Computer Business Review Online (www.cbronline.com) announced on October 28 that the search engine giant Google Inc (www.google.com) has paid an undisclosed sum to acquire Keyhole Corp (www.keyhole.com), a Mountain View, California-based digital mapping company and a supplier of online satellite maps that allow users to zoom down to street level to specific locations.
Keyhole's system is built on a multi-terabyte database with trillions of bits of mapping data collected from satellites and airplanes. The purchase allows Google to match rivals such as Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN, which offer online mapping services of their own using detailed drawings that allows users to zoom down to street-level scale.
Jonathan Rosenberg, Google's vice president of product management, said that with Keyhole one can fly like a superhero from his computer at home to a street corner somewhere else in the world, or find a local hospital, map a road trip or measure the distance between two points.
