Catch the London Underground with Google Maps

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)Starting today, you can get public transport directions for London within Google Maps. One of Europe’s largest metropolitan areas, London is a major destination for both business travelers and tourists. More than 1 billion passengers are serviced by Transport for London (TfL) every year across over 18,000 bus stops and over 250 Underground stations.Let’s say you’re at Trafalgar Square, and you want to visit...

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Congratulations Russia, the National Geographic World Champions

(Cross posted on the Official Google and Google Student blogs)This island has a population of about 57,000 people, with the most settlements concentrated on the west coast. Very little of this island is suitable for agriculture.After eight rounds of questions from none other than quiz king Alex Trebek himself, the team from Russia was crowned the National Geographic World Champions today at our Mountain View, Calif. headquarters after answering this...

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Google Maps 5.8 for Android adds photo uploads, My Places, and more

Today, Google Maps 5.8 for Android improves Places and Latitude with:Upload photos for a PlaceMy Places as a simple way to manage the Places you’ve starred and recently viewedDescriptive terms for Places in search resultsAdd a new Place on-the-go when checking inPhoto upload for a PlaceWhen deciding on a place to go, people often want to know what a place looks like in addition to seeing ratings and reviews. You can now contribute photos to help...

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National Geographic World Championship comes to Google

(Cross posted on the Official Google and Google Student blogs)It’s summer vacation for many kids, but 51 students from 17 different regions have been spending their time off polishing and fine-tuning their geographic skills to prepare for this year’s National Geographic World Championship, a biennial geography competition hosted by the National Geographic Society.This year, Google is the proud sponsor and on Wednesday, July 27, we’ll host the three...

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Explore new large geographic features in Google Earth

Since announcing the "Mountains" layer in April, we’ve been busy working to bring you additional geographic features in Google Earth. Today we’re announcing the availability of mountain ranges, deserts, plains and more under the “Borders and Labels” left Layers panel.Along with well-known landmarks such as the Appalachian Mountains, the Alps and the Sahara Desert, you’ll also find some less-well-known (but just as interesting) features, including...

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Making local online advertising easy with Google AdWords Express

(Cross posted on the Official Google, Inside AdWords, and Small Business blogs)Today, we're officially introducing AdWords Express, a faster and simpler way to start advertising online in under five minutes. We first launched this product as Google Boost last October for a small number of local businesses. Since then, we’ve continued to improve the product and enabled all U.S. businesses new to online advertising to reach customers with ease. AdWords...

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Keeping an ‘eye’ on the 2011 Atlantic and Pacific hurricane seasons

(Cross-posted on the Inside Search Blog)With the fourth major storm of the 2011 Pacific Hurricane season, Category 5 Hurricane Dora, churning off of Mexico’s Pacific coast, it’s looking like 2011 will be an active year for tropical storms. Today we’d like to introduce some new tools for tracking tropical storms across Google products.The first new way to get information about current tropical storms is on Google Search, where you can enter “hurricane”...

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Liquid Galaxy now at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC

Thirty-five years ago this week, the Viking 1 lander touched down on the surface of Mars, beginning an olympian mission of exploration lasting more than 6 years. Today, the Liquid Galaxy immersive Google Earth display lands at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, in the “Moving Beyond Earth” exhibit.Photo by Mark Avino, Smithsonian National Air and Space MuseumIt’s part of the museum's annual Mars Day! event, where visitors...

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Updated imagery of flooding near Council Bluffs, Iowa

Since June of 2011, Council Bluffs, Iowa and the surrounding area has experienced record flooding along the Missouri River. Google has a data center in Council Bluffs, along with many employees that live in the city and surrounding region.Along with our neighbors, we watched with concern as the Missouri River rose to a level not seen in decades. We are grateful for the extraordinary work of the City of Council Bluffs, Pottawattamie County, the Army...

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The Ongoing Evolution of Place Pages

Making constant tweaks and adjustments to our user interfaces and overall user experience have always been the norm at Google, and you may have recently heard about our renewed effort across all Google products to make the user experience more focused, elastic and effortless. Changes have already started to appear on Google Maps, and we’ve now simplified our Place pages across desktop and mobile devices as well. Some of the changes you’ll notice...

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Building outlines now appearing in London, Paris, Barcelona, and more

Since early 2007, Google Maps has made maps more lifelike by showing 3D building outlines when zoomed into cities. If you’re planning to walk down a street, you should know whether to expect low buildings, skyscrapers, or some cool architecture! Then the release of Google Maps 5.0 for Android ushered in the next-generation of mobile maps where you can rotate, tilt, and zoom in and out of 3D maps on a mobile device.Now, 3D buildings are available...

