Google’s purchase of Keyhole (announced yesterday) is, I think, the most significant thing they’ve done of late. Google desktop, gmail, groups, news, blogger, froogle are all sidelines, they are mere content providers compared to this.

Keyhole make a product called EarthViewer, which is one of the coolest applications I’ve ever seen – it makes extensive use of the high end graphics cards found in PC’s to map satellite images onto a virtual Earth, adding topographical information into the bargain and then overlaying information about roads, rivers, gas stations, ad infinitum.

Google’s aquisition puts it in a position where it can provide geographically attuned search results – imagine, for example, that you wish to see, at a glance, how many people in the USA have a weblog that mentions “I voted for Kerry“. Google now has the potential to provide such information overlayed directly onto the USA as seen from several kilometers above.

Google is currently rich from the proceeds of it’s IPO, so it is now in a position where it can make strategic purchases the like of which it could only dream of before. With Keyhole, Google has bought itself into a position where it could introduce a completely new way of presenting and interpreting searches results – the combined data from all Google’s other ventures now has a serious and highly attractive presentation engine that could put Google months, if not years ahead of it’s rivals.

Earlier I called Keyhole “one of the coolest applications I’ve ever seen” for good reason – it has competition (which emerged only a few weeks ago) in the form of a NASA led project which is now hosted on sourceforge, namely Worldwind.

Aside from being several years of development behind Earthviewer, Worldwind’s greatest advantage (that it is open source, and free) is also it’s greatest downfall. Interest in Worldwind has been so great that the servers which provide the satellite images from NASA have been down due to overloading. Nasa (and others) are working to remedy this at present, however, with Google’s legendary server farms this is a problem which is unlikely to befall the great search-monster.

Google have immediately slashed the price of the end user version of EarthViewer, and I will not be surprised if it lowers this still further (to zero) once full integration with it’s other services offers significant economies of scale, and advertising opportunities hitherto unimagined.

Virtual billboards here we come.

In the mean time, developers are of course invited to get involved on sourceforge and help develop Worldwind.