Google has announced the winners of its Street View Trike suggestions contest – a contest that started last October with Google inviting the public to tell the company where to send its trike for hard-to-reach Street View images. With nearly a quarter-million votes cast, Google says the winners are: Rochester Institute of Technology (Rochester, New […]
Relying largely on crowdsourcing and its MapMaker product, Google announced the addition of maps and local business search for 30 countries across Africa: Our big announcement today is that we are launching Maps domains for 30 countries across Africa. So what’s on offer? As well as searching online Maps for towns, highways, or roads, Google […]
Google has announced a new tool called Google Building Maker that lets you make 3D buildings using aerial photos and 3D shapes. Google says early testers felt it was more toy-like than tool-like and suggests that teachers might use it to help teach geography. And at this point you might be wondering … 3D buildings? […]
This year, we’ve seen several ambitious new efforts to mine and make searchable the vast part of the web that remains largely hidden to search engines—often referred to as the deep, hidden or invisible web. The latest foray into the reaches of hidden web is actually a hybrid, of sorts: Factual, founded by Gil Elbaz, […]
Google has pushed more deeply into “crowdsourcing” with Maps, now enabling users to “report a problem” in addition to making edits themselves on maps. According to the Google LatLong blog: You’ll find this “Report a Problem” link on the bottom right of Google Maps (you can also find it by right-clicking on the map). Has […]
Google is now using location-enabled mobile phones that have Maps for mobile installed to improve its real-time traffic data. According to the Google Blog: If you use Google Maps for mobile with GPS enabled on your phone, that’s exactly what you can do. When you choose to enable Google Maps with My Location, your phone […]
MIT’s Technology Review reported on a new game designed by Microsoft, designed to help make Bing a better search engine. The game is named Page Hunt and it asks users to submit search queries that they think the site presented to them, should show up for, in Bing. The results are then scored and players […]
Hunch is not a “search engine” insists Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, one of the people behind the new site. But you’ll probably start seeing it show up in (Google) search results, just like Wikipedia or Yahoo Answers. And in some ways it’s like a mix of both of those concepts, as Matt McGee discusses in […]
Caterina Fake’s enthusiasm for her latest project is contagious. Hunch is now open to the public, but it’s still three days pre-launch when we talk and, at this point, about the only uncertainty is how best to describe it in all the media interviews she’s doing. Phrases like “Q&A community” and “knowledge tool” are mentioned, […]
Yesterday Google provided another round of Transit updates. These include more cities globally as well as full public transit schedules for a number of new cities in Canada, the UK, Houston, Texas and throughout the state of Virginia. Separately Google now says that its community mapping tool Map Maker is available in 27 languages: We […]
Barry spotted this via Twitter: Google has, somewhat quietly, launched a Product Ideas Blog. A related effort is the company’s solicitation of ideas and their prioritization from users in a voting area. The first focus is on mobile.
Like many before it, most recently Mahalo, Wikia Search has introduced a Firefox toolbar, called “Wikia Evolution,” to expand the site’s reach and engage more users in the process of adding and annotating search results. In the notes, it suggests that Google is taking a page from its community playbook: “Already, we’re the cutting edge […]
No matter how much 3D, imagery, flash, and other impressive functionality you build into maps, data are the core of the experience. And improving local data is like building the pyramids in a sense. It takes lots of effort from many people. For this reason Google opened up Google Maps to community editing in March […]
There’s an interesting analogy to the 15th and 16th Centuries when European explorers (or colonialists) were out sailing and mapping the globe. The world was not entirely known and mapped at that time. So it is today on the Internet. While many areas are highly developed and well documented in online mapping, there are others […]
Last year in November Google opened up Maps to community editing, allowing people to move the pushpin markers to correct or improve the accuracy of business locations. John Hanke, Director of Maps & Earth, told us at the time that Google would move beyond just place markers and allow registered users to edit Maps more […]
The Google LatLong blog announced a neat new feature that lets you sit back and watch the edits made to Google Maps in a live viewer. To view recent edits made to Google Maps, just go here and watch. I made a quick video of the page, and as you can see, it showed three […]
The Library of Congress has teamed up with Flickr to create The Commons. The Library of Congress has added a sample of their over one million photos to Flickr, so that the Flickr community can help describe the photos through tagging. My Friend Flickr: A Match Made in Photo Heaven from the Library of Congress […]
The Official Google Blog (and Google LatLong Blog) announced a public map where users around the world are invited to add their holiday photos and videos. Here is the map: View Larger Map
Everyone’s been talking about how the social graph is the next evolution of search. Search 4.0. The next step forward after Search 3.0’s blended and personalized search. Today, Mahalo is taking that next step and adding a social layer to their search results. Jason Calacanis, Mahalo founder, says that the problem of search will be […]
Registered Google users are now permitted to adjust the place markers for businesses on Google Maps and soon will have the ability to more broadly edit local business information. Changes will initially go through a human editorial process to ensure the accuracy and propriety of information as the new capabilities are rolled out. Google told […]
At Web 2.0 Summit this week, Flickr previewed a feature that will provide a new way to browse photos based on geographic location. They are making over their map explorer and introducing new Places Pages that will make it easier to see what’s going on around the world through pictures. The current map explorer lets […]
Gary Price picked up on a major change coming to the German Wikipedia, where only “trusted editors” will be able to make instant changes to the online community-driven encyclopedia. This change is coming to the German Wikipedia later this year, and it may follow suit on the English version of Wikipedia as well as other […]
Last week, I wrote about the overall people search landscape, which, while not new, has been recently expanding and making full use of all that is shiny Web 2.0. Spock is the latest of these services to leverage social networks, intelligent web crawling, and community involvement. Spock launched in private beta in April, then in […]
Google announced expanded Maps coverage of Latin American and Asian countries on its LatLong blog. Recently added countries include: Afghanistan, Aruba, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belize, Bermuda, Brunei Darussalam, Bhutan, Bolivia, Cambodia, Chile, Columbia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Fiji, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Indonesia, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Kuwait, Laos, Lebanon, Mexico, Myanmar (Burma), […]
Brady Forrest at O’Reilly Radar reports on Google’s GPS-based “crowdsourcing” strategy to get local data on Maps outside the US (specifically in India). While Google has enormous amounts of data for the US and EU, in selected countries there’s much less data to plot on Maps. Accordingly Google is relying on users (e.g., My Maps) […]
Immersive 3-D mapping site Everyscape, which will formally launch this fall, has announced “The People’s World Project” which seeks to involve the community in voting for the next cities that EveryScape builds out. The company plans to launch with photorealistic, 3-D environments for 10 US metropolitan areas, five of which will be chosen by the […]
Jason Calacanis has announced Mahalo Greenhouse, a way for users to get paid for writing their own search results for the Mahalo people-powered search engine. The Greenhouse FAQ gives more details on the program, where if accepted, you can earn $10 to $15 per submission.