Two Tasty New Google Offerings
If you don’t regularly check Google Labs, you should. They have all kinds of new technology and they are always adding more.
The two most recent are Google Maps and Google Video.
Google Maps offers many of the same features as the popular competitor Mapquest.com (View maps, driving directions, search for local businesses and services), but has much more beautifully rendered maps ( IMHO) with animated map navigation (may not seem like much, but try scrolling your window down every time you zoom in with a 1024×768 screen size at mapquest), and better information presentation (city names arn’t all cluttered on a wide view).
Now granted, maps.google.com is in its beta, and probably isn’t as comprehensive as some of the competition, but MAN look at those sexy maps! Search your street address, and view the 3D shadowed address bubble. If that weren’t enough, the whole map is dragable, like a pdf file! This means no more clicking an arrow image thats linked to the next image. Its all real-time baby. Get directions to or from a location and get an interactive list of directions with a zoomed window of all the key turns and directions.
Google Video searches the text of the closed captioning data from a T.V. program and grabs screenshots off the video stream from time the text occured. Searching within a T.V. show is something one couldn’t do before unless it was an older show and had an episode guide. It could go mostly unused, or it could become another thing we don’t remember how we lived without. To date they have but a few stations dating back to December 2004 (still in beta), but it is ever expanding. Besides, a search for Family Guy gave me numerous results, so what else does one need?
