Searching for more than the point

Over the past few years Google Maps users have created millions of maps using the My Maps feature. At the same time we have been busy scouring the web to find maps in other formats, like KML and GeoRSS, to include in our index. As you may have seen in the recent post about blended search results we have been including individual places from those maps in our results. Until now, however, there has been no easy way to find complete maps created by others. That changes this week, as we start to surface a link to these complete maps when we think they are relevant to your query. For example, the query 'President Birth Places' now returns the following:

Clicking on the maps title takes you to a great map showing where each president was born:

Here are a few other queries to try: London Olympics 2012, US State Capitals, US National Parks, Events near Bay Area and Castles in Wales.

In addition to making searching better, this is also an excuse for you to go polish your maps, since now the world can find them! Remember, if we find an attribution in your feed we will link back to you.

Posted by James Macgill, Software Engineer