Google has announced a new official blog for Geo-data. They also announced in their latest “friends” newsletter a significant feat…
Also, this month, we introduced rooftop geo-coding for 50
million homes and businesses in the U.S., which significantly improves
mapping accuracy. You’ll see that address searches in Google Maps will
now often return results with pinpoint accuracy.
There are a few posts about the new Geo-location data, but less than I thought.
Any improvement to Geo-coding is an improvement to your local business listing and will, as geo spreads accross more Google products, it be important to be familiar with it.
As Google knows more about their users location, new possibilities exist. As David Mihm points out, those logged into their Google account would need one less step (entering an address or location) for searches.
I also can think of some pretty neat gadgets/uses for geo data.
Imagine a “Contact page” for your business, or a store locator for your business that actually knows where the user is. As an example, say you are WellsFargo and a user wants to find a location near them. If the page was fed by a gadget using maps, then the user could immediately be greeted with the bank locations near them.
As you think about geo data more and more and insert it into more and more Google products, there are alot of possibilities.
