Rediscover Historical Imagery in Google Earth 6
Historical imagery is one of the most powerful features of Google Earth, enabling you to go back in time and browse the visual historical record of our planet – from the evolution and rise of developing communities to the destruction caused by hurrican…
How Local Search Ranking Works
We’ve been quite busy this year working on Google Places, Tags, Boost, and our shiny new addition: Hotpot. With so many different products and features now available for local businesses, we wanted to take a step back and explain how the ranking of l…
Mapping Korogocho
[Cross-posted from the Google Africa Blog]At Google we want to make the world’s information more accessible and useful to people all over the globe. This includes providing rich local geographic data because a high percentage of search queries have a g…
Earlier this year, we added biking directions to Google Maps for the United States, enabling users to more easily find their way when they’d like to take a two-wheeled alternative to walking, driving or public transit. Today we’re expanding biking …
Google Earth has always enabled you virtually fly around the world from the comfort of your home, but there are a lot of great places to explore on the ground as well. So when we sat down to enhance the Street View experience for version 6, we focused …
[Cross-posted from the Hotpot Community Blog]As you know, we recently announced the launch of Hotpot, our new local recommendation engine for Google Places, powered by you and your friends. In the following video, Mat Balez, a Google product manager…
We strive to provide as much realism as possible in Google Earth, but until now, trees have largely been missing from the landscape of our product. Trees have been modeled individually in a handful of locations, such as Disney World and the Eiffel Towe…
Ratings, reviews and recommendations play an important role in helping people find great places they love. Now that Google Hotpot is available, we want to take the opportunity to share some details on how the Google ratings and reviews system works and…
Even smarter Street View navigation: single click to go (anywhere!)
Last year we introduced Smart Navigation to Street View, which allowed you to jump to a new panorama just by double-clicking on a place or object. Now you can quickly navigate to those images with just a single click.For those of you who haven’t use…
In Africa, citizen cartographers tell their stories through their maps
Earlier this month, we invited 60 of Google Map Maker’s top users in Africa to a community workshop in Nairobi. The event celebrated the contributions of exceptional mappers from across Africa who have collectively mapped hundreds of thousands of roa…
Last week, local volunteers in Christchurch and Dunedin New Zealand invested a day of their time learning how to create 3D models using Google SketchUp. The workshops focused on learning how to geo-model, a process that involves creating 3D models of b…
Street View comes to 20 German cities
Two weeks ago, we celebrated with the people of Oberstaufen when we made available the first ever images for Street View in Germany. Today I’m pleased to let you know that you can explore even more of Germany because we’ve just released 360-degree,…
Getting from A to B just got a little easier
Over the past year, the Google Maps Directions team has been hard at work developing a variety of design improvements to make getting and following directions much easier.It’s now simpler than ever to switch transport modes, change the time/date of y…
Google Boost: Now available in additional U.S. cities
We recently announced that our new search advertising program, Google Boost, is available to local businesses in San Francisco, Houston and Chicago. Based on the great feedback and results from early participants, the beta is expanding to additional U….
Discover Yours: Local recommendations powered by you and your friends
There’s something so exciting about discovering new places. Nothing beats finding a great new place I’ve never been—whether it’s a new bakery with a special dessert, a hole-in-the-wall Mediterranean place I didn’t notice before or a local art…