Warsaw

These new cities join other major European cities viewable in 3D, including Munich, Hamburg, Berlin and Zurich to name a few. If you've never visited these cities in-person, have some fun flying around and exploring them virtually.


Posted by Bruce Polderman, Sr. Business Product Manager
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Within this folder, you'll find hourly-updated storm tracks courtesy of the National Hurricane Center, which include forecasted storm center positions and storm track areas. The forecasted center positions of each storm are represented by hurricane-like icons and correspond in size and shape to the intensity and type of storm. The current position of the storm is shown, along with the predicted storm track swath, which is outlined in red. These are areas most likely to be affected by the storm at a given time 12-hour interval. Inside each balloon you'll find an overview of the storm, its official NHC advisory, a near real-time news gadget, and reference information.

Tropical Storm Andres off the coast of Mexico

Posted by Pete Giencke and Cris Castello, GIS Data Engineers
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Posted by Matt Manolides, Senior Geo Data Strategist
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This feature takes into account the zoom level you're looking at, and gives you the most appropriate geographical entity at that point. For example, if you're zoomed in closely on Manhattan, you can get the full address of a point by clicking on "What's here?". Additionally, by combining this with the "At this address" feature that you may have seen in the left-hand panel, you can also see a list of the businesses located at that place.

If you're a bit more zoomed out, you can get larger features, such as the names of the different Islands in the Galapagos Archielago - Isla Fernandina, Isla Isabela, Isla Marchena, Isla Guy Fawkes, and so on.


In the technical world, this feature is known as "reverse geocoding". It has been available in the Google Maps API for a couple of months now, so you can also put it to use if you're a developer.

Posted by Fernando Delgado, Product Manager and Diana Stroe, Software Engineer
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This is why transit agencies around the country are celebrating Dump the Pump day, sponsored by the American Public Transportation Association, today to encourage more Americans to take public transportation. Depends on where you are, you may get free passes from your local transit agencies today!

Now, you may wonder how you can plan a transit trip easily if you're not familiar with your local agency. The answer is - go to Google Maps. So far more than 100 agencies in the United States have made their data available in Google Maps through Google Transit Partner Program. Recently we have added several new agencies:
In addition, Los Angeles Metro, City of Edmonton, Houston Metro, and Calgary Transit have released their GTFS data feed to the public so that developers can create innovative transit applications to further promote the awareness of public transportation.

Now go to Google Maps on your computer or your cell phone, plan a transit trip, and go catch a train or bus. I bet your won't miss the congested highway or increasing gas price!

Posted by Jessica Wei, Strategic Partner Development Manager, Google Transit
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Posted by By Hannah Freya Anderson, UNHCR; and France Lamy, Google.org
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If you have your own story of how Google Earth or Google Maps helped you discover something - whether a new species or just a great picnic spot - let us know!

Posted by Elaine Filadelfo, Lat Long Blog Team
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Tokyo (Japan):


Subways are the most popular and convenient transportation method in Tokyo; most of downtown Tokyo is easily accessible via subways.


The Tokyo Metro Ginza line (drawn in orange) was first opened in 1927. There were many trams at that time, but they have since been replaced by subways because of the increase in automobile usage and lack of capacity and speed. Thirteen lines are in operation today and they carry more than 2.9 billion passengers per year, making this the world's largest subway system.


One of the interesting things about the Transit Layer is that you can see the layout of the transit system. In Tokyo, for instance, you might wonder why the subways take a circuitous path around the central area and avoid it. This is because the area contains the Imperial Palace, which used to be the Edo Castle where the Shogun lived during the pre-modern era. Also, many of the subways are located under historically significant roads. Though Tokyo is filled with modern architecture, it has not been built from scratch, but rather it has been built on top of the old city.


Moscow (Russia):


The Moscow Metro is the world's second largest metro system (in terms of passenger rides) and quite possibly the most beautiful. If you ever come to Moscow, you should definitely visit the Metro (but it's best to avoid it during the rush hour if you have the choice!). Meanwhile, you can check out the Metro on the transit layer for Moscow, together with the bus, tram, trolleybus and monorail lines. We have also launched the detailed transit layer for St. Petersburg recently. All in all, we now provide Transit Layer coverage for 90 cities in 26 countries, including many of the worlds largest transit networks.



Posted by Issei Suzuki, Peng Chen and Vladimir Rychev, Software Engineers
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So, last October, as the last few rays of sunlight remained high enough in the sky, Disneyland Paris opened its gates early to our Street View car to capture some of the magic at street-level. We drove up Main Street USA (outside of Paris!), through Adventureland, and around Fantasyland and even in Walt Disney Studios Park.

Some furry friends showed up early too. See if you can spot Buzz Lightyear, Pluto and Baloo, among others! Check out the mapplet we created to walk you through the park as well.


Disneyland Paris was our first "special collection" in France, and we hope to capture more interesting and hard to reach places like race tracks, castles, parks and more.


Disneyland Paris is also the first amusement park in the world to be visible with Street View, and includes both Disneyland Paris itself and Walt Disney Studios Park:


Posted by Liz Ericson, Product Marketing Manager, London & Paris
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Posted by Matt Manolides, Senior Geo Data Strategist
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Posted by Aidan Chopra, SketchUp Product Evangelist
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But can you imagine measuring the entire ocean with lengths of rope, when some parts are nearly seven miles deep? Not only would it be practically impossible, but it's a project that's difficult to even imagine pursuing. You might even say it's unfathomable. The truth is, even with the help of today's satellites, the most sophisticated global maps of the ocean floor are really just guesswork. Satellites can hardly see past the surface of the water, let alone the ocean floor, and so the ocean remains relatively opaque to our eyes, our technology, and for the most part, our understanding.

