Lior Ron

Showing some observations from Where 2.0.

  • Slides are bad (1)
  • Simple ideas are good(1)
  • Demos are better (5)
  • Launches are best! (9)

Started with the base layer, the tiles, satellite imagery, streetview. Canvas on which to load more and more data. We’ve added something pretty simple, businesses, left hand side now shows popular maps/collections, including Places of Interest. This allows me to light up all of the Indian restaurants in the US, maybe the seafood places too, try Steak housees too (loads!). Showing search results as a layer instead of just 10 results at a time.

Now you have a map, you have some businesses. I want a better understanding.. We’re announcing a new layer menu (“More…”), let’s pick wikipedia, now we see all the wikipedia entries in the US. Can click on one, zoom in, can see a snippet from the article. Can also do searches and the icons stay on the map. Burlingame is the second richest county in the state and 14th in the country. Can also see Panoramio photos, that shows all the photos around the world on a layer, can click on them to see what’s there. See canyons in arizona to moonrises in alaska. Can browser the universe, browse the whole world. These are both available in the layers menu on google maps.

Another way to explore this content is in search. Did a search for SFO previously, lets try San Francisco. After every search we see a bubble called “explore” on the left, can see photos, popular searches, user created maps in the area. Clicking on “explore this area shows more information that will be updated as we browse the map. Getting panoramio photos, but also get youtube videos and can see them in context. Annotating and getting a better sense of a place, all from within google maps. More interesting data that is exposed through this ability is the “my maps”. Someone showing the 49 miles city drive in San Francisco. Another my map of the famous Bullitt car chase with lots of information about it. While we browse the map, the info updates. Lots of useful info. Two new ways we’re uncovering that allow the users to view content and get access to it.

Now we have wikipedia on maps, we have photos and video on maps.

Other new content coming is search options, can specify “Real Estate” and see more than 5M listings of real estate data. Can filter the results.

So that’s available today as another type of content available on google maps.

Another option available is “mapped web pages”. Web pages that we’ve extracted data from. Searching for “UFO sightings in united states”, we’ll get a list of web pages talking about ufo sightings. For web pages that are exposing coordinates on the page.

So we have the web on google maps.

There’s one data source missing, we’re asked all the time when we’ll be able to read news on the map, I’m happy to announce that starting next week we’ll have a google news layer on google earth and will allow users to view news in a geographical fashion. Can see the context on google earth. Can click the markers and read the whole article from within google earth.

News can be countrywide, general and very very specific. Here’s the news from Burlingame. The 3rd Burlingame bank was robbed yesterday - links to the second richest county thing from earlier. There’s google news coming out of burlingame too. “Google opening geo-search”, “GIS exec works to unlock hidden geodata” - Jack’s talk from yesterday. Hyper-local news available from next week.

All these datasources coming to maps. It’s not only google maps, it’s google on maps.

The place that this data is talking about is the common denominator about these data sources. We’re launching the ability to view all of the data from in one place. Opened an info bubble about the “Palace of Fine Arts” and it shows all the news, images, all the info. Maps in a bubble on a map. Upcoming events, happening in the palace of fine arts. What’s unique, even if we don’t know about a place, we create a place based on the geodata. We didn’t know about the “Giant pink bunny” in Italy but we managed to make a page all about it. Exposing all the geodata that we have on the giant pink bunny. More data, in more places.

To wrap up, this is all aggregated, we’re very pleased to announce that this is open, meaning that all of this will be searchable from the local search api. Giving an example, a hiker site that aggregates trails on the web. What we can add to this is a search box and we can search the geoweb and see results from all the place, or do a restriction to only a bounding box specified by your site, or to only the content on your site.

Last announcement - top feature requested by API developers - the API is now available as Flash(!)

Google Maps = Google on Maps

Technorati tags: google, maps, search, map, flash, where, where2.0, where2008