Google Maps Hacks at the Factory Tour

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May 19
2005

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Google Maps Hacks at the Factory Tour

I asked about Google Maps hacks, like this week's Chicago Crime site, at the Google Factory Tour. Particularly, I asked if their agreements with Navteq and Tele Atlas, who provide the underlying map data for the service, would require Google to shut down sites that used the map data without Google's permission. They responded that they had every intention to not shut them down as long as their licenses permit it, and one of the engineers insinuated that they might be working on a Google Maps API or a similar way to build on top of Maps (he actually said, "to make them not hacks," by which I think he meant not unauthorized). They also said they hoped that the data licensors would realize that increased traffic benefits them.

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Comments: 12

Adrian Holovaty [05.19.05 02:00 PM]

AWESOME! Thanks for this great scoop.

Marc Hedlund [05.19.05 02:27 PM]

Later on I also spoke with Lars Rasmussen, the tech lead for Google Maps, on the topic of what a Google Maps API would look like (were they to do one). He said they don't have something specific planned, and we talked about how you would build an API for an Ajax project like Maps. Would it be a Javascript library that was supported, or what? One thing he mentioned as a personal (not company) goal was having all of these applications available in the Google Maps interface, so all the kinds of data people are adding to maps could coexist (i.e., show me crime rates and housing options on the same map). He said he wasn't sure how to address this, but that it was a worthwhile problem.

Adrian Holovaty [05.19.05 03:04 PM]

Ideally, putting a Google map on a page would be as easy as doing the following:

* Include an external JavaScript library.

* Call a JavaScript function to render the map. You give it the ID of the HTML element that the map should appear in, the map dimensions, and the XML file containing the map data.

That should cover most use cases, no?

I've actually pieced together a small custom API over Google Maps for my chicagocrime.org project, just for ease of use, which does pretty much exactly this.

Adrian Holovaty [05.19.05 03:07 PM]

One more thing: Seems like it'd be cool to take the approach by a9.com's OpenSearch and allow for external "feeds" that people could subscribe to in their own Google Maps account. Data providers would just have to output their stuff in the format Google Maps expected.

Follower [05.20.05 12:08 PM]

Essentially the existing "unofficial" API works pretty much like this already, I recently began documenting it further here:

http://stuff.rancidbacon.com/google-maps-embed-how-to/

--Phil.

Chris Holmes [05.21.05 03:56 PM]

Could someone please tell Dr. Rasmussen about the Web Map Service (WMS) standard? If Google were to support mapping standards then they could easily make it possible for data added by different people to co-exist. Indeed such a move would position Google to pursue geospatial search, not just making slicker versions of MapQuest with more javascript. Many governments and organizations are making their data available as WMS, and also as WFS. WFS allows you to get the raw data behind the maps (the source code, if you will), to do real analysis on crime rates and home prices, for example, instead of just looking at pictures of the statistics and trying to draw conclusions from there. If Google were to tackle the problem of searching those servers, and use their (coming any day now...) Google Foundation to bring more publicly relevant spatial data available through standards, then I will be impressed.

Jeff [06.30.05 11:40 PM]

I was talking to some friends who were struggling to get the basics of a map up and running.. I decided to toss together a quick tool to let you type in the information into a form and have it generate the right API code for you.. Feedback is helpful if you think you would use it.

Google Map API Tool
http://www.getaholdofme.com

google searher [07.19.05 12:47 AM]

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