Hitting the Ground Running — New Online Map Features

May 30, 2007 — -- All the world's a map, and all the men and women merely — what, pixels on it?

With apologies to Shakespeare ("As You Like It"), the newest developments in the online world make conventional mapping Web sites look oh-so-2006.

Today, Google is out with Street View, a new feature built into its Google Maps section.

Type in a location you're trying to find, and you'll get a map of the area, just as you have for several years.

Now, click on the "Street View" button in the upper right, and a new window opens. You'll find yourself looking at a street-level, 360-degree wraparound image of the place you chose.

Move your cursor around in the picture, and you'll find that you can turn, or move down the street, or zoom in on details.

Major and Minor Landmarks

So, for instance, type in 630 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. (even with typos), and you'll find yourself at the entrance to St. Patrick's Cathedral.

Try Las Vegas Boulevard South., move around the picture a little bit, and you'll turn up just off the Strip, watching valets parking cars at the entrance to the Bellagio.

"We're just trying to enhance the user experience," says Stephen Chau, a product manager for Google Maps. For now, Street View works only in five cities (New York, San Francisco, Miami, Denver and Las Vegas), but it will expand as quickly as — well, as quickly as Google can take pictures of the entire world.

'If Only I Could Remember Its Name ...'

"We can see all sorts of uses," says Chau. "I just moved to a new apartment, and I used Street View to check out the neighborhood.

"You can preview the location to see if the real estate listing is accurate — is it close to public transportation, and so forth. There's a sightseeing aspect to it that way."

It could also be helpful, he says, if you're trying to find that great little Italian restaurant downtown whose name you forgot. If you don't know the name, you can't exactly look it up, but if you can retrace your steps, virtually, you may find it and be able to zoom in on its sign.

Google sent vans out with cameras mounted on top, plus GPS locators and computers to store the data they collected. The result was a giant database of images, which can give you panoramic views of a location, or allow you to move down the street a little and get a different view.

Stiff Competition

Other firms are doing similar things, and Google is hardly the first to hit the market with its city views.

Numerous real estate entrepreneurs in the United States and Europe have tried to offer such services as a way for people to check out a neighborhood before they move there. Microsoft's map search offers views in San Francisco and Seattle; Amazon tried a version but stopped.

But Google, because it has such a lead in the search business, has upped the ante. It does not include advertising in the street views on its site, but it will doubtless profit by attracting more Web surfers to its site.

Oh, one other address to try: 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043.

Enter that one and you'll find yourself in front of Google's headquarters, the so-called Googleplex. Chau says somewhere in the imagery of the area, they've hidden a picture of the team that developed Street View.

"There is a little Easter egg in the product," he says. "And now, I've told you more than I should have."