Google Earth up to date?

I was looking on Google Earth recently, and deccided to look at my dad's house which is out in the country. It google earth says that the image was taken in to 2004, well my only problem with that is in 1999 my dad built a house and some other small building and cleared a massive amount of land. Well the satalite image shows that none of that as being there, there are even somethings that are shown that we know where there in the early 90's that are not there now. So my thing is, how recent are the images really? I also looked in a few other places, where I grew up and places I am very familar with and found alot of inconsistances. They were also said to be taken in 2004, but things were there in 2004 that are not in the images. I was just wondering if anyone else has noticed this?

Google Earth is not up-to-date, and I have no clue how far out it is. Because I park on the road under a large red maple, I can't tell if the image of the area I live in is recent or not. Being all daylight images, my wife would be at work, and her car wouldn't be in the driveway.

Also, my dad and I recently bought some hunting land up north. I printed off a picture from Virtual Earth, and the pic shows a one acre race track that the former owner's kids made for atvs, when you walk to where it should be, it is completely overgrown.

Edit to add: I just looked up our land with Google Earth, and it doesn't have near the resolution as Virtual Earth does.

[edit on 29-10-2007 by Mekanic]

It really depends on where you are looking. I'm pretty sure they are constantly updating different areas. The bigger the city, the more often it is updated.

And I'm with Mekanic, Microsoft's VE does seem to have higher res images generally. Plus, they seem to have more up-to-date images.

Have you checked out www.flashearth.com...? They have it where you can switch between several different earth imaging services, like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Ask, etc... So if one is outdated, another might be fairly recent. It's pretty cool, especially if you're looking in an area that has undergone a lot of change in a relatively short amount of time. You can see the evolution.