More 3D Cities in Europe

Warsaw, Prague and Oslo have joined the growing list of phototextured cities in the 3D Buildings layer of Google Earth. Like other major cities these 3D models are predominantly autogenerated, yet they also contain a number of Google SketchUp models generated by the user community. While the autogenerated models are good quality, user-generated models are often better because ground-based photos can produce a higher quality model than ones generated using aerial imagery.

Oslo

Warsaw

These new cities join other major European cities viewable in 3D, including Munich, Hamburg, Berlin and Zurich to name a few. If you've never visited these cities in-person, have some fun flying around and exploring them virtually.

Posted by Bruce Polderman, Sr. Business Product Manager

Exploring Երևան and کراچی in Google Earth

Over the past several months, the Google Earth Vector Team has been updating the 'Populated Places' and 'Alternative Place Names' layers in Google Earth. The alternative names show a place name in the local language and script. You can view Greek cities written in the Greek alphabet, Armenian in the Armenian alphabet, and Bulgarian in Cyrillic. Try flying to Japan, South Korea, China, Thailand, India or Pakistan. You'll see cities written as they are on local maps. This greatly enriches the browsing experience in Google Earth by showing part of the unique regional culture. This feature becomes a valuable asset when planning travel or trying to find your way around abroad.

With the success of Google Map Maker in many countries of the world, users have created an enormous amount of accurate city, town, and village names (not to mention roads and points of interest), and this user generated data is being used by both Google Earth and Google Maps. We treat you as local experts, who provide names in many scripts and languages. The result is a detailed and enriched map that benefits everyone. Our place names for India, Pakistan, and Armenia have all come from Map Maker. With Google Earth's multilingual support, you copy and paste the place names in the blog post title and see where you land.

We recently added a large number of Chinese small town and village names in English as well as the Simplified and Traditional Chinese languages. This brings in the high quality and coverage of Google Maps - China to Google Earth for the first time. We also updated Egypt and Jordan with Arabic names to match the quality we have in Lebanon.

It is important to Google to have the best possible data for our geo products like Google Earth and Google Maps. Keep updating Map Maker with the places you know, and revisit Google Earth for more updates coming soon!

Posted by Kailen Wright, Geo Data Specialist

Tips and Tricks: Set up shop in the Local Business Center

When I'm hankering for a bite to eat in my neighborhood, business listings on Google Maps are one of the first places I look. Whether I'm checking the opening hours of my local coffee shop, or finding a phone number to make reservations at a new restaurant, I rely on Google Maps for accurate and up-to-date information about local businesses -- especially when it comes to picking a good place to grab dinner.

When a business owner has added and verified with the Local Business Center (you can tell, because the phrase 'Provided by the business owner' appears in the listing), I can find find plenty of additional details, photos and video that the business owner adds can help sway my choice of dining spot. And for business owners, there are obvious benefits: adding a verifying a business listing is the best way to help Google users find and connect with your business.

In addition to the Local Business Center User Guide, which is your one-stop shop for information about putting your business on Google Maps, the Local Business Center folks have recently put together a new list of tips and advice for tailoring your business listing to help even more users find you. It's a win-win situation: adding and verifying your business listing with the Local Business Center gives you control over the way your business appears in Google Maps. And, particularly in my case, it connects your business with customers who may be hungry for what you have to offer.

To get started, simply visit the Local Business Center (make sure you're signed in with your Google account) and click Add new business. If you already see your business listing in Google Maps and want to claim it as your own, follow the instructions here.

Posted by Posted by Sarah Gordon, Tips Guru

Keeping track of hurricane season

The 2009 hurricane season has begun. Tropical Storm Andres is brewing off the coast of Mexico, and other storms are sure to follow. As we did last year, we've created a "Hurricane Season 2009" folder under "Weather" in Google Earth. This folder contains data that allows you to watch the storms develop and follow their progress.

Within this folder, you'll find hourly-updated storm tracks courtesy of the National Hurricane Center, which include forecasted storm center positions and storm track areas. The forecasted center positions of each storm are represented by hurricane-like icons and correspond in size and shape to the intensity and type of storm. The current position of the storm is shown, along with the predicted storm track swath, which is outlined in red. These are areas most likely to be affected by the storm at a given time 12-hour interval. Inside each balloon you'll find an overview of the storm, its official NHC advisory, a near real-time news gadget, and reference information.

