We're always interested in hearing your feedback and feature
suggestions. Use this group to share your thoughts, and I, along with
the rest of the Google Maps Guides, will make sure that your comments
shared with the rest of the team.
Let me preface my comments by saying that I am a huge fan of Google
Maps and Earth, both professionally and personally. I can easily spend
hours looking around the world. I also recently used Google Earth to
help plan an overseas trip.
I am a search marketer for a telecom company. On a whim I added all of
our central office location to Google Maps. Some might say that this
is not an appropriate use of Google Maps but I disagree. We sell DSL,
which is a distance sensitive product. Customers must be within 2.5
miles of a central office. For this reason it makes a lot of sense
that searchers would use maps to find a DSL provider. And our results
confirmed this notion. We received over 300 calls in April from people
who had found our listings in Google Maps.
Unfortunately, our listings are no longer available. This is where the
feature request comes in. I would love to know why. It would be great
to get feedback within the management interface, think Ad Words style.
I think this feature is more than warranted considering the large
number of unanswered questions in the “for businesses” section.
Additionally, it would be great to have much more open communication
with you guys. That is not so much a criticism as a request for more.
When our listings disappeared, I went looking for answers in all the
usual places a search marketer would go. What I did not find surprised
me. Search marketers are generally a chatty bunch, but there seems to
be no collective knowledge about Google Maps.
Switching gears, I like that we can get data on the performance of
individual listings, however with over 2000 central offices, I would
have to click through over 50 pages to see what listings are
performing. It would be great if you could click on the column headers
and have the listing ascend/decent by that field. Or when you export
the data file having the performance data go with. That way I could do
all my number crunching in Excel.
Finally, how about a feature in Google Maps to show service area? I am
sure that anyone who provides a service from plumbers, to fire
stations, to radio stations or companies like us, would love to draw a
circle around their location and say this is our service area.
Let me know if I can help you guys out. As I said I am a big fan, and
look forward to seeing how this service develops. Feel free to contact
me
Chris
On May 22, 11:43 am, Maps Guide Brian <maps-gui...@google.com> wrote:
> We're always interested in hearing your feedback and feature
> suggestions. Use this group to share your thoughts, and I, along with
> the rest of the Google Maps Guides, will make sure that your comments
> shared with the rest of the team.
I'm glad you asked. My suggestions pertain to Google Maps Mobile
Edition.
1) It would be great to add the new Physical map (topo/terrain map) to
the mobile version. I love it on the desktop website version.
2) In the mobile edition, the software accesses the GPS built-in to
the mobile phone. It's using the latitude and longitude to find the
position. It would be nice to be able to display the lat/long/altitude
on the map, even if it was only stored in a Favorite so that you could
see it somehow.
3) In the mobile edition, its nice that you can search for directions
and show the route on the map. It would be really cool if you could
record a "track" on the Google map mobile edition, save the track, and
email it. This would be the killer app.
> We're always interested in hearing your feedback and feature
> suggestions. Use this group to share your thoughts, and I, along with
> the rest of the Google Maps Guides, will make sure that your comments
> shared with the rest of the team.
Google Directions work well for short trips but what about longer
drives, right now I'm working on planing a 15 hour drive to Auburn AL
from Iowa, I think it would be useful to plan stops at gas stations to
refill, you could base it off the variable range a car is estimated to
travel on a tank of gas. Continuing off of that if you could obtain
reports from the departments of weights and measures you could inform
travelers who's the best gas station to go to, or where the lowest
prices are. Expanding one could locate and contact hotels that will be
easy to find on the way along with restaurants by type. There could be
time estimates... say I leave at 8:00 and would want to stop for lunch
at 12:00 what types of places are near by, fast food, sit down
restaurant??? or what time I would like to stop driving. Instead of
having to search for all of these things one by one, have Google do
the planing for me. Also Google should try and stay away from unpaved
roads in directions unless necessary, I didn't suffer too bad but boy
was my wife upset and had no idea where we were.
My suggestion would be similar to Jamie's. It would be great if
Google Maps showed trail maps for national parks and more popular
hiking areas. This would be ideal for the mobile version of course,
but would be useful for all of them!
Matt
On May 22, 11:43 am, Maps Guide Brian <maps-gui...@google.com> wrote:
> We're always interested in hearing your feedback and feature
> suggestions. Use this group to share your thoughts, and I, along with
> the rest of the Google Maps Guides, will make sure that your comments
> shared with the rest of the team.
Sounds like a great idea, but I think those features are pretty
involved. I think it's something that people would be willing to pay
for, and once Google recouped the development costs, it could be
free...?