Given how hard it is to study the ocean, it's important to make the most of what we do know. We believe a key step in understanding is visualization - this is one of the main reasons we added the oceans to Google Earth. Miles of rope, and the mysterious depths they measure, now fit on a small computer screen. Maps are, of course, just one form of visualization. Sometimes it takes a piece of artwork, something less literal and more symbolic, to make that which might seem overwhelming easier to understand. No matter what form a visualization takes, it offers promise as a starting point for comprehension, which hopefully will lead to more informed choices.

Visualizing the ocean is especially relevant today, the first UN-recognized World Oceans Day. The UN's chosen theme is "Our Oceans, Our Responsibility," which might seem like it ought to read "big oceans, big responsibility." To help get our heads around the watery part of our planet, we've collected a few visualizations of both issues facing the ocean and cutting edge science. Have a look at the problem of plastics in our oceans, find out about where currents might take your trash, the health of the world's fisheries, and what the latest satellite data says about the state of the ocean. If you find yourself wanting more, you'll also see a ticker at the bottom of the page with World Oceans Day news, and a custom search box in the upper right to help you navigate through the rich content on some of our partner sites.



Ready? Go see for yourself.

Posted by Steve Miller, Product Manager, Ocean in Google Earth
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Double clicking on the pancake transports you to the best panorama in that direction.  For instance, if you pick the front door of this church, you will be taken to the view shown below. Sometimes the pancake shows a little magnifying glass in the bottom right to indicate that double clicking will zoom in on the current image rather than transport you to a closer location. This happens when we've determined that the current panorama has the best view of the selected location. 

And in case you changed you changed your mind about the place you jumped to, you can hit the return arrow shown in the Address Box to get back to the previous location. Now you can wander through Street View imagery and not worry about getting lost!

The Googlers who have been playing with and testing smart navigation have found it completely addictive. Not only is it an easier way to browse cities in Street View, it allows you to do superhuman things like jump from one side of a river to another to see a faraway building. Here are some examples of places that are fun to browse:


View Larger Map


View Larger Map


Grotere kaart weergeven

We hope you find it just as fun and useful, so to get you started we have put together a video to show you all the things you can now do with smart navigation. Enjoy!



Posted by Daniel Filip, Computer Vision Tech Lead, Google Zürich

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Posted by Naureen Kabir, Strategic Partnerships
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We're pretty excited about this new feature. If you're a local business, you probably already know that Google Maps drives traffic to your website and to your business. While you may be tracking usage metrics on your website, you don't always get as much information from that as you'd like. For example, a user may search for "pizza," click on your business listing, look at the reviews, and decide to pay a visit to your Italian restaurant without ever visiting your website or calling you. The new LBC dashboard feature will change all that, making this data easily accessible to business owners by introducing a new "dashboard" tab in your Local Business Center (www.google.com/lbc) account. So if you're a business owner who maintains one or more physical locations, and you're curious about what people are searching for when they see your business listing and where your customers are coming from, the dashboard will answer many of those questions for you. Data available in the dashboard will include the following:

  • Impressions: The number of times the business listing appeared as a result on a Google.com search or Google Maps search in a given period.
  • Actions: The number of times people interacted with the listing; for example, the number of times they clicked through to the business' website or requested driving directions to the business.
  • Top search queries: Which queries led customers to the business listing; for example, are they finding the listing for a cafe by searching for "tea" or "coffee"?
  • Zip codes where driving directions come from: Which zip codes customers are coming from when they request directions to your location.

So how will you use the dashboard? The first thing you'll need to do is make sure that you've claimed your listing in the LBC. Even if you hadn't claimed it until today, you'll be able to use the dashboard, since we're automatically populating it with data from the past month. When you log in to the LBC, you'll notice a new "View report" link right under the statistics that we provide:


Clicking on the link will take you to the dashboard page, where you'll find several features. At the very top, you'll see a timeline tracking the number of "Impressions" and "Actions" that your business received on Google. "Impressions" refers to the number of times that users saw your listing appear as a local business search result; "Actions" refers to how many times users interacted with your listing. You can change the date range selected to view more or less data.


Right under the graphs, you'll see a summary for the date range you've selected, along with a breakdown of the various types of "Actions" that users took:


Below that, you'll find a list of the top search queries people are using when they discover your business listing. For example, do people tend to find your Italian restaurant more by looking for "pizza" or "pasta"? Do more customers seem to find you because of your reputation as an affordable hotel, or as a quiet hotel? This gives you valuable insight into the ways that your potential customers are looking for you, and what terms are associated with your business. To protect any potentially personally identifiable information, queries with a very low search volume are put into the "other" category, and we filter addresses out of the queries (for example, if a someone searched for "bakery near 5873 Maple Ave," you would only see the "bakery" term.)


Finally, you'll also be able to see a breakdown of zip code starting points for driving direction requests to your business. To protect privacy, we aggregate these requests at the zip code level. If you hover over the counts inside the map, we'll highlight the area represented by that count. This lets you find out where there's an interest in your business, which can help inform advertising strategies or future growth.

As we mentioned above, your dashboard will be populated with data for the previous 30 days at launch. After that, we'll add fresh data daily, so you'll want to be sure to check back often to see how things are going and how various strategies (like your latest offline ad campaign or the addition of a photo to your listing) affect your traffic.

If you want to learn more, you can read our post on the Official Google Blog or watch the video below. Otherwise, head to http://www.google.com/lbc to dive in to your new dashboard!




Posted by Amer Shahnawaz, Software Engineer, Local Business Center
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