Google Maps adds Neighborhoods - We Have Them Since More Than a Year Now

Posted on May 20, 2007
Filed Under Local Search |

Greg’s post made me aware of this - and reminded me to put the Google LatLong Blog to my feed reader list.

The Google Lat Long Blog has a post announcing the introduction of neighborhood search capability being added to their Maps product. Good for them! As people tend to search for Neighborhoods as their “where” terms to get local content. What does work in Maps bagels upper east side new york however seems not to be used in the Google onebox results in web-search yet - wonder when this will be added as well.

To add to the list of Trulia, Ask.com and Google I want to mention Yahoo! Local UK and DE - which were launched with neighborhood capabilities last year.

And to add to the list of providers on top of Urban Mapping and HomeGain - there is WhereOnEarth who were acquired by Yahoo! in 2005 and are the guys that provide this capability to us and other Yahoo! properties.

Comments

8 Responses to “Google Maps adds Neighborhoods - We Have Them Since More Than a Year Now”

ian on May 21st, 2007 1:13 am

There’s already a fair amount of searching done via informal space (ie, neighborhoods). The thing is, nobody knows what it amounts to because nobody has defined what ‘it’ is. That is, until we ran our neighborhood database against the leaky AOL search data. Ends up that 9% of all search queries use informal space. More on the blog:
http://blog.urbanmapping.com/articles/2007/04/17/informal-space-means-a-lot
Frank Fuchs on May 21st, 2007 8:49 am

Hi Ian,

Thanks for pointing me to this article. You are right its very hard to define something like neighborhoods cause there are too many ways to approach this topic. There is way more to this than just the colloquial terms like “soho” etc. but also districts used for elections or governmental issues etc etc. But 9% is a huge number anyway. Imagine you can increase the coverage of onbox results in Google web search by 9% the gain of visibility for Maps would be huge.

In Europe we are facing another additional “issue” because all the countries do have a different approach in handling “locations”.

Again thanks for your reply.
Darrin Clement on May 22nd, 2007 12:27 am

So where is google getting their neighborhood definitions? Are they from Maponics (http://www.maponics.com/Neighborhood_Maps/neighborhood_maps.html) or someone else?

Darrin
ian on May 24th, 2007 3:57 pm

hi darrin

i think you’d know if google were getting their ‘hood data from your company
but good SEO thinking on the post!
Darrin Clement on May 25th, 2007 4:52 pm

Ha!

Good call Ian. Are they getting it from Urban Mapping (www.urbanmapping.com) then? (See, I can share the seo wealth!)

Seriously though, I think the issue of neighborhood map data quality is important for local search and knowing where the data comes from is important for advertisers as well. With disclosure of data sources comes accountability for updating the data.
Curious on August 20th, 2007 9:17 pm

I heard there is a group out of the University of California that helped create the original neighborhood data set that both Urban Mapping and Maponics tried to acquire.
Is it true that it now is an open source project? Does any one know the name of the group and where to contact them?

- Curious
darrinclement on September 14th, 2007 9:49 pm

Hi Curious,

Maponics did acquire another resource to add to our neighborhood boundary data, but any attempts by another company (that may have had access to it earlier) to distribute that data through open source would be illegal. I’d be leery if I were you about any company saying they had permission to freely distribute someone else’s data. I think the idea of an open source project is a good one though.

Curious that you don’t have a name by the way…

Darrin
Curious on March 24th, 2008 6:24 pm

Several universities have created neighborhood type data over the years they include UCLA, UPenn and two universities in San Diego. The University of California group of which I spoke just used some of their research.

The open source neighborhood project can be found at http://www.zillow.com/labs/NeighborhoodBoundaries.htm

Curious