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Evolving the look of Google Maps, redux

Hot on the heels of our new style for the Google Maps user interface, today we are pushing out some further improvements to our map design to match the updated look and feel and further improve the usability of our maps.Amongst the changes you will find a plethora of subtle changes, designed to make the map cleaner, more focused, more visually harmonious, and easier to use. Some highlights to look out for are a brighter and more cheerful color palette,...

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Imagery Update: Week of July 18th

The Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 proposed a highly regular grid pattern as the layout for an island that was mostly farmland and wilderness in a still-young country. Two hundred years after the streets and avenues were dreamed up, the landscape of New York City has changed dramatically as skyscrapers have been built, parks have been planted and the population has increased by millions. Today’s latest batch of updated imagery reveals new, high resolution...

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Celebrate Marine Day by exploring the shinkai

The ocean covers approximately 70 percent of the Earth’s surface and yet remains one of the most mysterious places on the planet. In Japan, bodies of water with depths over 200m (656 feet) are referred to as shinkai, or deep sea. These dark regions of the ocean do not receive light and water pressure is up to 100x higher than at the surface, making the shinkai inaccessible to most exploration.In honor of Marine Day in Japan, we collaborated with...

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UNITAR/UNOSAT team up with Google Map Maker to boost impact of community mapping for disaster relief and humanitarian aid

In times of disaster and humanitarian needs, relief activities are sometimes carried out in chaotic and dynamic conditions in which multiple groups need to interact. First responders need to quickly build an on-the-ground picture of where people are, what condition they are in, what their needs are, what services are still available, and what resources have survived. This helps relief and humanitarian responders as well as local planners to plot...

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Live traffic information for 13 European countries

Since introducing the live traffic feature on Google Maps in 2008, our team has been working hard to make this feature available to more users in more countries. Just in time for summer travel, we’re delighted to announce that today we’re making traffic available in 13 countries in Europe. The new road traffic information is in the traffic layer on Google Maps and Google Maps for mobile, and Google Maps Navigation (Beta).Left: Traffic layer Right:...

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A cause to celebrate in Pakistan with Google Map Maker

The month of June proved fruitful for mapping enthusiasts, tech buffs, and entrepreneurs throughout Pakistan as they gathered for a series of Google MapUps organized at universities in three major cities: Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi.Led by Google Pakistan Country Consultant, Badar Khushnood and a trio of Pakistan’s Map Maker Advocates—Faraz Ahmad, Jabran Rafique and Omer Sheikh—the three events welcomed a total of 150 participants to learn the...

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Using Street View to digitally archive Japan’s disaster zones

After the March 11 earthquake and tsunami devastated the coastal communities of Eastern Japan, we at Google tried to find ways to use our technologies in support of relief activities. This started immediately after the quake with our Person Finder to help locate displaced individuals, and more recently we’ve started projects to spur economic recovery in the affected areas, such as the “YouTube Business Support Channel,” which enables local businesses...

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Let Historypin be your guide

Editor’s Note: Today's guest author is Nick Stanhope, co-founder and executive director of an awesome and inspiring website out of the UK called Historypin. We collaborated with the site for its launch as a beta last year, and Nick is writing a guest post to announce today's official launch of Historypin with a new mobile app and expanded global availability. His team’s labor of love illustrates the amazing ways individuals and organizations can...

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Street View comes to glamorous Monaco

Last week the spotlight was on Monaco for the royal wedding between Albert II, Prince of Monaco, and Charlene Wittstock. Today we are excited to announce that we are bringing Street View in Google Maps to the glamorous principality.Monaco may be the second smallest country in the world, only the Vatican City is smaller, but it has many interesting sites and roads.You can now explore the streets made famous by the annual Formula One Monaco Grand Prix,...

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South Sudanese sing and map their way to independence

On July 9, South Sudan will officially be independent, becoming Africa’s 54th state.In anticipation of this significant development, the World Bank, UNOSAT, RCMRD, Satellite Sentinel Project and Google organized a South Sudan Community Mapping event in Nairobi on June 30. This was the second in a series of mapping events intended to encourage local people to create accurate and detailed maps of South Sudan, to help them navigate their path to independence....

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Expanded 3D Buildings coverage

(Cross-posted on the Official SketchUp Blog)Looking for new 3D cities to explore in far off places? Well, you’re in luck! We’ve been hard at work expanding our 3D coverage by adding ten of thousands of 3D buildings to these cities:Berkeley, California USACologne, GermanyThe Hague, NetherlandsSee the new buildings for yourself with the “3D Buildings” layer in Google Earth or by using Google Maps with Earth view.Happy touring!Posted by Catherine...

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“Download map area” added to Labs in Google Maps for Android

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)One way we bring you new product features is through Google Labs—a collection of fun, experimental features you can turn on if you’re interested in the functionality. In fact, Google Maps itself started as a lab. In addition to our desktop Maps Labs, Google Maps for Android has a few tricks you can try out right from your phone. We’d like to introduce you to one new experimental feature, “Download map area,”...

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