It's a fact of projecting the surface of a sphere onto a 2D plane. You can't see every side of the earth at once in Google Earth. Even the globe you look at in Google Earth is distorted since it's still a 3D projection into 2D. Looking at it from the equator, countries at the equator will appear larger relative to countries near the poles.
Anyway! This site is really cool.
I think 'Natural Earth' is most satisfying to me subjectively. Looks close enough to what we're all raised with, and seems to have a good balance of various types of distortion.
Comments
It's a fact of projecting the surface of a sphere onto a 2D plane. You can't see every side of the earth at once in Google Earth. Even the globe you look at in Google Earth is distorted since it's still a 3D projection into 2D. Looking at it from the equator, countries at the equator will appear larger relative to countries near the poles.
Anyway! This site is really cool. I think 'Natural Earth' is most satisfying to me subjectively. Looks close enough to what we're all raised with, and seems to have a good balance of various types of distortion.