Travis Pettijohn: Blog

I just whipped up a little javascript/Google map today to help me remember where I parked (I drove my car yesterday for the first time in 2.5 weeks). Click on the map to create a marker. The location is stored in a cookie in your web browser. Next time you visit the page, the map will center and zoom back on that point.

Where did I park?

Last week I went on vacation to Angel Fire, NM (a ski valley outside of Taos) with my family. I went on a lot of hikes and brought along my GPS unit. Check out what a little code to transform the log file into KML brought out. Install Google Earth, and then open the KML of my trip. Make sure you have 3D terrain enabled. You can see some of the pictures I took (sorry—cameraphone only) in the exact location where I took them. I'll make the code available to transform from Mapopolis to KML upon request (or when I polish it up a little first).

Edit: By request, here's a screenshot. So now if you're Mike and you don't want to install Google Earth, you can still get a feel for the end result.

I'm joining the club of coolpeople who hack Google Maps.

Late last night (like from 1 to 4, I don't know why) and this afternoon I hacked together a merging of Google Maps and Chicago Reader rental classifieds. I give you the result (it takes a while to load).

I like Housingmaps.com a lot, but Chicago Reader (so I've been told) is one of the best ways to find a place to live in Chicago. Craigslist is so-so. Compare the results on the two maps and you'll see that it's true.

Step one: Perform a search and copy-and-paste the resulting URL into my code. You're looking at 1 bedrooms in 60613, 60614 and 60657, priced between $600 and $1000.

There are two ways to find the location of a property. If the classified ad has a map link, I don't need to find the address. I can follow the link; it redirects me to a new URL that has the GPS coordinates in the query string.

Method two involves me parsing: "Street1 and Street2" or "#### (Direction) StreetName". It's not perfect, but it's pretty good. I can then ask Google to attempt find the coordinates from the address I harvested. In total, I can find the coordinates of about 80% of the ads.

After that, I generate some javascript (ads.js) that defines the coordinates and descriptions in a giant array. I can manually upload that to my hosting provider, and index.html references it. Tada!

If anyone's interested in the source (C#), drop me a line.

Kudos to Google Maps on such an excellent and interoperable product.

Kent and I were talking about Google results and the idea of customizing them. The result of our discussion ended up being sent to suggestions-at-google-dot-com. I think it's a really cool idea. It's such a big idea, though, that it would take a company like Google to pull it off. Do you think it would work? The suggestion:

I would like to be able to add weight to certain domains/sites such that they bubble higher up in my search results. For example, I like Wikipedia results. I would like to customize my search results such that pages from en.wikipedia.org get an extra "bonus" in their PageRank.

Building on that idea, it would be cool if I could add people that I know to a network of my friends. I could weight my friends so that their search preferences (preferred sites) also reflect in my search results. The further away a person is in the chain of people, the less their preferences effect my results.

This might be implemented as a star system on the results page. If I was satisfied, I can click back and score that result with 5 stars. If it did not answer my query, or if it was some search engine spam, I can give it 1 star.

The idea of bringing human feedback and social networks to Internet search could really make results better.

As we all know, Internet search is big business these days. Recently, A9 was launched. And today, Google announced the Google Desktop.

A9 is a search engine with a twist: you log into it using your Amazon.com account. It is then able to keep your search history and your bookmarks on their servers. Which means that you can log in from anywhere, on any computer with Internet access, and get to your bookmarks. It's beautiful! It has some cool drag-and-drop features (drag a link from your search results into your bookmarks). The best part is that it uses Google for results, so you don't have to give up the quality that you're used to. You just get these value-added features. It also has buttons to include movies (IMDB), images (Google Images) and books (searching inside via Amazon.com) (and a few other things) in your results.

The downside? No Google Calculator, no maps, no phonebook, no package tracking, no Google Local, no define: (though I usually use Merriam-Webster), no Froogle, no Groups, no News. And now, no Google Desktop.

Google Desktop builds a fast, searchable index of the hard drive on your computer. I installed it today and I already know that it will be indispensable. It searches into Office documents. It builds an index of your Outlook email. The slowness of Outlooks searches has been something that I've grumbled about for quite some time. Today, just to prove a point, I did an advanced search in Outlook for the word "twice" in the subject and message body of all of my email (about 90 MB). It took 45 seconds. In the era of Google, I'm sorry, but that's just absurd! With my newly-created Google Desktop index of my email, I searched for the same word. It took 0.8 seconds. I rest my case. (As an aside, the admin of the Exchange server turned on full-text indexing for my account on the server...I'll post here with results of that comparison.)

Google Desktop's results are tightly integrated with Google. When you search for something, if there are results on your computer, they show up in the top, just the way news results or Froogle results show up. Google Desktop is incredibly useful. It fills a pretty big hole in my computing life. It does what Indexing Service failed to do. It does what WinFS is promising to do. I think Google Desktop will be an indispensable tool for me until WinFS rolls around.

As for A9, I really like the server-side search history and bookmarks. I don't have to email myself links anymore. I just put them in A9. But knowing what you give up with Google, you have to know when to use it. For my average web search, A9 is king. For things I'm less certain about (especially programming-related, where answers are likely on Usenet), Google is the way to go. I guess that makes me a flip-flopper.

In summary: try A9, try Google Desktop. I like them both a lot, and I bet you will, too.