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Google Adds Location Targeted Searching
miradu writes "Many Slashdot users may remember that the winner of last year's Google programming contest's entry was a location specific search. Now, Google has made a version of Daniel's idea available to use on Google Labs. Google Search By Location lets you search for things near some zipcode, or city/state. It then gives you a map with each search result pinned on it. V"
On the other side of things, Google stands to make a killing here. Google can sell a new class of ads to people like plumbers, who don't need a webpage. In fact, they could possibly host a minimal web page for those kind of advertisers who just want to show some simple text and services.
Hey, perhaps Google wants to give me some kind of idea fee???
Newsfollow.com
How come when I search for the location of "Hot single geek chicks" there are no results found?
But wouldnt be cool to see this applyed to
more then just the US?
With all the talk about Google being
'The' serch engine, id love to see
something like this applyed on a
world wide base.
mind you not knowing how it works
it may require ppl to put decent
contact info on there pages,
ie country name.
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
It's a great idea but the heuristics need work:
"Your search for money grubbing scumbags near Lindon, UT did not match any documents within 15 miles."
Trolling is a art,
Server Error
The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request.
Please try again in a minute or so.
Does anyone have a link to the google cache of this page?
er.... nevermind...
Why is it so hot? Where am I going? What am I doing in this handbasket?
From the end of the article: "V" ????...
I was searching for a non-slashdotted version near me when it borked.
The opposite of progress is congress
At first, I thought this was going to function by mapping the web server IP address to a geological location. This is much better. It is a logical extension from the feature where Google gives you street addresses when you search on business, etc. This could be really useful for finding local clubs and organizations that share a common interest.
Phoenix
Once GPS becames much more universal, it would be great for us all to move to latitude and longitude. That's a truly international standard.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
Would it be more effective for a small business that depends on local business (such as a house roofing or a plumbing company) to have a business name and a website that includes the name of the city? For example, "www.dallasplumbing.com" or www.dallas-plumbing.com? Which would be better at getting higher up in the google query? It would seem that with this IP location factor in the query that maybe such a URL scheme would be effective? Your opinions, please.....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
or, using google-patriot act search, type in a person's name, and you get all the secret cameras in their home, their entire geneology, pictures from their past, and other weird things that only the conspiracy theorists know...
Or, even better, using google for moms, a google that scans the computer for cookies to find out what site her kid has been visiting via a cookie scan or something.
I dunno, but eventually it's going to seem like an invasion of privacy with these search engines, but then again, once you put something online without any protection, it *is* public domain.
How is this different from Yahoo Yellow Pages ( http://yp.yahoo.com )? I've been using that service for half a decade. It searches by zipcode / address as well.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
goats near Christmas Island is too disturbing for me.
That would be a trip.
I tried the search and it failed on my quite a few times, but the potential is huge. The first thing that came to my mind was real estate.
I've gone out looking for land with realtors that can't even find the lots they're supposed to be showing, and look how much they take in transaction fees for their "service." It' not like they do the Escrow themselves. I suppose it's a bit different for houses, but for land sales they act like they're doing you a favor.
Not only that, but I've gone in with aerial photos and maps from the County that all come off of county maintained computer databases and the realtors inevitably insist their little hand drawn map that doesn't even accurately map the parcels is the more accurate solution.
This could be the beginning of something huge for Google.
Search results
I'm not Seth Finkelstein. I still speak the truth.
How many posts are going to say "OMG we slashdotted google." This clearly is not running on there huge cluster. Its probably just a single server or something. Settle down, pigs are not flying.
Scott
Here in the UK, you can use Multimap to acheive something close to this.
Multimap's main use is simple as an online map, and it's used heavily here in the UK, but they do show pin-marks on the location of any services they know about.
They only show links to certain categories of service (hotels, and the like), but limited though it is, the search by location service has been available for some time.
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
I wonder how they will be enforcing the zip code registration. The main drive behind google and the page rank thing was to take search engine optimization off the page and out of the hands of the web master so as to avoid keyword stuffing and not-quite-honest optimization techniques.
But it seems sort of hard to determine the "location" of a website without input from the people behind the site. There are possibilities for abuse.
But maybe there's no incentive to be listed in the wrong zip code... well, maybe there is.
If you do a lot of business on the web or by mail, and your physical location doesn't matter, you might post 100 versions of your site, each with the zip code of a large metropolitan area. But then how many people would do that?
Ah hell, I don't know. I'm rambling...
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
The results returned by this thing seem to be fairly irrelevant.
When searching for 'food' with my office location I received the following results;
-Food allergy and intolerances, fact sheet
-Oriental grocery stores list for my area
-Sources of free or low cost
-Food science publications & journals
-Thoughts on Food Safety
-History of Hannakuh foods
-Oriental grocery stores list (again)
-foodandwine.com's best new chefs list
Admittedly, 'food' is a pretty lame search, but I would've hoped to see a couple restaurants and grocery stores in the list.
