Google Maps removes clouds, clears up view in 700-trillion pixel upgrade

Or 73 sq meters per pixel if you spread it out evenly over the whole surface area of the Earth.

To put that in perspective, the average journalist has to pass 1 maths class in college, which is the number of stars in our solar system.

Welcome to Australian journalism.

I would be extremely surprised if they were actually doing that, because a lot of effort has already been put into doing it a better (and more interesting) way: cloud detection and mosaicing. Landsat captures several spectral bands, and due to atmospheric transmission rates, some bands can act as really good cloud filters [0].

This is what they're actually using, or something very close to it, for clouds [1].

[0] http://landsat.usgs.gov/ldcm_vs_previous.php

[1] https://github.com/USGS-EROS/espa-cloud-masking

Was about to say the same. There are still clouds.

Yeah, it was a bit. I took it to be emphasising how although it's a huge number by natural standards, humans do some silly things with numbers at times so we get desensitised to their scale.