Am I dreaming or did someone recently say on this forum that they had successfully googled a Paris address and gotten the map AND the satelite photo? Can't figure out what I'm doing wrong. Can we use www.google.com/ or must it be www.google.fr/? Thanks.

I don't know about goggle (or even google), but I think this is the site you want:

http://www.pagesjaunes.fr/

Over on the right side enter Paris for the "ville" and then enter your street address for map and pictures.

You may be thinking of Google Earth.

I agree that the French Yellow Pages is a reliable alternative.

I don't think google does europe yet (U.S. stuff is at http://maps.google.com/), but mappy.com certainly does. Enter your address and after the map comes up look for a slider near the top left side called "transparency". You can gradually fade the map into a satellite picture and back, and the two should correspond precisely. It is very, very cool and works for 63 european towns, according to their website.

OMG! The sattelite photos of Paris are great! I particularly enjoy going up around 500 ft and then "flying" along the Seine. (Doing this for Venice is also pretty cool).

Here's the free download:

http://earth.google.com/

You can superimpose street names, cafes, and any other extra info you want on the sattelite photos. They self-update as you "fly" along.

Note: Very old computers (5yrs+ ??) can't handle the software.

My boss told me about that Google thing with satellite photos, which sounded sort of creepy to me as he said they had photos of everyone's home. However, when he showed it to me and we put in my address and some of my prior homes, the photos were not close at all and didn't really look like much of anything.

OMG! I can almost see my front steps!

Christina,
The high res photos are only for highly populated areas - other places are low resolution

With excecptions (like the Grand Canyon which is in high resolution).

My 17 year old son and I sat up half the night locating things like Stonehenge, the Hollywood sign, the Pyramids and identifying all the hotels we could along the strip in Vegas. Kind of like potato chips, we kept saying "This is the last one," and then "Okay just one more."

The mappy.com site is great! After you get the transparancy on the right side of the screen , if you click "visits" it lists all the major "attractions" in the area and gives their addresses..also ATM, and various other shops!