Googleholic for May 13, 2008

Welcome to Googleholic, your bi-weekly fix of everything Google!

In this edition:

• Search for real estate on Google Maps
  
• Faces getting blurred in Street View
  
• Gmail gets slight loading speed boost
  
• Wikipedia comes to Google Maps

Search for real estate on Google Maps

Google Maps continues to get more useful, having made available a new search feature allowing users to browse and look for real estate. To access the feature, select "show search options" next to the search bar, giving you a drop down box from which you can select "Real Estate." After plugging in your query, you can order results according to price, bedrooms, and bathrooms. If you see something that catches your eye, you can then view an indexed property's original listing. This would probably come in really handy if you are prospecting some property in a particular area or just feel like sampling the prices of homes in a given neighborhood - Or looking for another way to play around with Google Maps.



Faces getting blurred in Street View

If you've been cruising through Google Maps with Street View and happened to find that you have been captured by Google's eye on ground zero, there is good news (or bad news if you liked the publicity): Google is experimenting with technology that allows them to blur faces in Street View. At this stage the blurring experiment is limited to Street View in Manhattan - but if all goes as planned all of Street View will be anonymous before long.



Gmail gets slight loading speed boost

It looks like the boys and girls at Gmail have been busy making the best even better by making the already short load time for Gmail even shorter. By measuring every transaction that occurs between the web browser and Google's servers, and then finding ways of reducing the number of requests as well as making them more cacheable, Gmail's initial load time has been reduced to four requests between "sign in" and the Inbox.



Wikipedia comes to Google Maps

And just when you thought Google Maps couldn't have more updates. There is a new button next to Street View called "More" which allows users to check out geo-tagged Wikipedia articles and photos from Panoramio. Hopefully this is just the beginning of a massive influx of additional databases getting geographically tied to Google Maps - because truly, can you ever have enough information on your map?


[Via: Google Operating System ]
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