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Google Launches Mapping Service
Alex Reynolds writes "The beta version of Google Maps is now online, offering an alternative to Mapquest with what some might describe as a very much improved user interface, offering a cleaner layout, drop shadows, clickable waypoints and keyboard controls that allow you to move and zoom the map. For IE and Firefox/Mozilla at this point (no Safari or Opera support, as yet)."
GoogleMaps + AdSense + Google Local = Massive profits for Google and a fantastic customer experience.
I knew the folks at Google were smart, but...
I'm a big tall mofo.
They seem to have the directions to take on Microsoft
What about the rest of the planet?
I gave it a run.....Definitely better than mapquest....Map moves smoothly, instead of having to click and wait for a reload. Nicer interface....
But how does it work?
-thewldisntenuff
My MythTV HowTo
A preview of the world map after Bush his second term is over :)
This may be the most impressive web application I have ever seen. It performs like a local application, incredibly fast and smooth, but it's all coming over the internet and displaying in my web browser. I can browse around the country like I was playing with a photograph! The lack of Safari support is too bad, but they say it's coming soon.
No, I have nothing constructive to add, just... wow!
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You can actually drag the map with your mouse to move the part that's being displayed. Way cool!
As said before, yes, it only seems to work in IE/Firefox (which is a shame). But, it is still easily the best map experience I have ever had. Being able to just type parts of an address into a bar instead of seperate boxes is disorganized, but quick and easy. And the balloon popup for current location is useful. The vector graphics are great, and scale to monitor resolution. I just wish NAVTEQ would add topographic information (for that matter, why does NAVTEQ do everyone's maps?). The zoom scale is much better than others, since it is live and smooth scaling. However, overall, the system doesn't seem like it would transfer to print well. I suppose the only way to find out is to try it.
WASTE - The Secure P2P
Very nice interface, and certainly less cluttered than maps.yahoo.com or mapquest.
But best of all -- my new subdivision is on the map whereas it's absent on all the other free map services that the pizza guy, furniture stores, and other delivery folks keep trying to use because they've never heard of my street before.
Google's "DO NO EVIL" company value really shows in this excellent service.
The surest sign of intelligent life in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us. -- Calvin & Hobbes
Jesus! They have drop shadows! Sign me up#@!
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
This looks very much like maps24.com... their application was java-based, and this appears to be browser-based / scripted.
Maps24.com won a Webby in 2004.
The click and drag for map movement rocks.
Your browser is not supported by Google Maps just yet. We currently support the following browsers:
IE 5.5+ (download: Windows)
Firefox 0.8+ (download: Windows Mac Linux)
Netscape 7.1+ (download: Windows Mac Linux)
Mozilla 1.4+ (download: Windows Mac Linux)
We are working on supporting Safari. Regardless of your browser type, you must have JavaScript enabled to use Google Maps.
We recommend you download one of the browsers above, or you can try to load Google Maps in your current browser.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Or, for that matter, map24. Think they've got the most impressive interface i've seen yet.
Shorest Distance.
Avoid Highways
Use Highways
Fastest Time
Least number of turns (most direct route).
Avoid Cities
As well the ability to change your route on the map. Say you know that you cant take this road because of traffic today so you need an alternate route.
I think those would be useful features for any map program. At best I have only seen some of them parttilly implemented.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
maps.google.com
Here's the kicker;
* They used DHTML and Javascript
* They did _not_ use Flash
Go take a look and consider that...
* No need to use the on-screen arrows to move around
* Left click and hold can be used to drag the map
* The arrow keys and other keys on your keyboard also work (PgUp, PgDn, +, -, ...)
While the useful part of the map is limited to the 50 US States, Puerto Rico, and the populated areas of Canada, it does not have local boarders (drag from Alaska or Hawaii to Florida or the Canadian wilderness if you want). Zoom all the way in before you think they left something out. It looks to be complete.
