The official blog for Google Maps
My Map of travel conditions during China's snowstorm
January 31, 2008
Posted by Qiushuang (Autumn) Zhang, Software Engineer, Google Maps
Next week, most Chinese will be celebrating Chinese New Year with their families. Millions of people in China travel home for this holiday. Because of the crowds, it's extremely difficult to get train tickets during Chinese New Year. I still remember how hard it was for me and my college classmates to get tickets from Shanghai to Harbin. Some of my friends slept at the train station overnight, waiting in line for the ticket windows to open.
However, this year the biggest problem isn't the availability of train tickets, it's the huge snowstorm that's currently affecting the central, southern, and eastern parts of China. It's the worst snowstorm in about 50 years. By now, it is estimated to have caused billions of dollars in damages. Several national highways, airports, and train stations have been closed; tens of thousands of farms have been destroyed; power outages have hit many of the provinces; and thousands of soldiers are working around the clock to clear the snow. Many of the people who want to go home for Chinese New Year are stranded.
The Google Maps team in China has put together a
special My Map
that shows current weather conditions and the status of China's public transit systems. Click on the train and plane icons to find out whether the train stations and airports are still selling tickets, and whether the stations are currently open or closed. You can also get information on which trains have stopped operation, the number of passengers stalled in the stations, and instructions on how to get your tickets reimbursed.
If you have information that you'd like the Maps team to include, please
email us
.
Find more with Google Maps
January 30, 2008
Posted by Lior Ron, Product Manager
There's a lot to discover in Google Maps: addresses, businesses, points of interest,
user maps
, and even
photos, books, and videos
. To help sift through all of this, we've added a new search option that will help you find exactly what you want. Check out the new "show search options" link near the search box. Following this link will add a drop-down menu with three options for refining your search:
Locations - Search only addresses, places of interest or other location names. For example, searching for "storm" will bring you to
the city of Storm, Finland.
Businesses - Search only businesses. Searching for "storm" over San Francisco will show you
businesses with storm in their name.
User-created content - Search maps created by users in Google or anywhere on the web. Searching for "storm" over San Francisco will show some
interesting photos
from the stormy week we had in San Francisco last month.
This last option is particularly useful for exploring the world from the vantage point of true local experts. Here are some cool searches I was able to do: "
Windsurfing in San Francisco
" shows windsurfing spots around the Bay Area from
YouTube
,
virtualglobetrotting
and
Flickr
(while business search will show
windsurfing business listings
); "
Romantic places in Paris
" includes results for romantic places mentioned in mashups by
francoissachs.nl
,
communitywalk
and
Platial
; "
Seinfeld New York
" highlights locations featured on the show from
Panoramio
, Flickr and other highlights from Google My Maps.
Doing our homework
January 29, 2008
Posted by Anna Bishop, Google Earth Education
We know that the last thing teachers have is tons of free time to spend learning about new teaching tools. That's why I'm thrilled to point out some new
YouTube video tutorials
that offer up basic tricks for using Google Earth and can serve as inspiration for
lesson plans
. While any new user (and even some of our old hands!) can appreciate these helpful hints, it's our hunch that educators will find them particularly useful. Here's a look at one of the videos in the series:
These short clips (there are 5 total) will walk you through some of the most popular features in Google Earth. Whether it's
navigating
,
searching
,
marking locations
,
obtaining coordinates
, or
geotagging photos
, you'll be able to get started in no time at all.
More videos are in the works, and, of course, the
Google Earth User Guide
is also a great training resource. We hope that you'll soon be developing and sharing your own educational content just like these awesome
literary field trips
!
No address required
January 25, 2008
Posted by Nick Lee, Software Engineer
Have you ever been traveling and needed to get directions from your hotel to another destination in town, like a restaurant you keep hearing about? You may have been a bit frustrated that Google Maps required you to look up the addresses of your starting and end points before ultimately getting your directions.
Well, we felt the same way. So we fixed it. Now you can type in any location where you want to go -- whether it's a specific street address, a business name like Fuzzy Buddy's Dog Daycare, or even something more general like "florist" -- and we'll help you get directions. We'll even automatically try to find the closest results for you.
