In the beginning, it was a lot harder to find your house or neighborhood on TerraServer than it is now. Instead of being able to enter exact coordinates or an exact address, you had to keep clicking approximately, followed by lots of
scrolling until you either found what you were looking for or gave up. Now, however, you can plug your
address right into the site. Though with certain locations (like my
school, for example) it's easy to pick out buildings, the images are kind of
blurry, so if TerraServer tells you that the pin is on your address, you may have to take its' word for it.
One of the cool features of the site (now located at http://terraserver.homeadvisor.msn.com/) is the archive of Famous Places. This is mostly a collection of stadiums (including Lambeau Field, Giants Stadium, and the Metrodome), several ships of various importants (including the Queen Mary and the USS Texas), and historical sites (the Hoover Dam, Kennedy Space Center, and World Trade Center, to name a few). You can also see the White House, the Pentagon, and Central Park.
TerraServer was created by Microsoft as a research project for developing advanced database technology, according to the site's FAQ. It runs on an SQL server, with Hewlett-Packard hardware. Despite all this, it contains no evil.