* The vector-generated maps are very readable when printed
* It uses Google's Local search; if you haven't tried that, give it a whirl (example: Choose a location on the main page, click Local when the location appears, and punch in "pizza" or "atms". Not perfect; "beer" and "pub" don't work so well, though oddly "brew" returns some good results. :( )'
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
I never use Mapquest. I use maps.yahoo.com, and when I login with my yahoo id (started using it for mail, now I just use it for everything but mail because gmail rocks), I am able to name and save specific locations. So now I have all of my son's soccer and basketball game locations available for instant lookup.
When Google Maps gets this feature and allows me to save locations linked to my gmail account, I'll switch over. The new interface in Google Maps is cool, but Yahoo maps (and Mapquest, I suspect) is good enough - especially for simply printout out map and driving directions.
I love the fact that the map loads nearly as fast as I can scroll. It's size is really nice too. Even better, the route marker it puts on the map when it gives directions isn't in the way, like it is on Mapquest.
Add to that the wonderful UI, and I think that Google has a real winner here.
By the way, all of you complaining that the map is USA only should note that this is only a beta. Chances are that when the full version is released, it will cover as much, or more, of the world than Mapquest.
1) They won't take you the wrong way down one-way streets.
2) They will get you to your destination instead of 95% of the way there.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Um, ok.... those two services you linked to? They suck compared to this. They're a big reload fest, just like all other traditional web apps. Click, wait for a new picture to load, repeat endlessly. It's not interactive, it's just a normal web page with links that do interesting things.
Google's service does live zooms, live scrolling, and never leaves me waiting. If it requires breaking standards to accomplish that, then so be it. Nobody's forcing you to use it.
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So, who lives closest to the intersection of 2200 Rd and 4300 Rd, Coffeyville, Kansas? Just keep clicking the "+" button, and that's where the exact centre of Google's map of the US is. Just north of Coffeyville Country Club.
- Eastern Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church In Canada
- St Mary's Coptic Orthodox Church
- Customers For Life Inc
- Brantford Public Library
- Children's Aid Society of Haldimand-Norfolk
- Oxford Self-Help Network
Google teaches us so many things!- c -
I went looking for some cities I know of in the US, and the coverage is spotty, to say the least. New York is there, of course, but I went south to New Jersey and Delaware, and both Gotham and Metropolis are missing. Duh! Iowa and Minnesota exist, but Central City and Keystone are missing. Boston and Seattle are there, but no sign of Hub City, Gateway City, Star City -- need I go on? Obviously Coast City isn't there, but there's no marker for where it WAS.
Pretty shakey all round. Not impressed.
I have discovered a truly remarkable
And there's a little bug - if you search for a city, its name appears on the right. Now, zoom out, and zoom in on another city. The city name doesn't change.
I'm looking at Montreal (street level), and i says I'm still looking at Ottawa.
This will be GREAT for practical jokes - "Need directions? Here's the map of downtown New York (hands over map of Detroit that says "New York" on it).
Now what about those of us who have to hold a map upside-down over our head to make sense of the orientation? Frigging monitors are HEAVY.
We could not calculate driving directions between miami and anchorage. We currently only support road-based driving directions.
Coming soon - off road based driving directions!
Turn left out of drive.
Go through neighbours yard.
Swerve to avoid barn
Swerve to avoid cow
Attatch floats to car, cross pond
Drive across desert, hope for reliable engine
Drive through mountains, attatch boring attatchment(yawn)
Reach crevasse
Plummet
Go to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200
The thing about making a flat map of a spherical world is that there will always be distortion. Either the relative sizes of landmasses, the angles between them or BOTH will be distorted. The particular projection used to create the map will determine how much of what kind of distortion the map has. Whether if a map is "online" or not has nothing to do with it as long as it is still a two dimensional representation of a 3 dimensional object.
The most popular projection is called the Mercator Projection. This projection will heavily distort the relative sizes of landmasses, making whatever is in the corners of the map appear to be much larger than what is in the center. For example, depending on where the map is centered, Greenland could appear to be larger than the entire South American continent. The good side of the Mercator Projection is that it preserves the relative angles of locations. In other words, if 3 places all fall on the same straight line (around the world of course), then all three will also be in a straight line on a Mercator Projection map. For this reason, the Mercator Projection is by far the most useful for sailors and Navigators.
