Why is Jerusalem blurry on Google Maps?
1997 law makes it harder to sell high res imagery, but that could soon be revised
Update 2021 — still blurry but US is loosening the restrictions so could become more clear soon.
My cousin is traveling to Jerusalem and asked for the best places to go. I lived there for 4 months so I happily wrote up a list. As I was trying to find a certain hotel that served awesome lemonade I zoomed all the way into Google Maps and found… it was totally blurry?
That didn’t make sense, so I reloaded the page, no change. I then started googling and found that all of Israel is intentionally blurry.
This is Google Maps all the way zoomed into another important cultural site, the Topkapi Palace in Turkey which I also visited in that same time. The resolution is about 50 ft to an inch. You can see a lot of detail.
And this is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The resolution is half at 100 ft to an inch, but worse, it is intentionally blurred out.
