

When you open a file, it will show up under your temporary places. Save it to My Places folder if you’d like to re-visit it at a later date.

Want to revisit your search results? Save them to the My Places folder with custom icons and descriptions, and share them with your Google Earth-using friends. These are saved as Placemarks in the form of Google Earth files.

Google Earth allows you to print, save and email your images/views. For instance, if you want to email a certain point of interest to a friend, you can send it as a placemark that can be opened in Google Earth.

Until now, Google Earth has let you zoom in from outer space to view our planet. With Earth’s new Sky feature, you can turn that perspective around and explore the wonders of the heavens.

Learn more