Google Location Search

September 23, 2003 9:45 AM

In the long tradition of Google anouncements may I present to you Google Location search (which if you recall was the winner of the competition they held last year)
posted by zeoslap (7 comments total)

US only for the moment... I wonder if this uses GeoURL tags. If not, why not?
posted by PenDevil at 9:58 AM on September 23, 2003

I had some trouble getting it to work (three separate "internal server errors"). Also, I'm not 100% clear on what the value is. Is it trying to compete with Citysearch and the like, for localized service search ("find me Dry Cleaners in Los Angeles")?
posted by jonson at 10:54 AM on September 23, 2003

Errors? Me too - maybe something to do with the fact that it was just posted on Slashdot. When I get through to it, I'd like to see if it's not just stuff that can be found in existing gazetteers/phone books/etc., in which case I'll be wondering how they generate their indexes. PenDevil, GeoURL sounds cool - any more info? Cheers.
posted by carter at 11:10 AM on September 23, 2003

It works like so...

"To accomplish this, Daniel converted street addresses found within a large corpus of documents to latitude-longitude-based coordinates using the freely available TIGER and FIPS data sources, and built a two-dimensional index of these coordinates."
posted by zeoslap at 11:35 AM on September 23, 2003

The FAQ. Doh. Thanks, zeoslap.
posted by carter at 11:46 AM on September 23, 2003

Right now, it doesn't work as well as Google proper for the same search. For example, "Smith" in the search terms and Greenfield MA in the address box gives you no results or an error. Type "Smith Greenfield MA" into Google and you get a couple of Smiths plus a clickthrough to all the Smiths in town.

Can anybody give an example of an actual result obtained from this thing?
posted by beagle at 1:47 PM on September 23, 2003

US-only, no searches seem to produce anything, lots of errors. Is this an actual released product, or has someone found a back-door into something unfinished?

Ah, I see:

Sometimes we have to shut the service down to implement improvements. Sometimes it decides on its own to break for a nice pot of Earl Grey and some fresh silicon wafers. We'll keep it running as much as possible, but please bear with us as we work to make it faster and more reliable.

posted by dg at 3:10 PM on September 23, 2003