Thursday, June 25, 2009

Google City Tours

Google Labs has a new experimental project that could become a part of Google Maps: City Tours. The service "helps you identify points of interest and plan multi-day trips to most major cities. You just specify the location of your hotel and the length of your trip and City Tours will map out an itinerary for you," explains Google.


For now, City Tours doesn't offer too many interesting features: it only lists popular sights and it suggests when you should visit them. You can edit the information about a place and you can add new sights, but the options are very limited.

It would be useful to show more details about sights from Wikipedia and from image hosting sites like Flickr or Panoramio. Google works on landmark recognition, a project that associates images from the web with landmarks, and City Tours is an obvious application.

{ Thanks, Dan. }

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Google City Tours by Alex Chitu
  15 comments ( Post a comment )
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Blogger xaxa said on June 25, 2009 4:50 AM PDT:
Thank you for the news! This is just exactly what I was looking for this summer !
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Blogger imma said on June 25, 2009 6:17 AM PDT:
Yikes, the placemarks default to dragable & say they save when you move them. Fortunately re-doing the search resets them & it doesn't seem to be affecting other users.

The un-lettered placemark seems to be your hotel & moving it can re-plan the whole thing :-) Moving things your visiting around also appears to refresh subsequent suggestions
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Anonymous Jason McElweenie said on June 25, 2009 9:12 AM PDT:
When can we embed these on sites?
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Anonymous peter gabriel said on June 25, 2009 9:35 AM PDT:
Great, I am sure that Google will improve on what they already have and it will be a nice tool
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Anonymous Anonymous said on June 25, 2009 11:19 AM PDT:
I like how the first day of the NYC schedule maps out a pentagram. Very efficient route. :)
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Anonymous Anonymous said on June 25, 2009 11:21 AM PDT:
...is there a way to reorder the sights? There should be...
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Anonymous Ben K. said on June 25, 2009 11:33 AM PDT:
This has a long way to go before it's usable in my opinion. There's no integration with Google Transit; the so-called "sights" aren't very compelling; and the ability to add info and spots seems lacking. Good idea. Needs work. That's why it's in Labs though.
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Blogger Alex said on June 26, 2009 5:52 AM PDT:
more customizing options and options to save it and load it again on your mobile-maps and it's usable while traveling!
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Anonymous Yeast Infection said on July 6, 2009 3:59 AM PDT:
Its really a great thing. When can we embed these on sites?
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Anonymous web design and development ireland said on July 6, 2009 8:34 AM PDT:
sweet. perfect to plan my trip to new york.
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Anonymous dublin blinds said on July 6, 2009 8:34 AM PDT:
mobile access would be sweet..
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Anonymous Anonymous said on July 14, 2009 11:03 AM PDT:
I keep getting error on page with city tours.
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Blogger Editor said on August 3, 2009 5:13 AM PDT:
Is it possible to add ones own sights?
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Blogger Kestutis said on August 12, 2009 1:02 AM PDT:
It's a great idea but for smaller countries the sites that are placed on the map are wrong location, some obcsure objects and most of the city tour offered is excursion from one hotel to another. Google should cooperate more with locals to put right sites and right addresses. Some day it will be very usefull I hope.
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Anonymous Acai said on September 9, 2009 4:49 AM PDT:
Great, I am sure that Google will improve on what they already have and it will be a nice tool
What do you think?
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