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Wednesday, June 15, 2005

Reactions to web site: Google Maps

Post comments on Google Maps below.

2 Comments:

At 10:52 PM, Blogger umaysay said...

Google mapping website provides satellite photo as well as map. In addition, it provides lots of spatial information by retrieving request like search engine. I was surprised by the fact that it has the Korean restaurants information in Madison. It seems like contributing strategic marketing more efficiently.

 
At 9:29 AM, Blogger Nick said...

One quirky and interesting aspect of the satellite view is that you can scroll left and right and it recycles over and over around the world, as if it were a circular drum...like the earth really is. When you do this up and down, however, you get stuck at the poles. I feel like this tells us something about how we traditionally use imagery to represent the earth. In theory there's nothing special about looking at a sphere in a particular manner (left to right with the equator in the middle), but it is so ingrained via conventional, normative mapping that there's not even data to scroll up and down in a similar recycling manner. The thing that amazed me about google maps was that they are (I think) the only online mapping service to play with and offer real time zooming. No reloads for scale changes! They haven't quite got it yet though because sliding up and down the scale bar doesn't change the data set from which the image draws. It just makes the pixels bigger or smaller, and zooming way out doesn't change the spatial extent of the map. The three services google maps provides are "go to a location," "find a business," and "get directions." These are all intuitive and useful query options in my opinion. The best thing is that they are all interrelated, i.e. if you go to a location, the interface makes it simple to then find a type of business (like a restaurant) or get directions to and from that location. For example, I searched for "jazz" in New York City as a business type and it came up with about 15 places in Manhattan represented by pins. Scrolling over the pins exposes a bubble with the exact address and a web link to that business. Then I typed in "get directions from" my Madison address and found that it functions much like mapquest.
I think they could get by with about four different scales instead of 9 or 10 because much of the information doesn't change until you jump 3 or 4 scales anyways, the picture just gets bigger or smaller. I noticed that the data is generated and powered by NAVTEQ and Tele Atlas.

 

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