Friday, December 14, 2007

Google Maps Integrates Video, Book & Photo Results

A Google Maps search may now return location markers showing videos from YouTube, books from Google Book search, or geo-tagged photos from Panoramio*. Try the query google geyser, for instance, and you will find the blue placemark’s info window will embed a YouTube video for direct playback... possibly retrieved because the description, tags or title of the video contained the keywords in question as well as location information (the description reads “Drove by Google’s Mt View corp campus today found a Geyser,” and tags include mountain view).

The integration of the YouTube results looks very half-baked, as the screenshot shows (there’s not enough padding between thumbnail and description, the thumbnail is redundant in the first place because the embedded video contains a preview still already, the embedded video is too large for the info window, etc.).

To see book results, Google at the official Google Lat Long blog suggests you search for christmas books in jerusalem. Photo results can be pulled up by searching for e.g. big ben in london.

*Panoramio is a Google property as well; let’s see if Google will index and display other photo and video properties in their maps results too, like data from Flickr, for instance. The quality of Google’s services will suffer if they become too self-referential. Correction: Google Maps does index Flickr, through KML, as Pamela and Ionut note in the comments.

Google Maps Integrates Vi ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (11)

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