On May 1st of 2011, President Barack Obama announced that Osama Bin Laden had been killed by U.S. troops in Abbottabad, Pakistan (although, of course, the news was all over Twitter long before Obama made his official statement). Alongside news sites, the search engines have made news information more accessible by moving data to prominent “spotlight” sections on sites like the Yahoo home page, YouTube, and more. Additionally, Google has multiple sets of images of the Abbottabad region, some of which are available now and some of which will be released in the near future.
The first set of images was taken in May of 2010 during scheduled high-resolution imaging of the region. These images were scheduled for a release in the near future, during the next “periodic imagery update” to Google Earth. However, given the prominence of the Abbottabad region in recent news, Google has released these images early via a KML code file that contains an advanced preview of the high-resolution images. These images will be made available on the live version of both Google Earth and Google Maps once the next periodic update has occurred, which will also update images in various other regoins of the world.
The second set of Abbottabad images was taken the morning of May 2nd, 2011. These images are of lower resolution and have already been released to media outlets. These images will be made available to the general public via the Google Earth Historical Imagery utility sometime in the near future.
[via the Google LatLong Blog]