Here's a (hopefully) non-slashdotted site that does the same thing although it only works in San Diego. SDcommunities.net
I got the latitude and longitude data from the Census for zip codes and created a HUGE reference tables for the distances between zip codes. Lots of math in the search code.
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
http://houndwire.com
Google gives good search results except when the law tells them not to -- and even then, they give you a link telling you that results were removed, and why.
Google self-censors already, anyway -- by altering their PageLink algorithm when certain dishonest sites try rigging Google's system for better page results. This sort of self-censorship is a Good Thing.
If you want a completely "open" search engine, you're probably going to keep looking. Other engines are increasingly giving into advertising boosting search results, and probably nobody has the breadth and depth of Google's database. You might not like the fact that they have to comply with the law in order to keep returning results at all, but believe me, they don't like it either, and they do all they can to remain honest.
http://www.superpages.com/ came out with mapbased search that uses an Applet a while back. And for those who remember Mapquest use to offer a similar feature back in the 90's. Google is a little late to the game. The application itself isn't all that hard to build. The real trick is providing a way for listees to correct the gps coordinates. For those familiar with GIS, that is the biggest problems. To my knowledge, VeriZon offers that capability to listees. You can easily test the accuracy of Goecodes by doing a search for the same address in mapquest, yahoo, and mappoint. You'll see the coordinates are not identical. Not only that, but each system uses a different level of precision. Only the military uses full precision, but then again they have to.
How is this different from Yahoo Yellow Pages?
Um, quite a bit of difference, theoretically. How about searching for parks, lakes, fire hydrants, mailboxes, phone booths, one-way streets, registered sex offenders, gullible people, etc.
Slashdot seems to be very pro-Google, and I admit to using their search the majority of the time as well, but everyone should at least take a glance at google watch. Of most interest is the privacy section. If any other site were to track the stuff Google does, /. would be up in arms protesting.
"Google currently does not allow outsiders to gain access to raw data because of privacy concerns. Searches are logged by time of day, originating I.P. address (information that can be used to link searches to a specific computer), and the sites on which the user clicked. People tell things to search engines that they would never talk about publicly -- Viagra, pregnancy scares, fraud, face lifts. What is interesting in the aggregate can seem an invasion of privacy if narrowed to an individual."
Please note, this isn't a troll, and I'm not wearing a tin-foil hat (maybe I should?). Imagine the following scenario: a bomb goes off in the US. By tracing searches for "anarchist cookbook" to zipcodes within the area of the bomb blast, the FBI could have access to information that makes TIA look like a better alternative.
Maybe this isn't such a good feature after all...
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
it doesn't know where saddam is either...
ph
Check out www.smartpages.com
It is an online yellow pages. Each listed company has a small 'web-page' that provides a link to the actual external web-page, if available, as well as a mapquest map, address and main contact phone number.
I use that site ALL the time looking up potential service vendors for the company I work for.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
After a lot of trying, you've finally slashdotted Google! lol
I keep getting server errors when I try searching for things like donuts or my own webpage. Either that, or it thinks Irving,TX is a black hole. Hmm, don't answer that.
RB
You should probably change the location to something other than "my parent's basement".
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Don't mod this guy up.
He is stealing someone else's post
Original post Damn plagerist.I mean, beyond the 10K he made in the contest. Did Google give him a job? Or did they basically get this great idea (and a lot of others) for the low-low price of $10,000?
Regards, Martin
First, a quick search of most active username on kazaa.
Ah, there we have it. Now, let's find some info on this bastard.
-- --
Google 'Search by location' search term: kazaaliteuser@kazaa.com
Google 'Search by location' region: USA
Google found 2.304.942 search results:
Alabama
A. Allan
1425 21st Street South, Suite 208
Anniston, AL 12205
A. Andrews
517 Beacon Parkway West
Anniston, AL 25209
A. Baccus
106 W Third St
Birmingham, AL 35674
This is great... combined with something like GoogleAlert you could watch for anything new springing up in your neighborhood!
Hrm... Not quite there yet.
Searching for Microsoft and Redmond in the search and location fields yields nothing.
From Google's regular search engine I get these results.
I think they still have some work cut out for them. Granted, it's a great feature, but nothing earth-shattering, since the concept of "yellow pages" has been online for a very long time.
Some notable YP type engines that I might suggest:
- Yahoo Yellow Pages
- InfoSpace
- Bigfoot
user@host$ diff
type in 'sex' and 'new york' as the location and the first thing it comes up with is the registry of sex offenders...hmmm very useful for vigilantes
Good day,
Would it hurt the story submitters and/or the moderators to mention it when something is US specific ? Not that we have anything against it, but I'm tired on clicking on a link to only find out that whatever the link is pointing to is US-specific. I was excited by this search-by-location feature and then... saw that it was only for the US. Feel free to mod me down if you want, but Slashdot's readership is NOT 100% American. Get a clue.