Google Pro has a lot better imagery. For Google Earth there is an API that you can do some pretty swift GIS data stuff with. I'm not familiar with what you're using at all but Space Imaging in Thornton, CO has some pretty cool tools (sort of civillian company).

One other thing about Google is that what you see with search tools are only part of the capability. With the Google appliance suite you can put your data up for searching and it (and the software) can start doing analysis and drawing relationships. That gets your easy to use database.

When you're dealing with content rather than images or geographic locations context aware searching is important. There is another similar technology to Google for context aware searching being modeled by a company called Hakia. It uses heurestic semantics and the more questions you ask the better it gets at searching.

Sorry I didn't understand.