We've found this particularly handy for pizza runs from our office; now we can just put in
"651 N. 34th Street Seattle to pizza"
and choose from our options. And if you're ever in town visiting us and want to go to dinner from your hotel, you might try "
Andra Hotel Seattle to Wild Ginger
" (make sure to try their
seven-flavor beef
).
First Google Earth layer update of 2008
January 25, 2008
Posted by Wei Luo, Senior GIS Specialist
Happy New Year! We're starting things off with a number of exciting updates.
With help from a team of
USGS
scientists, we reengineered the Earthquake layer to be more accurate and informative. And to top it all off, we gave it a fresh new look. This layer presents historic earthquake epicenters of magnitudes greater than 3 for the entire world over the last 40 years. It's very fun to look at if you're interested in geology. For instance, did you know that large earthquakes happen most frequently at tectonic plate boundaries? If you zoom far out and connect the large earthquake dots, you will get a rough graph of these areas. The information balloons that appear on the map tell you the magnitude, depth, and date of the earthquake. And if you're interested in tracking earthquakes happening in real time, you can download the USGS Real-Time Earthquake KML file from any of the earthquake bubbles. The KML file will be added to the "Temporary Places" panel on the left, and it will automatically refresh every 5 minutes, showing the latest earthquakes around the world. So if you're feeling a jolt under your feet but not sure if it's an earthquake or your neighbor playing Wii, now you have a way to find out.
We expanded one of our most popular layers
--
National Geographic
--
to three more continents: Europe, Asia, and South America. These new additions feature interesting stories about everything from China's fearsome Taklimakan Desert, where Marco Polo traveled, to the hyacinth macaws of Brazil.
And finally, we added and updated roads in 26 countries: Russia, Malaysia, Thailand, Aruba, Bahamas, Belize, Bermuda, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, St. Kitts and Nevis, Trinidad and Tobago, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Place names in Taiwan, Russia, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, and Turkey will now be labeled in their local language, and bodies of water will be labeled in the language you have Google Earth set to.
Making changes
January 24, 2008
Posted by Charles Spirakis, Software Engineer, Google Maps
At Google, we're encouraged to move to different groups and learn new skills. I recently transitioned to the Maps team -- specifically, to the group that empowers local experts like you to improve your virtual neighborhood on Google Maps. You may remember that not too long ago we launched a feature that enables people to
correct marker locations
.
I previously focused on behind-the-scenes kernel work, so switching to something as well-known as the Google Maps user interface was quite a refreshing change. Excited and inspired, I got to task by working on a Maps
'recent edits' viewer
that provides a real-time view into a sampling of the user edits taking place across the globe. You can just sit back and watch the world's information improving bit by bit, edit by edit. I warn you, though, it's highly addictive (almost as addictive as helping make the improvements yourself!).
Now that it's complete, I'm excited to know that something I've worked on is actually a visible part of the Maps experience, and helps encourage people to improve the information about the world around them. And as a bonus, after all these years, when Mom and Dad ask "So what exactly do you do again at Google?", I can simply point to
http://maps.google.com/recentedits
and say, "That's what we do!"
Reordering features in My Maps
January 23, 2008
Posted by Brian Cornell, Software Engineer, Google Maps
Many people have used the My Maps feature of Google Maps to store, organize, and share their geographic data. In fact, more than 7 million maps have been created, on topics ranging from
skate parks
and
historic pubs
to
real-life superheroes
. You can add local businesses, mark favorite spots, draw a few lines, and then label and color code everything to make it easier to read. But lately, a lot of users have told us that they want the ability to reorder the placemarks, lines and shapes in the left panel when they edit their maps.
Well, we're happy to let you know that now you can drag and drop items in the left panel to reorder them. If you have a large map, you can also move features to the previous or next page by dragging them to the special targets that appear before and after the list of features. After you're finished rearranging everything, just click save.
With this new feature, you can finally sort your placemarks the way you want. You can put the most important ones on top, or sort them by date or alphabetically. You can also arrange your markers into groups -- geographically, east to west, north to south, alphabetically by city, or any way you like. Now the choice is yours!
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