10 amazing Google Earth add-ons

Maps from centuries past, paths of satellites whizzing by, global warming brought to life: User-created Google Earth mashups present a dizzying array of information in a new and imaginative graphical form.

By Alex and James Turnbull

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A World of Information

Google Earth puts an entire planet's worth of useful, relevant, and just plain weird content at your fingertips. As you saw in "The Strangest Sights in Google Earth," some things in this world are simply out of this world.

To find such wonderful sights, you can call on a large library of Earth add-ons. As authors of the Web site Google Sightseeing, we see a lot of these add-ons and collections.

What follows is a list of 10 of our favorites. Note that some of the links go straight to .kml or .kmz files, which Google Earth can read. When you open these files, however, the content may not immediately display; in that case, look in the Temporary Places folder in the Places pane.

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