Not to turn this blog into a Google love-fest, but their latest acquisition is pretty darn cool. Over the weekend, an annoucement showed up on the Google homepage that they’ve acquired Keyhole, a “3D digital earth pioneer.”

From Keyhole’s Web site:

Keyhole’s groundbreaking EarthStream™ technology combines advanced 3D graphics and network streaming innovations to produce a high performance system that runs on standard PC’s and commodity servers. Both high performance and intuitive to use, Keyhole’s solutions enable anyone to manipulate a rich map of the earth composed of imagery and feature information.

You can read more here.

Google hasn’t announced what it plans to do with Keyhole, but for the time being, you can download a free 7-day trial. It’s sort of GPS, satellite imagery, and cool 3D rendering all rolled into one.

Of course, what really hooked me is that one of the high-resolution cities available is Missoula. Sigh. I can’t hike the M anymore, but it’s still nice to do a virtual fly-by.