During its first year Nanaimo's maps looked fairly blurry, but these days 10 centimetres on the ground in Nanaimo equals one pixel on Google Earth – significantly higher resolution than maps covering the rest of the world. Google Earth estimates that about 30 per cent of the world's surface has been mapped, and only 50 per cent of that has resolution that is more detailed than one metre a pixel.

“You can find your house, you can find your boat, you can find your trails,” said Guyllermo Ferrero, Nanaimo's manager of business applications.

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“If there's a tsunami coming, the government's eager to put warnings on the radio, television and newspaper,” he said. “You want the information to be where the readers are. Well, with more than 250 million users of Google Earth, we're one of the major places where people are looking at things.”