My neighbors farm surrounds my house and I have permission to kill as many as I want. During WV's extended doe season I shot a big doe on a hump on the hill behind my house from a solid rest off my carport at an guesstimated 300yds.
Later while playing with goggle earth, I discovered while looking at a sat. view of my house; A ruler icon in the tool bar I clicked on it and found I could change miles to yards. I stretched the line out from my carport roof edge to the hump the doe was on and low and behold it read 296yds.
To check accuracy I moved goggle earth to my buddys farm where we had lazer ranged many landmarks and recorded the ranges for future use. The ranges where I had visible land marks, wellsite, medow gate, hayshed, etc. The ranges with goggle earth agreed with the rangefinder to within a few yds. at 3-4-500yd ranges. Needless to say I was amazed.
Any of ya'll tried this yet?

No -but i will check it out...

did it a few times when hunting a new place, just to see how far shots would be before going there for a look.

Once there, I mark the spots on a google-generated map with a range finder.

Cool. Back in the days before laser, the military used to teach "use a map" as one of several range estimation techniques. The better the map, the better the accuracy. Sounds like this is just the modern version - albiet with (perhaps quite) a bit more accuracy - of the same.

Used it for several years, and yes, it is surprisingly accurate

I think a bit of caution would be prudent around hills.

Thanks for posting, I will deffinately be trying that out.

Wow I just measured out the Sacramento Valley range and the 1000 yard pits were 999-1002. I think its more accurate than the pixels I can generate on my laptop.

I am a civil engineer and have been using it for a number of years and the measurements are very close.

I also use the feet measurement.

If you pick "path" you can measure from point to point to point.

I have data collected a point on the ground compared to points collect on google earth and they are within a couple of feet of each other.

I had my GPS running on an alpine hunt and downloaded the track onto Google Earth. The shot across a small alpine valley was a little deceiving so I aimed high and hit where I was aiming. Google said 126yds. It's a good tool. It will help me judge distances better in the future.

The extreme left is where the deer was and the rapid change of direction/ straight line is just below where I shot from. You can't alter Google images so I can't mark those spots. Yes, some areas have better resolution than others!

TK

I've found positons of most landmarks on georeferenced images tend to be within 3 to 10 yards of their indicated positions. I use some high end Trimble GPS units to map or locate points quite regularly. When using every available means to correct those positions, that's about the range of error I typically see. Given the repeatability of a series of GPS readings for a given point, I tend to think my coordinates are slightly more accurate than the maps or photos. That's pretty good, given the distortion, stretching, and tweaking of images and maps to get georeferenced landmarks into their proper locations. Yes, we have some amazing tools available now days.

I haven't tried it with Google Earth, but I have tried it with the freeware USAPhotomaps and the shareware ExpertGPS. Both give similarly accurate results. My problem is that there isn't a whole lot of resolution to Google Earth at my location. The other two choices work off topo and aerial photos.

Not very high resolution at my location either but if you have the right landmarks handy, road edge, barn, fence, creek, big tree in field, or in the example I gave; roof edge to hogback on the hillside, its possible to get mighty close.