[Q] Map on the Google's Local page

[CyanBlue]

Howdy...

I just saw that Google has Local page...
http://local.google.com/

Put something in the text fields and map comes up on the right side of the page where the search results gets displayed...

Dang... What kind of technology is that???

Anybody have any idea???

Thanks...

[pyrocorp]

its a navteq map...
heres thier site.

http://www.navteq.com/

you can do the similar things with Microsoft Mappoint. They even have an online subscription version that you can link you site to.

BTW, They can afford to use it now that they went public with thier stock!

[CyanBlue]

Thanks for the info, pyrocorp...

I don't really see much information on their site though... But I'd love to know what sort of technology they are using if anybody knows...

[Xeef]

Hmm ?

search in the database for the street name (DB has info on it's location on the planet)
show the part of the map
search for nearby "PIZZA" and put the flags on the map

ready

i doubt that you can get access to such a DB for free (will by some sort of roadplaner
"GPS navigatyonsystem" software better ones can show you petrolstations parkplacec ....

[hangalot]

cyanblue the technology is calles Geographical information systems (GIS), its been around for ages, arcinfo and arcview being the two best known examples.
you can get quite a bit of GIS data for free from esri, local councils, goverments to name but a few. also postgreSQL 8 supports GIS data natively now (just shapefiles and their associated dbf files) so doing a real mapping job is now cheaper than 2 years ago.

checkout www.freegis.org for some more info.

this is a hobby of mine in the freetime, since half my familiy are planners and geographers

[petefs]

It looks an awful lot like http://maps.google.com/ ^_^ Whether they've built it on navteq's technology or not I don't know.

As far as how it works: XMLHttpRequest ^_^ a javascript object for sending and retrieving data. Google has been making extensive use of it lately.