Google brings historical Street View to Google Earth

Google Earth is celebrating its 20th birthday, and to mark the occasion, Google is bringing historical Street View imagery to the service. In a blog post, Google said the anniversary update allows users to "explore the wonders of the planet from even more viewpoints, whether it’s a bird’s eye view or at street level."

From today, when you load up Google Earth you’ll see a new option for historical imagery in the toolbar, which allows you to move back and forth between now and years gone by. Seemingly predicting that you might be overwhelmed by the prospect of having the entire planet at your fingertips, Google offers some suggestions. You might want to look at a timelapse of Berlin between 1943 and the modern day, in which time the Berlin Wall was built and fell, before the city underwent huge ur...