Google had decided to add a new navigation layer to its Mobile Maps and a demonstration of this was given to the press on the 27th of this month at the Google office in Mountain View. The demo was carried out on Verizon’s new Android 2.0 Motorola ‘Droid’ phone. Google said that currently the feature of turn-by-turn navigation for Mobile Maps will only work on Android 2.0 smartphones.

When asked whether other devices like G1, MyTouch3G and other non-Android 2.0 phones will be able to upgrade, Vic Gundotra who is the Vice President of Engineering at Google said that this decision lies entirely with the Android carriers. As per the reports, other smartphones should also be able to upgrade to get this new feature from Google.

The demonstration began with Gundotra providing some background information about Google Mobile Maps. He reported that ever since its launch four years ago, there has been billions of downloads and currently has about fifty million ‘active’ users on a global scale. Gundotra said this feature was added as this navigation layer was the most commonly requested one by most users.

This use of this feature will definitely gain momentum especially with the combination of other Google tools like search assets, voice interface and other Maps features. The fact that it comes free can only boost its use which could be quite a bad news for other GPS device manufacturers and subscription-navigation services.

A user can search manually or by voice in English on Google Navigation and this can be pretty fast on the Quick Search Box provided on the home screen of Android devices. Users can also carry out regular searches and then get turn-by-turn directions to the required destination through Navigation. This new offering from Google Navigation through Android can make both Maps and the device one very successful combination.

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Google has now come up with the plan to use mobiles that have maps for mobile installed on them to get hold of live traffic data. This was announced in the Google blog which said that a GPS enabled mobile uses Google maps for mobile and when you select your location, your mobile sends anonymous data bits back to Google which gives an exact description of the speed of your movements. This bit of information about you is compared to all other phones in the vicinity and this is what feeds Google the real time traffic information.

This does not require any additional effort from your point. All that you have to do is switch on Google maps for mobile before you get into your car. As the number of people who do this increases there will be better and more accurate traffic results that are generated.

Google does not plan to give away the figures regarding the number of Google maps for mobile users but it remains the fact that it is the most important feature accredited to the iPhone and is also present in most other kinds of smart phones. Statistics say that there are roughly many millions who posses such location aware devices who drive through the peak hour of traffic

There is talk about the security involved and Google says that they know what they are doing as all the data transmitted is completely anonymous. Users will not probably mind if the world knows how fast they drive, but it is another thing to make their destinations known. And Google guarantees that privacy protection was their main goal. They do not want people knowing the travel details of one another, so all the details of the source and destination are completely deleted in a manner that even Google cannot access it.

Critics will not be completely satisfied with these assurances about the safety precautions taken, especially in the EU. It is but fair to attribute commendation to Yahoo at this point because they were one of the first to give real time traffic information on maps in the year 2004.

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Google is always the leader in search engine world and so do they keep up their good work by updating the It is difficult to maintain the same position all the way through and you need to work hard for that. There are dedicated members who keep on making the website the latest and on the top.

Google has been doing a great job in including more information onto the different features including user lists, articles, maps, images and the list goes on. The latest news by the company was that they announced that they have inserted “icons and labels of prominent businesses and places of interest directly on the map itself.” This was a something extremely good to hear for those who were into Google maps for their needs as it would certainly add value to the dedicated Street View site.

With the launch of this new aspect, the use of search box will be limited or of no use from now on. The users can directly check out for anything on the map directory, for example, attractions, businesses, points of interests and lot more.

You might be thinking how will it be possible to trigger out things by just having a look, isn’t it? It is pretty easy as each of the types has its own icon to ease up the work. I hope there is lot more to be introduced by Google in the coming days and one day might pop up when you can simply get hold of any location on the map by just selecting the icons which are easily available as a long list on the website itself.

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The Google Street View Bikes were launched in May of 2009. The bike was originally used to map the footpaths in Britain. The tricycle helped to photograph the car unfriendly roads in Britain, the cobblestone lanes in Rome etc. Now it seems there are many such bikes in use at present in various countries. The other countries they are operating in are U.S, Italy and Japan.

As a matter of fact, the progress is so fast that the images from three locations in California have been published online. Images from more locations will be updated soon.

Santa Monica Pier, 3rd Street Promenade and Monterey are the three places that have been photographed and the images have been uploaded in the internet. Google claims that photography of more locations will be completed and uploaded in the internet soon.

To be of use to the public, more universities and amusement parks are expected to be photographed. University Of Pennsylvania, Penn State, University Of San Diego, Legoland California etc are some of the locations that are likely to be added to the list of locations to be photographed.

