In an attempt to assist the users in more ways than some satellite navigation systems, Google Maps allows users not only to ‘add a destination’ to their main route (from A-B, to A-B-C) but to drag the route to incorporate any detours as an additional option, without having to enter new destinations in the side menu.

For example, a journey between London and Birmingham would normally take around 2 hours, according to Google Maps, but when you alter the route by ‘dragging it’ to include Cambridge, Milton Keynes, Northampton, Peterborough, Coventry, Cheltenham, and Wolverhampton, the blue route alters radically, and the estimated journey time is 9 hours. Images of this example can be seen below:

Before:

After:

Google Maps is a useful website tool on its own, but some visitors to the page may not be aware that there is user-generated content, sometimes from big-name websites, that can be integrated into your map-viewing experience!

The first batch of these would be fairly obvious as these are the ones that appear by default on Google Earth, the downloadable and more detailed version of Google Maps. One of these ‘mapps’ for Google Maps is from one of the biggest websites in the world, Wikipedia, providing detailed user-made content and information about the location or landmark you are visiting on the page, and is available wherever the Wikipedia . On a similar note, other major websites which are licenced on Earth, and now possible to use in Maps, are YouTube (videos relating to location), Flickr (photos), and Panoramio (panoramic photos). Perhaps the easiest area of these links is that they are dircetly integrated into the experience once they are ‘added’, meaning that the content (image/video/text) will be on-screen in a ’speech bubble’, unless you feel like using the link to go to the specific webpage…

Other, less-known websites also seem to be trying to cash in, with sites such as SeeMyHotel, and Glotter launching their own ‘mapps’. Could Google Maps soon take off as the new hotbed of internet self-promotion?

Incoming satellite searches:-

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Google Maps offers the very useful tool of showing a user the best directions to get from ‘A to B’, but perhaps they should consider other means of transportation.

For example, entering the directions from Sydney (Australia), to Los Angeles (USA) via Tokyo (Japan) (when walking, the journey would take approximately 190 days of travelling), gives the result of filling the ‘overseas’ sections of the journey not by the conventional boat, ferry, of plane, but by kayak.

Like all programmes, Google Maps cannot have everything, but since there is the option of including bus and train routes for some local journeys, could there not be one for international travel, such as planes?

The very least that they could have done was list a boat ride instead of a tiring kayak…

Incoming satellite searches:-

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