Tag: googlemaps

How to get your information into Google Maps: Update

For those of you who are waiting for the next installment in the How to get your information into Google Maps series, here’s a quick update.

Writing the last two articles about Local Ads and User Generated Content is taking longer than I thought it would take. Especially the one about Local Ads.

The local features of Adwords are difficult to test just for the sake of an article, without running a real campaign.

So keep your eyes posted on this blog, next week the last 2 articles will be published.

In the mean time, if you’re Dutch, you may wanna check out the Dutch version of this series. It’s not just a translated version, but it will also be adapted to the Dutch Google Maps (if possible and needed).

Hoe kan je eigen informatie op Google Maps publiceren (1)

Google voegt steeds meer informatie toe aan Google Maps. Deze informatie bestaat uit lokale bedrijven, restaurants, hotels, openbaar vervoer en zelfs live verkeersinformatie (op dit moment alleen nog maar in de VS beschikbaaar).

Voor veel mensen is het onduidelijk waar Google deze informatie vandaan haalt.

Tijdens de Geo Developer Dag van 29 maart jongstleden kwam ik er ook achter dat er weinig mensen (bedrijven) zijn die weten hoe ze hun eigen informatie op de kaart kunnen beheren mbv het Google Bedrijvencentrum.

Deze serie gaat over de bronnen waar Google de informatie vandaan haalt en hoe bedrijven hun eigen informatie kunnen toevoegen of wijzigen.

Eerst een introductie.

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How to get your information into Google Maps (4): Local Business Center

In the previous article in the ‘how to get your information into Google Maps’ series I talked about the 3rd party sources Google is using for their data on Google Maps. After reading this article you’re ready to get your hands dirty and start adding your own business information by using the Local Business Center.

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How to get your information into Google Maps (3): Local data suppliers

I think the most important source of data for Google Maps are the local data suppliers or 3rd party sources.

The biggest difference between the webcrawling results and 3rd party sources is the structure of the data. 3rd Party sources know what the address fields are, how the extra data like reviews is structured, etc. While data from the crawlers isn’t structure at all, as we saw in the previous post.

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How to get your information into Google Maps (2): Webcrawler

Today was an important day because of Google’s announcements about My Maps and KML search. I’ll talk about these later on in this series, when I’m writing about user generated sources.

This post is about the business data Google gets by crawling the Internet and the use of addresses on your website.

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How to get your information into Google Maps (1)

Google is adding more and more localized information to Google Maps. They are adding information about local businesses, restaurants, hotels, public transport and even live traffic information (at this moment only available for the US).

What the sources are for the information Google displays on the maps isn’t very clear to a lot of people.

At last week’s Geo Developer day I also discovered not a lot of people know how they can control their own information on the maps by using the Google Local Business center.

In this series of posts I’ll write about the sources Google uses and ways how to add or edit your own information.

First let’s start with an introduction.

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Report of the Google Geo Developer Day in Amsterdam

Yesterday I was at the Google Geo Developer day in Amsterdam. I think it’s the second time Google organizes such an event. The first time was last year preceding the Oreilly’s Where 2.0 conference in the US (btw. why isn’t there such an event in Europe?).

The program looked interesting and I was looking forward meeting other Google Maps developers.

The day started with some keynotes.

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Google Maps API first steps towards open source

This morning there’s some great news about the Google Maps API:

The Google Maps API Team is excited to announce our new open source project, the GMaps Utility Library. This project will be hosted on code.google.com and will let the Google engineers for the Maps API work hand-in-hand with the many great developers in the Maps API community. Together, we can extend the core Maps API and ensure that every developer need is met.

There are a few reasons why I think this is great news:

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Google officially unveils the Plus Box

On the Google Blog there’s an official announcement of the Plus Box feature. This feature allows extra information to be shown next to individual search results. The feature isn’t completely new, as several bloggers, including Google’s own Matt Cutts have written about it (see search engine land’s post with links to a few of them).

