Spot What Has Changed on the Ground: How Google Earth's Detect Change Tool Helps African Businesses
A new housing estate goes up on the edge of town. A farm becomes a warehouse park. A patch of veld becomes a shopping centre.
For businesses that plan around where people live and work, these changes matter. But finding them has usually meant flicking between old satellite images and scanning large areas by eye.
Google has introduced Detect Change, an experimental tool in Google Earth on the web. It compares two years and highlights where the ground has changed, so teams can see new development without hunting for it.
How Detect Change Works
Using the tool takes a few steps. You pick a baseline year and a target year between 2017 and 2025, draw a polygon around the area you care about, and create a layer. Google Earth then adds a heatmap at 10-metre resolution, with brighter yellow areas showing the biggest changes.
What makes it more than a before-and-after photo is the data behind it. Google's model doesn’t just compare colours in images. It combines several kinds of Earth observation data:
Optical and multispectral imagery: Picks up changes in surface and vegetation.
Thermal data: Helps tell bare soil and plants apart from tar and concrete roofs.
Radar: Sees through clouds and haze and detects physical changes on the surface.
As a result, the heatmap can show changes not obvious in normal imagery. Google recommends checking results by zooming in, opening historical imagery for the past two years, and using Street View for a virtual ground-level view.
Detect Change is available on Google Earth's Standard plan, with more capabilities on professional plans.
Why This Matters for African ISPs, Fleets and Planners
African towns and cities can change quickly. New estates, complexes, and business parks appear, and the maps and plans businesses rely on don't always keep up.
A tool that highlights new development can help:
ISPs and telecoms: Spot new estates and developments early, so network and sales teams can plan where demand is likely to come next.
Transport and logistics: See where new residential and commercial areas are growing, so delivery zones and routes can be reviewed before complaints start.
Planners and property teams: Check a site's recent history and the surrounding development before committing to a visit.
As Google notes, the tool is a starting point. The heatmap shows where to look. Imagery, Street View and, where needed, a site visit confirm what has actually changed.
Partnering with a Local Google Maps Specialist
Knowing where things are changing is only useful if your systems can act on it. That is where 28East comes in.
As a Google Maps Premier Partner and Google Cloud partner, we focus on maps and location. For ISPs, our network coverage maps put instant feasibility checks on your website, with results from multiple fibre network operators in one request.
For enterprises, we offer local procurement, billing and support for Google Maps Platform, along with help implementing and optimising it.
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