Tropical Storm Andres off the coast of Mexico

Posted by Pete Giencke and Cris Castello, GIS Data Engineers

Imagery update for Tehran

Many of you have been letting us know through Tweets, emails, blog posts, message boards, and even an online petition that you're very interested in seeing recent satellite imagery of Tehran. Well, we've heard your requests and over the past few days have been working with our satellite imagery partner GeoEye to make this possible. We just received updated satellite imagery of Tehran, taken on Thursday the 18th at approximatly 11:18am local time. Below are some screenshots the updated imagery, you can view the entire image in Google Earth with this KML file.

The images above were taken from GeoEye's IKONOS satellite, which images at roughly 1-meter per pixel. We are continuing to work with GeoEye to see if we can provide a higher resolution update from the GeoEye-1 satellite, which would be at 0.5-meters per pixel, but this is subject to weather constraints. We'd like to thank GeoEye for making this imagery available to us and to thank our users for their advocacy.

Posted by Matt Manolides, Senior Geo Data Strategist

How to find out "What's here"

On Google Maps, we try to label important places directly on the map tiles. But sometimes, it seems more helpful to just click on a point and ask "What's here?". Now you can do exactly that with an option we've added under the right-click menu. When you click on "What's here?", we give you the most relevant result representing that location, whether it's a specific address, a natural entity, or a place name.

This feature takes into account the zoom level you're looking at, and gives you the most appropriate geographical entity at that point. For example, if you're zoomed in closely on Manhattan, you can get the full address of a point by clicking on "What's here?". Additionally, by combining this with the "At this address" feature that you may have seen in the left-hand panel, you can also see a list of the businesses located at that place.

If you're a bit more zoomed out, you can get larger features, such as the names of the different Islands in the Galapagos Archielago - Isla Fernandina, Isla Isabela, Isla Marchena, Isla Guy Fawkes, and so on.

In the technical world, this feature is known as "reverse geocoding". It has been available in the Google Maps API for a couple of months now, so you can also put it to use if you're a developer.

Posted by Fernando Delgado, Product Manager and Diana Stroe, Software Engineer

Dump the pump with new transit agencies in Google Maps

Did you know:

• Individuals can achieve an average annual savings of over $8,000 by taking public transportation instead of driving and by living with one less car?
• For every $1 invested in public transportation infrastructure, $6 is generated in economic returns to communities?
• Public transportation saves 900,000 automobile fill-ups each day – or 4.2 billion gallons of gasoline per year?
• Switching to public transportation can reduce individual carbon emissions by 20 pounds per day or 4,800 pounds per year?

This is why transit agencies around the country are celebrating Dump the Pump day, sponsored by the American Public Transportation Association, today to encourage more Americans to take public transportation. Depends on where you are, you may get free passes from your local transit agencies today!

Now, you may wonder how you can plan a transit trip easily if you're not familiar with your local agency. The answer is - go to Google Maps. So far more than 100 agencies in the United States have made their data available in Google Maps through Google Transit Partner Program. Recently we have added several new agencies:

• Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County, Houston, TX
• VIA Metropolitan Transit in San Antonio, TX (data available tomorrow)
• Utah Transit Authority, Salt Lake City, UT
• Metro St. Louis, St Louis, MO
• Foothill Transit, San Gabriel Valley, CA
• Riverside Transit, Riverside, CA
• Charlotte Area Transit System, Charlotte, NC
• Pinella Suncoast Transit Authority, St. Petersburg, FL

In addition, Los Angeles Metro, City of Edmonton, Houston Metro, and Calgary Transit have released their GTFS data feed to the public so that developers can create innovative transit applications to further promote the awareness of public transportation.

Now go to Google Maps on your computer or your cell phone, plan a transit trip, and go catch a train or bus. I bet your won't miss the congested highway or increasing gas price!

Posted by Jessica Wei, Strategic Partner Development Manager, Google Transit