If Legoland is being photographed then why not photograph Disneyland? Disneyland Paris has already been photographed and has been put online too. Only thing is that the process was not done using the bike, but by using a car. Other Disney parks may or may not be photographed using bikes.

The photographs of other locations will be ready in a few months. So the road maps of these universities and amusement parks are expected to be available online in a few months time.

The really amusing part about the whole project is that the Street View Camera caught the video of two people indulging in mugging. They were arrested. Thus Google now acted to help the cops in Netherlands.

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Isn’t it a wonderful news to be known that Google Map has been conversing with Twitter with the name GoogleMaps and here you can get plenty of information on the product tips, cools uses and other things on it? You can also get to know about things going around with the Googlers and also the happening in the mapping world. It has also been reported that Twitter will be used as a medium for the users to suggest things about improvements, praise messages and lot of things which would make the website even more useful and worthy enough to go through.

There are many of them who are aware of what Twitter is and usually they come up to say that it is the 140-character micro blogging website which has tremendously gained enough popularity from both the individuals as well as the organizations. They are just overwhelmed to hear this good news as they can easily get all the concepts under one roof. If you are a Twitter member, you can login and choose the follow link to enter GoogleMaps. On the other hand, if you are new to Twitter, you need to first sign up and then enter the “follow” link to move onto GoogleMaps. It is nothing difficult as the steps are pretty easy and of course free!

You can just catch up with the tweets and enjoy your Twitter experience with more which is about to come apart from the new mapping concept which has been introduced. The massive popularity of Twitter is bringing in more people towards it and they are trying to provide the best and the latest to the customers at the same time!

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According to Google Operating Systems it has been found that a new layer named the Webcams has been introduced by Google recently in their Maps. You might be wondering about the need for this special addition onto Google Maps. Isn’t it? Could you just make a guess as to what would the added purpose be for this?

Of course you are right. On clicking the webcams available at certain locations which is denoted and marked clearly by a sign, it shows the various webcams which are placed on the location you are looking at on the roads.

To make it clear to you, I have brought about a small example where I clicked onto the George Washington Bridge to zoom it. It is the link that joins New York City to that of New Jersey. This gave me my first view of what they call the new addition of webcams. This was a great benefit for me in every way.

This new concept brought about by Google has been talked out as a great addition which would certainly help to check in the traffic at certain roads. Also, it is certainly a great blessing for those who are looking out for street views in a very different and ethnic way. It is something different from the normal mapping work which was seen earlier with Google and presently with other online maps.

The newer inclusion at this point includes Wikipedia, photos and videos apart from webcams. This has been estimated to bring in more traffic to Google Maps and thus making it a routine phenomenon where people can simply find out anything about any place however far they are located from that point. Isn’t that a wonderful aspect? Great thanks to Google for bringing up such wonderful concepts in making our earth even smaller than what we thought it to be.

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The January traffic data collection has presently reported Google Maps to be leading all the way beating MapQuest and recognized to be the top mapping site among in US. According to the figure received, it states 41.5 million visited for MapQuest during the month of January and around 42.2 million unique visitors exclusively for Google during the same month.

MapQuest were the leading entertaining in this field and it is the first time that Google Maps have overtaken them. On the other hand, there are sources reporting that the time on site or the engagement within the site is greater for MapQuest when compared to that of Google Maps even now.

This event has been monitored since long time, since links to competitors mapping sites was removed by Google from the search results obtained during January 2007. There are many who argue with the concept that it is an unfair result as all this is done by the ability of Google to refer more traffic to its own resources. Yes it has been true as Hitwise reports the same news that a large number of traffic to Google Maps has been the result of the same issue of self-referring phenomenon. Almost a year ago, Hitwise’s Heather Hopkins had written about the gains of Google against Map Quest.

Even though there are enough evidences, it does not figure out the entire thing what has resulted right now. The truth is still there about the self-referring phenomenon, still there are other significant factors also to be noted at the same time.

The investment made by Google for the past years on Maps as well as the distributions across the web world is significantly large and this has been conducted via its API. The special features and abilities of Google Maps are special and extensive when compared to that other competitors. Microsoft was the only company to match with that of the investment made by Google in online mapping.

From SEO MegaCorp News Blog.

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We culls the latest Images from the internet and serve to you in the weekends in our Image Search over this SEO Blog. We cover the images and cartoons related to the search engines.

This week in the Image Search we find the several images which worth here. So we Added them here.

Yahoo Halloween Dresses

Google Maps Ad in NYC subway

Halloween Display @ Googleplex More Google Halloween Images on Official Google Blog What are you going to be for Halloween?

YouTube in Balloons

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