On May 23, 6:19 pm, Gifters <Gift...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Google Directions work well for short trips but what about longer
> drives, right now I'm working on planing a 15 hour drive to Auburn AL
> from Iowa, I think it would be useful to plan stops at gas stations to
> refill, you could base it off the variable range a car is estimated to
> travel on a tank of gas. Continuing off of that if you could obtain
> reports from the departments of weights and measures you could inform
> travelers who's the best gas station to go to, or where the lowest
> prices are. Expanding one could locate and contact hotels that will be
> easy to find on the way along with restaurants by type. There could be
> time estimates... say I leave at 8:00 and would want to stop for lunch
> at 12:00 what types of places are near by, fast food, sit down
> restaurant??? or what time I would like to stop driving. Instead of
> having to search for all of these things one by one, have Google do
> the planing for me. Also Google should try and stay away from unpaved
> roads in directions unless necessary, I didn't suffer too bad but boy
> was my wife upset and had no idea where we were.
I know we can submit correction requests for roads, but I think it
would be nice if we could edit roads like we do addresses - click
Edit, and drag the road. Corrections could be shown in a different
color, with a balloon that says "John Doe thinks the road is in a
different place. It's marked in red. Google's data is in gray. Do
you know which one is right? John, Google, Neither, or Not sure?"
It would also be useful to be able to add comments when editing a
place or road, i.e. "Crab Shack's new location as of 5/20/08" or "Road
moved; construction scheduled to be complete in June of 2008".
How are edits verified - do other users rate them? Does Google staff
look at each one? I think that having users rate (and maybe comment
on) edits would reduce your workload - you could focus on features
rather than perfecting the data set.
Mark
On May 22, 2:43 pm, Maps Guide Brian <maps-gui...@google.com> wrote:
> We're always interested in hearing your feedback and feature
> suggestions. Use this group to share your thoughts, and I, along with
> the rest of the Google Maps Guides, will make sure that your comments
> shared with the rest of the team.
I don't think that it would be so much more involved, especially if
you compare it to Google Earth, you can already search for restaurants
and I would think gas stations using Google its would be more of an
integration of features in a user friendly way.
On May 24, 8:10 pm, mark <mpic...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Sounds like a great idea, but I think those features are pretty
> involved. I think it's something that people would be willing to pay
> for, and once Google recouped the development costs, it could be
> free...?
> On May 23, 6:19 pm, Gifters <Gift...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Google Directions work well for short trips but what about longer
> > drives, right now I'm working on planing a 15 hour drive to Auburn AL
> > from Iowa, I think it would be useful to plan stops at gas stations to
> > refill, you could base it off the variable range a car is estimated to
> > travel on a tank of gas. Continuing off of that if you could obtain
> > reports from the departments of weights and measures you could inform
> > travelers who's the best gas station to go to, or where the lowest
> > prices are. Expanding one could locate and contact hotels that will be
> > easy to find on the way along with restaurants by type. There could be
> > time estimates... say I leave at 8:00 and would want to stop for lunch
> > at 12:00 what types of places are near by, fast food, sit down
> > restaurant??? or what time I would like to stop driving. Instead of
> > having to search for all of these things one by one, have Google do
> > the planing for me. Also Google should try and stay away from unpaved
> > roads in directions unless necessary, I didn't suffer too bad but boy
> > was my wife upset and had no idea where we were.
It would be awesome to have paved, off-road bike trails shown on the
maps. Right now the only way to see them is with the satellite view
on the highest zoom. If bike trails could show up on the map view in
a different color then the streets, that would be a huge help! Other
than that, I love your maps!
On May 22, 11:43 am, Maps Guide Brian <maps-gui...@google.com> wrote:
> We're always interested in hearing your feedback and feature
> suggestions. Use this group to share your thoughts, and I, along with
> the rest of the Google Maps Guides, will make sure that your comments
> shared with the rest of the team.
I live right next to a toll road and I constantly have to drag my
route around to avoid it, sometimes several times to find the shortest
alternate route and sometimes several times to keep Google Maps from
re-routing me back to the toll road further down the trip.
I'm sure you must get this request a lot, but I'd like to add myself
to the list: Please add an "avoid toll roads" option to Google Maps.
Thanks.
Luis
On May 22, 2:43 pm, Maps Guide Brian <maps-gui...@google.com> wrote:
> We're always interested in hearing your feedback and feature
> suggestions. Use this group to share your thoughts, and I, along with
> the rest of the Google Maps Guides, will make sure that your comments
> shared with the rest of the team.
Oh... and if you want to go the extra mile ;-), it'd be nice if Google
Maps would tell me how much time is lost when using the "avoid toll
roads" option.
Thanks again.
Luis
On May 28, 11:21 am, "lsala...@gmail.com" <lsala...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I live right next to a toll road and I constantly have to drag my
> route around to avoid it, sometimes several times to find the shortest
> alternate route and sometimes several times to keep Google Maps from
> re-routing me back to the toll road further down the trip.
> I'm sure you must get this request a lot, but I'd like to add myself
> to the list: Please add an "avoid toll roads" option to Google Maps.
> Thanks.
> Luis
> On May 22, 2:43 pm, Maps Guide Brian <maps-gui...@google.com> wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > We're always interested in hearing your feedback and feature
> > suggestions. Use this group to share your thoughts, and I, along with
> > the rest of the Google Maps Guides, will make sure that your comments
> > shared with the rest of the team.