Other projections such as the Lambert Azimuthal Projection provide more exact relative sizes of countries and continents, while horribly distorting the shapes of places near the edge. There is also an Azimuthal Equidistant projection which neither maintains correct relative sizes, nor angles, but has the advantage that all distances measured from the center of the map will be correct.
As you can see, mapping online or off is all about trade offs. You can have correct shapes or angles or distances, but you any map will distort at least two of the three.
http://www.aquarius.geomar.de/omc/omc_project.htm
http://www.worldatlas.com/aatlas/worldout.htm
I'm a gnu world man.
I think it'll be more impressive than that. If you've tried the Keyhole satellite software (parent company bought by Google), it becomes obvious that the eventual product will incorporate actual satellite imagery down to the block level.
If you haven't tried(played)with the keyhole software, I highly recommend the free trial. Same address location, zoom in and scroll capabilities as Google maps plus angle effects, but with real satellite photos.
http://www.keyhole.com/
The image is made out of an array of tiles, each a GIF about 3.6K in size. They have URLs like this: http://mt.google.com/mt?v=.3&x=5&y=-4&zoom=8 As you pan to the right, each tile's src attribute gets the url of the tile to its right, which is of course already in browser cache. The rightmost column of five tiles is then fetched from the server. The very clever thing is how they make panning continuous. I have to look at their javascript to see how they accomplish it, it's quite an illusion. In any case, the efficiency of this approach accounts for the generous size of the map. and its responsiveness, which would be hard to achieve using conventional mapserver techniques.
I've worked with developing web map services before. This approach complicates some things you might want to do, but is probably how you'd do it if you wanted a very fast, ultra-scalable service I wouldn't be surprised if Google, which in many ways is in the information storage business, has got all these tiles pre-rendered somewhere. Normally, you'd render the gif for the entire map in a temporary directory somewhere. Natrually this approach is more processor and bandwidth sensitive, but saves on storage. Of course, it allows you to do other kinds of GISy things that probably would be hard to do with Google's approach, but those kinds of things are relatively rare in this kind of application.
I'd like to figure out how to map from geographic coordinate systems to the bizarre system they're using. Then I could use the mapping service for my own uses.
Altogether, it's an interesting first effort. A rectangle drag zoom function would be welcome.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
None of these maps have a scale on them. It seems like a poor choice to omit that.
What I would like is a better transit map searching system.. I'm planing a trip to SFO, and having a nice on-the-fly map drawn of different bus/train routes would be handy.
I'm a non-US reader, and as you can see, I don't care. For me it's a cool technology showcase, not something I'm going to start using tomorrow. I believe that was the point of the story.
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The biggest missing feature of all the mapping services I have seen is the lack of integrating mass transit.
I live in NYC, and whenever I am going somewhere, I usually pull out mapquest to find the address (cross streets) and then sit there with a subway/bus map to try and figure out how to get there. Aside from the time problem (the time intervals that flights trains and busses leave is not as flexible as a car), this should be relatively easy to implement as the search space is so much smaller, and should be easy to acquire information about (as opposed to every backroad across the US). Just overlaying subway and bus stops onto the street maps would be a huge improvement.
There are many profitable ways to utilize this:
I type in to WA. I get all the options- from trains, busses, airplanes. This is targeted marketing nirvana, as unlike people who are searching for TV's just to see the latest stuff, very few people ask for driving directions "just to see how they would get there."
Just targetting airlines and railroads, etc. might be too small of a market... So how about showing ads from places along the route? Driving from NY to DC? See the diners along the way. Taking the train? Stop at the pizza hut in Penn. There is alot of revenue to be made there.
It could be argued that this is a small market. However, considering that there are 10M people in NYC alone, most of which whom rely on mass transit, I would have to disagree.
I wonder whether anyone has told the Coffeyville, KS chamber of commerce; they could start printing Center of the World postcards and T-shirts, and rename the local diner the Center of the World Diner, and hopefully rake in the tourist bucks.
But assuming you actually meant where, what are you looking for? A long lost girlfriend, Timothy? Are you looking for a map to her new place? What about the restraining order?
Random is the New Order.