| Would you like some extra suggestions with that?
May 22, 2009 at 5:40 pm
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The Google Maps driving and walking directions team has traditionally been in the business of answering the question "what is the best way to get from point A to point B?" When there's a single obvious route, we usually don't have a problem finding it. When there are many good routes to your destination, we suggest one we consider to be the best and let you drag the route around to discover the rest. But what about when there are two or three different routes that all get you to point B effectively? Wouldn't you like to see them all on the map for comparison? Now you can!
When there is more than one good way to get from A to B, we still show you the route we think is best, but in addition we now show one or two additional routes, under the "Suggested Routes" heading. These are other good routes that we think you might be interested in because they are different enough from the best route that personal preferences are likely to affect your choice.
For example, when driving between the two engineering offices in Washington, while we still return the WA-520 bridge as the primary route, we offer the additional suggestion of the I-90 bridge which you might prefer because it has carpool lanes; hover over a suggestion to see both routes on the map, and click on a suggestion to update the step-by-step directions:
For those curious about what's happening behind the scenes, here are some slightly technical details. Deciding which route is "best" involves balancing competing factors: distance, travel time, number of turns, and many more. We boil all these factors down to a "cost" associated with each candidate route and display the route with the lowest "cost." But we don't know about all of your personal preferences, some of which can mean a higher cost route is better for you. Now you can compare and choose!
One final tip: when you're evaluating routes, check to see if the traffic layer is available in your area so you can see either the live conditions or the predicted conditions for when you're traveling, helping you make a smart decision about the best route for you.
Posted by Ami Fischman, Software Engineer    |
| Bring More of Your World Into Google Map Maker
May 22, 2009 at 4:00 pm
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Since launching Google Map Maker, our user-contributed "wiki-map", we've gotten a lot of great user feedback. Two of our top requested features are to more easily get data into and out of Google Map Maker. We've recently begun to address the latter with a variety of efforts ranging from making Google Map Maker tiles available in the Maps API to allowing shp and kml file download for some of the Google Map Maker data.
With the latest batch of new features, we now also give users a new way to bring data into Google Map Maker: Overlays. This allows users to overlay kml and image files on top of the map tiles to assist with mapping. A great file to test this feature out with is the Panoramio kml: www.panoramio.com/kml . Adding this kml will drape user-contributed photos on top of your map to give you a ground view no matter where in the world you are mapping. For a full tutorial on how to use the Overlay feature, see Overlay Tutorial.
Posted by Kishore Annapureddy, Software Engineer, and Jessica Pfund, GIS Specialist
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