Google Maps Route Tools
April 6th, 2007
Google just released a route-mapping feature for Google Maps (when did they give up on the name “Google Local”? I prefer Maps, anyways). This has a terrific interface for creating simple maps with points, lines, and even areas, and seems to allow publishing said maps to the Google Maps search function. When you search a map, you can scroll to the bottom of the search results and click on “User-created Content”. I haven’t been able to bring up any routes but that’s most likely where they’ll show up.
Link to a map Dave made this morning.
This function mirrors many of the innovations in Google Maps Pedometer, released many months ago – but (and maybe this is why it took so long) they’ve really nailed the interface. Still, a couple oversights, contributed by Dave Pitman, Vestal’s director of interface design:
- Latitude/Longitude input for points (for those with GPS devices)
- Distance measurements for the route/legs of the route. (Unless we’ve missed something.)
And when will Google (or someone) finally offer a free, unlimited (::cough:: Yahoo ::cough::) geolocation service? For that matter, I’ll pay for good geolocation based on address strings. That is to say: “1503 Spruce St., Unit B, Boulder‎ CO‎ 80302” => Longitude: -105.27625, Latitude: 40.019878”.
Note: We used geocoding technology in the recently launched Campus Vortex project, to calculate the distance between a campus and various restaurants.
Popularity: 7% [?]
April 9th, 2007 at 11:44 pm
Here’s a big list of geocoders and reverse-geocoders.
Note that Google Earth Plus ($20/year) also lets you geocode up to a 100 points at a time based on address while Google Earth Pro ($400/year) lets you geocode up to 2500 at a time (among a lot of other neat features.)
April 11th, 2007 at 2:03 pm
Thanks for the tip, Jess, those are interesting – but we’re faced with thousands of points at a time, and need a ceiling of maybe 10-20k points per day, working from addresses. Also, we really need an API or some kind of remote request service, like Yahoo’s. Yahoo limits at 5k per day, and we ran through that pretty fast. I think we’ll figure it out but for now we’re probably going to stick to being really conservative about how many requests we let through. I wish there were a reliable address-based service we could just buy, maybe per request, or buy 10k per day or so.
In any case there soon will be, this is a huge market and more and more web services will be using datapoints. Yahoo or Google could probably make a killing by offering a geocoding library with some nice functions like distance_between_points() and others. I ended up writing them myself.
May 2nd, 2007 at 12:21 am
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