Filed under: Google, Googleholic
Googleholic for May 13, 2008
Welcome to Googleholic, your bi-weekly fix of everything Google!
In this edition:
In this edition:
- Search for real estate on Google Maps
- Faces getting blurred in Street View
- Gmail gets slight loading speed boost
- Wikipedia comes to Google Maps
Search for real estate on Google Maps
Google Maps continues to get more useful, having made available a new search feature allowing users to browse and look for real estate. To access the feature, select "show search options" next to the search bar, giving you a drop down box from which you can select "Real Estate." After plugging in your query, you can order results according to price, bedrooms, and bathrooms. If you see something that catches your eye, you can then view an indexed property's original listing. This would probably come in really handy if you are prospecting some property in a particular area or just feel like sampling the prices of homes in a given neighborhood - Or looking for another way to play around with Google Maps.
[via Google Operating System]
Faces getting blurred in Street View
If you've been cruising through Google Maps with Street View and happened to find that you have been captured by Google's eye on ground zero, there is good news (or bad news if you liked the publicity): Google is experimenting with technology that allows them to blur faces in Street View. At this stage the blurring experiment is limited to Street View in Manhattan - but if all goes as planned all of Street View will be anonymous before long.
[via Webware]
Gmail gets slight loading speed boost
It looks like the boys and girls at Gmail have been busy making the best even better by making the already short load time for Gmail even shorter. By measuring every transaction that occurs between the web browser and Google's servers, and then finding ways of reducing the number of requests as well as making them more cacheable, Gmail's initial load time has been reduced to four requests between "sign in" and the Inbox.
[via Official Gmail Blog]
Wikipedia comes to Google Maps
And just when you thought Google Maps couldn't have more updates. There is a new button next to Street View called "More" which allows users to check out geo-tagged Wikipedia articles and photos from Panoramio. Hopefully this is just the beginning of a massive influx of additional databases getting geographically tied to Google Maps - because truly, can you ever have enough information on your map?
[via TechCrunch]
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
