...once someone else had thought about it and executed them in an intuive manner

...like Google Earth?

Terravision existed prior (https://www.dailydot.com/debug/google-earth-sued-patent-infr...)

They probably got it from Snow Crash. The oldest surviving globes of the known world date back to 1492 according to Wikipedia and the Greeks probably created their own variations a few millennia ago.

Turtles, turtles, turtles! All the way down.

Which was Googles version of NASA WorldWind?

Keyhole EarthViewer predates WorldWind and is what became Google Earth after Google acquired Keyhole.

Cool, did not know that. Apparently the idea was less novel than I thought.

you just described the definition of good design

It was so natural and intuitive that Youtube's version STILL doesn't compare to how good, fast, seemless, and unintrusive it is done on the porn sites, years later.

It's actually patented by a porn site and YouTube pays them for the licensed use of it

Source? I don't see any possible way a thumbnail playing on hover is patentable.

Can’t find a source for my actual claim but here is a similar patent that Google claimed themselves: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9363579B2/en

... like searching for text on the internet