Can I Find My House?

A posting from The Earth Is Square blog got me thinking about the availability and accuracy of Australian address locations.

Whenever I install a product, or start to use a web application, with capability to find addresses, one of the first things I do is to type in my own address. This starts my Out-Of-The-Box-Experience (OOTBE). The second is usually to inspect the quality of the imagery displayed and when it was captured.

Here I'll record whether or not I can find my house in Brisbane (Australia) using a number of alternatives. For my test I just type in my house number and street, my suburb, my state and my country.

The results are:

• ArcGIS Explorer (Build 500): Find Address task has no option to set Country to be Australia
• ERDAS TITAN 2009 Viewer 9.3.1: My house was not found
• Google Earth 4.3.7284.3916 (beta): Found my house (imagery looks to be within last year or two)
• Google Maps: Found my house (street view image from about 10 months ago)
• Information Queensland: Found my house using the Property radio button (imagery not available when zoomed in)
• Microsoft Virtual Earth: Found my house (or at least was within about 50 metres of it; imagery from more than two years ago)
  

At this stage I'll tend to use Google Maps when my requirement is simply to find and view an Australian address.