Last week we announced that our new ads offering, Tags, would be rolling out to additional cities. Now business owners in San Jose, Houston, Austin, Atlanta, Washington DC, San Diego, Seattle, Boulder, Chicago, San Francisco and Mountain View can sign…
The Google Earth and Maps Imagery team has just finished finished pushing out large amount of updated imagery. In total, more than 35 countries are getting updates in one form or another. Some of my favorite highlights include:Las Vegas, NV”The Boneyar…
En FrançaisThe map of Canada is constantly changing – new roads are being built, highways are being renamed, and bike trails are opening. To keep up with all these changes, we’ve started using new map data in Canada. This new base map is built from a …
It probably comes as no surprise that I spend a lot of time using Street View – it’s my job, after all. But sometimes I get so immersed in my exploration that I take all sorts of detours and side trips and find myself in completely unfamiliar areas t…
If you’re a geo-data dork like me, you’ve probably been following the Google Maps and Google Earth displays of near-real-time mail participation rates for US Census 2010 across states, counties, places, and tracts, which we announced last month wit…
With a new name comes a fresh support experience. The Google Places team wants to make sure that, as a business owner, your experience with Google Places is a good one, so we’ve taken some steps to expand and refine our support offerings. Here’s an…
What’s that barcode in your Google Places account?
If you manage a Google Places account for your business in the U.S., you’ll now find a two-dimensional barcode – known as a QR code – on the right side of your business’ dashboard page. If you have just one business listing, this is the page you’…
Today marks the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, which provides us an occasion to highlight that part which covers 70% of the planet — the Ocean. We’re releasing a second Hope Spots tour in the Ocean Showcase which features 5 more special places, comp…
In 2008, Brazilian filmmaker Denise Zmekhol joined the Google Earth Outreach team to train the Surui people of the Brazilian rainforest on Google tools to help preserve their way of life. One year later, in 2009, another team went back to the Amazon to…
The Suggest feature for Google Maps helps you find what you want faster and more accurately by showing search suggestions for the most relevant places, businesses and points of interest as you type. We experimentally launched suggest for Google Maps i…
See what’s in store
Just as you can’t judge a book by its cover, you can’t always judge a business by its exterior appearance. Yesterday we introduced Google Places and mentioned that we’re now starting a pilot project in select cities worldwide to take photographs of b…
A couple of months ago we announced a trial for a new and easy local advertising product through Google Places (the new name for the Local Business Center), that we referred to as “enhanced listings.” This flat-fee advertising feature costs $25 a …
Not all businesses serve their customers from a brick-and-mortar storefront. Folks like photographers, piano tuners, and plumbers tend to travel around town to provide their services, and may operate from home. To better connect with all the customers …
Today, the skies above my home in England are noticeably empty. The UK air traffic authorities and many others across Europe have closed the airspace due to safety fears from an enormous ash cloud originating from the eruption of the Eyjafjallajoekull …
Members of our Google Map Maker community have always told us that the biggest milestone after launching maps for their countries is adding driving directions. A few months ago we launched driving directions in 18 countries in Eastern Europe and Asia-P…