There are two types of Plus Box result: Stock information and maps. I don’t find stock information that interesting, but I love the maps Plus Box. If you search for a business and Google knows its address, there will be a map shown next to the search result with a marker where the address is.

At this moment most (all?) of the results are from the US. You can search for restaurants in New York and you’ll see a few examples (at the bottom of the first page). Sadly I haven’t found any business with a Map Plus Box in The Netherlands (or elsewhere in Europe). The only result with a maps Plus Box you’ll get when searching for restaurants in Amsterdam is Amsterdam Restaurant in New York 🙂

The Google Blog says they are working hard to increase the availability and I hope they will add availability of non-US businesses soon.

I’m not sure a lot of people now how they can add their business information to Google so it’ll show up in the Plus Box or in a Google Maps search. You can add your own information by using the Local Business Center. See more information at the Webmaster Help Center.

In The Netherlands most companies are registered in the Chamber of Commerce register (KvK) and this information automatically shows up in a Google Maps search. At the Local Business Center you can change and add your information (images, description, categories, etc). Before these changes will show up in the search results you have to enter a PIN you’ll get by snail mail sent to your business address.

In the Local Business Center you can also see some kind of statistics, I don’t know what kind of stats it’ll show, because I haven’t received the PIN yet. I’ve changed my information on March 8.

According to the Google Blog there will be more Plus Boxes in the future. One has already been spotted, the Video Plus Box, which shows a video in the Plus Box. I’m curious whether this will only show Youtube and Google Video results, or also videos of Google’s competitors?

Rails and geo plugins

After looking into Cartographer and YM4R I started searching for other geo tools for Ruby.

I found several and started creating a list. My idea was to make a comparison between the features of the different plugins. But I soon found out James Stewart did this already in his Comparing rails geo-plugins post. He moved the information to a wiki, on which the most recent information about the different Geo plugins can be found. On this page you’ll also find some great reviews of the different plugins.

I started looking into GeoKit, acts_as_geocodable and actsaslocateable. The last one isn’t suitable for my application, because it can only deal with US addresses. That’s also true for some of the geocoding services the other two support. The only one1 with support for Dutch addresses is the Google geocoding service, so sadly no fall back mechanism for Dutch addresses when one geocoding service isn’t available.

There are a few differences between the remaining two plugins.

acts_as_geocodable makes use of a gem called Graticule. This gem takes care of the actual geocoding, communicating with external services, etc. The acts_as_geocodable plugin takes care of the Rails specific stuff (extra find methods, etc).

GeoKit has all the functionality in the plugin, but Bill Eisenhauer, one of the authors, said “there’s no reason why this needs to be packaged entirely as a plugin”. So maybe this will change one day.

Another important difference is the way the two plugins store the geocoded information. GeoKit can handle existing models with longitude and latitude columns. You can specify the names of the columns with the column_name parameters (the defaults are ‘lat’ and ‘lng’).

The acts_as_geocodable plugin creates two new tables. The first is called geocodes and stores the longitude and latitude for a given address. The second table links the geocodes into your model in a polymorphic way.

Both plugins als have a feature the other plugin doesn’t have (as far as I can tell).

acts_as_geocodable can update the address fields with the data returned from the geocoding service, just add acts_as_geocodable :normalize_address => true to your model.

GeoKit has the ability to look up a location based on the user’s IP-address.

Which of the two is better? I don’t know. They almost have the same feature set, GeoKit does IP-based location lookups, while acts_as_geocodable separates its functionality between the plugin and the gem and has the ability to normalise addresses.

I think it’s a matter of taste, which one to choose. Or is there any difference in performance? I guess I have to test this.

For now, I think I’ll start with GeoKit for my application. I really like the ability to keep my own models with the longitudes and latitudes.

1 Maybe someday I’ll write a post about addresses and zip codes in The Netherlands and why the aren’t available for free.