Yesterday we quickly mentioned that Google was set to launch Google Earth 4.3 sometime in the evening and we outlined some of the features that it was going to have. The new version has launched and now that we've seen it in action, we decided more needed to be said.

Several weeks ago it was rumored that Street View would be incorporated into the new release of Google Earth. Google has confirmed that in fact there will be a Street View feature available with Google Earth 4.3 which is set to launch this evening at around 8 PM.

If you visit Google today, you'll notice the usual logo has been replaced with the one you see pictured to the right.  It's Google's 9th Birthday, and they're celebrating! While there are actually several dates that could be considered Google's birthday, clearly they acknowledge today, September 27th as their official birthday, the day that they became incorporated and their name was officially Google inc.

Flying around space and zooming in on over 100 million stars and 200 million galaxies is now possible thanks to Google.

Google Earth 4.1 Beta is now available for everyone to download. As of right now there is no information posted on what’s new in version 4.1, but both the Ogle Earth and Google Earth blogs have shed some light on new features that they have found:

The whole idea behind Google Earth is pretty amazing. The entire world is at your fingertips.  It originally started as a project called Earth Viewer and was developed by a company called Keyhole.  Google acquired Keyhole in 2004, and from there it became Google Earth.

There have been many startup services out there that introduced the concept of creating your own mashups using Google Maps.  One of those mashups that we’ve written about is called “Wayfaring” which was a great way to plan trips, or create a journal of a trip that you already took.

Last Friday, people started to notice that Google replaced the satellite imagery of New Orleans with those taken before hurricane Katrina had devastated the city. Both blogs and news sites alike were claiming that Google was trying to rewrite the history of what happened in New Orleans. Here is what Google’s response was: