TerraServer.com

» see terraserver.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

There were two TerraServers, and this site already buried the famous one. Microsoft's version was a 1998 demonstration of how much aerial photography you could stuff into a SQL Server database, and it died in 2012. This is the other half, the commercial company that kept the trademark and the domain, and outlived its sibling by eight years.

Both came out of the same project. Aerial Images Inc was the partner that supplied the pictures, buying satellite imagery from Sovinformsputnik on the Russian side and from Orbital Imaging, later GeoEye, on the American one. The agreement ended in January 2000 and the thing split down the middle. Microsoft went off to build TerraServer-USA and then Microsoft Research Maps, while Aerial Images kept terraserver.com and ran it as a shop. In May 2002 the company sold off the Aerial Images assets and renamed itself after the website, operating out of Raleigh, North Carolina. PrecisionHawk, a drone analytics firm, bought it in March 2015.

What it sold was access. A subscription ran a few hundred dollars a year against the thousands that the big imagery brokers wanted, and that gap was the entire reason the service mattered. Anyone with a question about a building in a conflict zone and no institutional budget went to TerraServer first.

~ the record ~

~ the refund that gives the date ~

On 18 January 2020 the imagery stopped loading. There was no notice and no email. For roughly two weeks the site simply failed, and subscribers worked out among themselves that something had happened. The announcement, when it came, was not an announcement. It was a refund policy.

The replacement homepage was a short FAQ, and one line in it is the death certificate: "We'll refund all active subscriptions and provide a refund pro-rated to January 18, 2020, the date the service was last available." Accounts would be deactivated on 3 February and billing would cease the same day. Refunds would start then and take five to ten business days. Imagery you had already downloaded went with it: "You will no longer have access to previously downloaded imagery from TerraServer.com." Future orders were to go through PrecisionHawk's sales staff, one image at a time, with no subscription on offer. The domain does not resolve at all today, on either the bare name or the www form.

~ the people who lost a tool ~

Vice got the story on 4 February and found the users easily, because they were the sort of people who post about their sources. Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat called it a real blow to investigators who could not afford more expensive options. Louisa Loveluck, then the Washington Post's Baghdad bureau chief, had been using it on Iraq, and a nonproliferation researcher at the James Martin Center had been using it on missile sites. None of them were the customer PrecisionHawk wanted. Its replacement arrangement quotes imagery order by order, with no subscription tier at all.

I work on computer vision for drones in Ankara, which means the layer TerraServer sold sits underneath my working day. The imagery available now is better and there is a great deal more of it. What one person with one question has to pay for a recent picture of a specific roof went up rather than down when this closed.

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