Maggie's Farm

You'll want Google Earth installed, of course. It's an easy install, then I have you make a couple of changes in the Options so it works its best.  Download link and tweaks are on the site.

You can pick out your spots of interest from either viewing the video tours or just looking over the database pics and then clicking on the GE link.  You might want to do the tours, though, as they'll give you an idea how far out in the boonies the spot is, which in general will be the tougher spots to find info on — and thus the more appreciated.

When you get to the spot in Google Earth, open the 'Layers' area on the lower-left if it isn't, select 'Photos' and 'Gallery'.  If nothing informative pops up, click on every box and hope for the best.

Assuming this thing is a couple steps beyond the boonies, be grateful if any markers show up.  Even then, most of them will just be clueless observations and guesses ("Chinese Stonehenge?", "UFO landing site?", etc), but you might get lucky and someone will note the actual name of the place or at least what it is, and occasionally you'll find a link to some web forum that's talking about it.

As a good example, here's 'Big Circle'.  There's no telling what the hell it is.  The sucker's over a mile across.

The only reasonable guess would be an agricultural circle, bolstered by the fact that it was green colored when it caught the first GE goer's eye.  The problem is that it's about a thousand miles from the nearest farm house.  It's way the hell out in the middle of nowhere in southern California near the Nevada border, miles from any road.  If you have GE installed, you're welcome to look for yourself.

As you'll note, there's one marker on the whole thing, where someone's asked "WTF?" in some forum and left a link to the spot.  You click on the link, which goes to the forum, then skip through a number of guesses and there, at the very bottom, is the answer:

It's a parachute practice landing site for Edward Air Force Base.

It was basically a great big green field used by the Air Force to train troops, and kept somewhat manicured so there wouldn't be a bunch of twisted ankles after every drop.  I gather choppers brought the troops back to Edward Air Force Base, 75 miles to the south.

If GE doesn't yield anything, well, now it's just between you, Google, and your descriptive powers.  Since every place has a name, even if only colloquially, that's your prime objective.

You'd start with a general description of its location in the country, like "central china".  If you can find a county or province name, include it.  Ditto any local named spots, both man-made and geographical.  For all we know, the huge symbols in the ground just south of Yellow Duck Mountain in central China actually are called "Huge Ground Symbols South of Yellow Duck Mountain" by the locals.  Or "黄色小鸭山以南的巨大接地符号", to be more precise.

Speaking of which, you might need Google Translator at some point.

You'd also include any descriptive word you can think of, like 'curved', 'arc' 'angled', 'bent', 'upward', 'downward', 'round', 'oblong', ' ancient space ship design', 'nazca alien astronaut', whatever comes to mind.  The idea is to get zero hits — and then start working backward from there.

And don't forget Google Images; the link at the top of the Google page.  If all you've got is "big spiral design in middle of azerbaijan desert", you might get lucky.

And two Google tricks while we're on the subject:

— To make Google look for an exact phrase, put it in quotes

— To ensure a keyword is actually on the web page, not just in its list of keywords, precede it with a + sign, like '+spiral'.

BTW, the software for our comments area is real sensitive to what it perceives as 'spam', so if you get the red 'Spam Prevention' message, convert the link to something else using TinyURL.

Happy hunting!