Talk about global outreach

I discovered an incredible new travel tool while I was having a tooth crowned recently. My L.A. dentist and I were waiting for my gums to numb when he turned on his computer and asked, “Have you seen this?”

He clicked on an icon and up came Google Earth, which gives you a list of sites to visit for information on a topic and also displays almost any location on the planet in 3-D. Google Earth accesses maps, satellite imagery and aerial photography taken in the last three years. That image can be manipulated using a variety of features: navigational controls for tilting, zooming in and out and moving left or right. You’ll also find a distance calculator; line or route marker; overlay mechanisms that sandwich different images together; and ancillary video and print information from sources such as the National Park Service and the Discovery Channel.

My dentist knows my love of Paris, so he put the Eiffel Tower in the search panel. Suddenly, I saw the Paris landmark from every direction, including above, as he played with the navigator. Then he moved the cursor a fraction of an inch left and there was the Pont d’Iena leading over the River Seine from the Eiffel Tower to the Trocadero. I was just about to ask him to show me the street with my apartment when he started drilling.

I used to think MapQuest was cool, with its useful route-planning capabilities. But 3-D, content-rich Google Earth (www.googleearth.com) blew me through the roof. With it, a traveler looking for a place to stay in most corners of the world can capture an image of a hotel’s street, along with nearby restaurants, shops and tourists attractions. It’s easy to see how far a hotel is from the airport, where beaches are and figure out the roadway system.

I was somewhat familiar with the capabilities of Google Earth because I took a course last year at the Royal Geographical Society in London on adapting computer-generated images and maps for special purposes, such as scientific field work. At the time, it seemed geeky and way beyond me.

But Google Earth has put this technology within reach of ordinary mortals. Like the general Google search engine (www.google.com), it was created in a Silicon Valley garage by a group of computer wizards who received $4.5 million from Sony to get the project off the ground in 2000. They called it Keyhole for the fictional satellite system in Tom Clancy novels.

Keyhole Chief Executive John Hanke, now the director of Google Earth and Maps, told me in a recent phone interview that the imagery used to require extraordinarily powerful computers, making it chiefly the domain of the government.

But the Keyhole people realized that, with the Internet going broadband, almost anyone with a fast connection could call up 3-D images generated by satellites and aerial photography.

“We thought, ‘Wow, wouldn’t it be cool if everyone had access to this stuff?’ ” Hanke said.

In spring 2003, CNN used Google Earth to create detailed pictures of the war in Iraq. The Keyhole URL appeared on the images, and so many users called it up that the system crashed.

Meanwhile Google, the 8-year-old company virtually around the corner from Keyhole in Mountain View, Calif., was shopping for new products and applications to add to the search engine that revolutionized the Internet and put a new verb in the dictionary (“to google”). Google, which Wall Street analysts value at $100 billion, just spent $1.65 billion to buy the video browser YouTube Inc. Among the other innovations Google engineers explored were several geo-browsing systems.

But it was Google co-founder Sergey Brin who found Keyhole, demonstrating its capabilities at a meeting by showing everyone at the table the streets where they lived. In a matter of days, Google had bid on Keyhole.

It was an attractive offer. The start-up needed an infusion of cash, brain power and technology to take Keyhole to the next level. “Besides, we’d heard rumors that Google had great food and gave employees massages,” Hanke said, laughing.

Keyhole joined the Google family in July 2005 as Google Earth. Hanke said 100 million users launched the geo-browser in the year after it made its debut.

It covers the whole world with medium-resolution imagery and about 20% of the Earth’s land mass in high resolution, which gives users 1,500-foot aerial views of many big cities and geographical features.

To run Google Earth, certain computer specifications are required, including a 3-D graphics card. But there is no charge to download the application.

In little more than a year, Google Earth has proved its attractions to individual users. They spend long hours tinkering with it and access the Google Earth Community function to report what they find in its vast store of imagery: a ship on fire off Iceland, spreading oil spills, a scale model of a top-secret military installation in a disputed region between India and China.

Discoveries by average users are being reported on the Google Earth Blog (www.gearthblog.com), started in August 2005, by Frank Taylor, a former NASA scientist. Taylor says more than 500,000 readers a month participate in the blog, which has no connection to Google besides its use of the company’s advertising program.

“Google Earth is remarkable, because people who use the application are getting access to imagery and other data that would previously have cost them millions,” Taylor wrote to me in an e-mail. “It has a very intuitive browsing interface and features that make it possible to create and share content.”

When I told Hanke I was planning a trip to Nepal, he told me how to use Google Earth to get a preview of tourist sights in the Katmandu Valley, annotated by other users who have been there recently.

I also can prepare for hiking a path in the mountains by following the route virtually with Google Earth.

It’s mind-blowing. And to think I found out about it at the dentist.

susan.spano@latimes.com