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[bryant]

You've probably seen it, but if you haven't, check out Google Maps. I would not want to be working at MapQuest right now.

Comments

[multiplexer.livejournal.com]

Except it can't even find my house.

[bryant]

Sad! Finds mine OK, though.

[richtermom.livejournal.com]

It found my house just fine, but it didn't find the county park two blocks away that's been there for about 90 years. I like the zoom app, though.

[marphod.livejournal.com]

It seems to be a very cool idea, but there are flaws.

Little ones:
The location on the maps for both my house and place of work are not overly accurate (for my house, we're the second from the end of the street, and the arrow points to before the middle. Not a long road, and it does get the right side of the road, but still; For my office its about 1/4 mile off).

They have the traffic circle on the Map near my mother's house that has been on maps for 3 decades, but doesn't ACTUALLY exist. The circle would go through my mother's house.

Like every other map system in existence, it doesn't necessarily find the best directions.


The larger issue is, with this being google, I was hoping for more.
It doesn't (yet) integrate with the yellow pages service. What I want to be able to do is get directions to something by a yellow pages entry. Like 'Fuddruckers, Saugus, MA', or 'Jordan's Furniture, Natick, MA'. That would be a killer app.

[bryant]

I think the integration is there. Type "Jordan's Furniture, Natick, MA" into the search box. Click on the first Jordan's Furniture result. At the bottom of the popup bubble, there's a link labelled "To here".

[marphod.livejournal.com]

I noticed that; I was hoping for it to work the other way, as well.

If you have an address loaded, you can't get directions to a yellow book entry. Only the other way around. There seems to be a lack of two-way integration.

[head58.livejournal.com]

The maps are certainly much nicer to look at than MapQuest or YahooMaps. Wow.

Minor complaint: they don't have the one-way streets labelled as such.

[bryant]

Hm, so they don't. OK, that's somewhat irksome. NAVTEQ data sets do have one-way streets; I wonder why Google isn't using that? I bet it gets fixed, though.

[head58.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I mean, this is a Beta. I don't expect it to be perfect. But it found my house, and gave me good directions to get to my parents' house, and looks all shiny, so I can't complain about it too much.

But what I REALLY want is to be able to type in "Bryant" and it tells me where you are right now!

[bryant]

Apparently I'm in Kansas at an electrical supply company.

[head58.livejournal.com]

Well, that's cool, because I'm apparently at the Emporia State University's Kansas Business Hall of Fame (if you use my lj username anyway).

Actually, if you put my last name in, all the hits also come up in Kansas. Puttin in the last names of most of the folks on my Friends list hits an address either in Kansas or Nebraska. Even freaking "Krzywicki". There's no reason that should find anything. Weird.

Oh god. Kansas. The cornfield. The ferris wheel. It's all coming back together, isn't it?

[bryant]

This is actually an immensely cool feature. When you do a search that isn't a location, it assumes that you want to do a business search centered on the center of the current map.

So if you zoom in and center Boston on the page, then search for pizza, it'll show you pizza places in Boston.

[head58.livejournal.com]

Ah. Well, that's better than their database being weighted to the geographic center of the US for no good reason.

[robotnik.livejournal.com]

Man, you people are hard to please. A little perspective: There is a machine on your desk that gives you near instantaneous street maps of any address in the country!!!* That's pretty cool if you think about it.

In related news, airplanes can fly! I'm not being sarcastic here. They can fucking FLY!!!

*OK, so at the moment all Google Maps gives me is a beige rectangle. But if it DID show me a map, I would be damn impressed and not grouse about the details.

[kodi]

Not just near instantaneous, but also easily scrollable/zoomable and nominally free AND it doesn't require shockwave. I just dragged the map from Brownsville to New Orleans at a scale large enough that the City of Galveston stretched halfway across my screen.

Although I'm a little concerned that it's farming out drawing some coastlines to Fractint.

Better build an ark

[bluegargantua]

If that homepage picture is correct, the Pacific ocean appears to have swallowed up Central and Southern America. No clue on how the other continents fared.

"Well Mr. President?"
"Could be a fluke, I still say global warming needs more investigation."
Tom

[kodi]

The one thing that I really miss is when Mapquest used to offer fully integrated satelite photos, so you could switch back and forth between the two datasets. This REALLY needs that.

[adamdray.livejournal.com]

Check out the Keyhole app. There's a trial version.

I recommend maximizing the elevation exaggeration in the preferences and definitely tilt the satellite view so you look at it obliquely, once you find something interesting.

[kodi]

Pardon the profanity, and the fact that I'm linking to something that showed up on /. 12 hours ago, but fuck, yeah.

[richtermom.livejournal.com]

I'd just like to point out that Bryant beat out anyone in my office for this link by a good two hours.

Even when they use old data, they do well

[dtm]

Well, near my house Google managed to show a rail line as being part of the "Penn Central Railroad Shore Line", which ceased operations in 1976. Until early 2004, that line had been a freight line, though there's still an empty building in town near the tracks that was at one point the passenger train station.

In early 2004, the track became part of the state-run NJ Riverline.

Anyway, I'd never known what that track was before it was just a freight line, though the abandoned building in town looked like a former passenger stop, but old maps served up by google told me what terms to search on, and behold!

Google maps - a new tool for local history.