Very few of the buildings could serve a residential purpose, so don’t try to find plans for your next home among them.  Instead, these buildings are real-life research centers, office buildings, or tennis centers, to name a few examples.  And to be honest, not all of them are visually interesting.

That could be a good thing, though, considering the current lawsuit against Frank Gehry; the BigHorn Home Improvement Center, which is described on the Google Earth Blog, sounds (and looks) vastly superior to MIT’s Stata Center.  Frank Taylor states that Home Improvement Center “uses extensive daylighting and natural ventilation cooling systems to lower energy demand.”

Also, “The center has a roof-integrated photovoltaic solar power system, the largest commercial solar array in the state, and sells unused electricity back to the utility company.”

This building (and the 84 others) are all included in the Department of Energy’s High Performance Buildings Database.  If nothing else, Google’s models should at least provide a bit of publicity for them.

RK Stewart, president of the AIA, seems extraordinarily pleased about the arrangement.  “I’m ecstatic to announce our partnership with Google Earth to launch these new layers in celebration of our the 150th anniversary,” he wrote on the Official Google Blog.  Stewart also encouraged users “to explore architecture’s most popular structures and take away some ideas to help enhance the communities we live in.”

That may not be practical – I’m not sure how many rural towns can pony up for their very own version of the Sydney Opera House.  Still, there’s a lot of neat stuff out there, and the new Google Earth layers provide a great way to find it.  As Stewart noted, many of the points of interest on those layers even qualify as “America’s Favorite Architecture . . .  (as selected though a national poll announced earlier this year).”

For still more information on the project, users can turn to a YouTube video posted by “AIA150Google.”  The clip gives some background and technical information, but, to be honest, your time is probably better spent looking at the actual buildings.

The new layers will allow you to look at 150 different structures, “including many with just created 3-D models of the buildings, ballparks, bridges, and memorials that characterize architecture in the eyes of Americans.”  So have at it.  Just don’t set your heart on building another Thomas Jefferson Memorial.

Just like many websites that try to monetize to early, Microsoft has already placed test billboard images on top of buildings in the beta launch of their product.

By Microsoft placing the billboards in their images they change the focus of what people talk about from the quality of the product to the stupid billboards. If they have no users the billboards do not matter, and what is the point of going to that much effort to gather the data if you are going to put fake billboards on it right out of the gate?

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Aaron Wall is the author of SEO Book, an ebook offering the latest
search engine optimization tips and strategies. From SEOBook.com Aaron
gives away free advice and search engine optimization tools. He is a
regular conference speaker, partner in Clientside SEM, and runs the
Threadwatch community.

For instance, if you search for “flower” you will see 2 pictures at the top of the search results of flowers.

It also includes the words, “See 1,180,000 image results for flower ” … clicking that link will run an image search for the word flower.

This may be in a beta rollout because most search terms do not display images. Here are a few more that do:

Rich Ord is the CEO of iEntry, Inc. which publishes over 200 websites and email newsletters.

Rich also publishes his blog WebProBlog which focuses on internet business and marketing trends.