4 ms·
Google Maps Instant (inspired by Youtube Instant)
- greenlblue 16y agoYou get a job too I guess but you should get rid of the query limit.
- joelhaasnoot 16y agoLittle too popular already...
- cstuder 16y agoPlus get an auto-zoom feature.
- buro9 16y agoAnd clear markers from the prior keystroke.
- keyle 16y agoHaha, I like your try! And it works really smooth.
- IgorPartola 16y ago"Geocode was not successful for the following reason: OVER_QUERY_LIMIT" I was half way through typing my city's name...
- vijaydev 16y agoI too got that quite a lot.
- Das_Bruce 16y agoAdding a quarter second gap between new searches would probably avoid this.
- pavel_lishin 16y agoAnd not making it a modal popup would prevent it locking down my browser.
- michaelhart 16y agoI sorda forgot that in there when I made it, then it got copied over to the CDN. So changing it was a little difficult. But I did ultimately change it; it now redirects you to a different version of the page with a fresh API key and a different IP address. While it hasn't fixed the API limit issues completely, it has helped significantly.
- michaelhart 16y agoReally sorry about that. When I moved it to my CDN, the error happened a lot less though. I do have plans to add a buffer between searches, as well.
- natabbotts 16y agoThis is really impressive. I wonder if the guy will get a job offer - he certainly seems to be a pretty quick coder.
- tlrobinson 16y agoSomeone looking for a job on the Google Maps team?
- sachinag 16y agoHe says so right under the input box. :)
- michaelhart 16y agoI'd love a job on the Google Maps team. Psh, Google, you need janitors? Yeah? Call me.
- Elite 16y agoThe concept doesn't translate for maps. An address as entered from left-to-right goes from the very specific to the general. Therefore all the api calls and screen updating you make are completely irrelevant until I type in my city half -way through.
- jackvalentine 16y agoIt semi does, I was just typing city and country names and enjoying the instant snap to.
- jordanmessina 16y agoI only typed in my house number and 2/3 of my road and got the QUERY_LIMIT, but the result was correct with no City or State. I do live on a road with a very unique name though.
- jodrellblank 16y agoYou live on Satellite Tracking Station Road?
- jordanmessina 16y agoWell, there goes trying to hide my identity on HN...
- there 16y agogoogle maps on my android phone does this type of instant-search recommendation and i always thought it was stupid, too. i just typed in "1218" on it and it's trying to recommend me "1218 grand-saconnex, switzerland" (i live in the united states). if it's going to do search recommendations, it should at least do a regional geo-ip/gps lookup and offer suggestions i'd probably be driving to.
- michaelhart 16y agoThat is possible, but when I was making this, I didn't want to use server-side technologies (php) because I wanted it to stay fast, which would have been necessary to determine your approximate location and get the GeoID prior to page generation. It is easily possible, however, it just would have been soooo slow in comparison.
- c00p3r 16y agoany Facebook/Twiter Instant? btw, there are lots of good ideas about command line - reverse search as in readline, context help as in Cisco IOS or SoftIce debugger and Zsh of course.
- scorpion032 16y agoGoogle Maps team, at least much of it, is in Bangalore. Like to relocate to India?
- yellowbkpk 16y agoThe Geo team has a whole building in Mountain View, I'm sure they'd let him work there :).
- robk 16y agoMaps engineering is vastly in California.
- beaumartinez 16y agoWell, it got my house, which is in Spain, albeit after a long list of JS alerts. Nice job! Even if you can't get around the errors, at least don't inform the user via JS alerts, they steal the focus from the search box and hence are indescribably annoying.
- joshwa 16y ago"Geocode was not successful for the following reason: ZERO_RESULTS"
- raquo 16y agoIs the "scroll up to zoom out" behaviour intended? Usually it's the other way.
- michaelhart 16y agoI didn't modify the default events. It could perhaps be a bug with the Google Maps v3 API. I will look into it, and report a bug if necessary :) Thanks!
- edw519 16y agoI typed in my home address in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and it put me in Long Beach, California. I think you're on to something.
- paolomaffei 16y agoWell, cool but... first place? I wonder how many other "clones" we'll see in the next days edit: don't want to be mean
- dredge 16y agoAre the map pins ever cleared? As I continue typing a long place name, I can see the 'shadow' behind the pin getting darker and darker with each keystroke. It's 'neat' but I don't think it's useful, per se. Possibly no more or less useful than YouTube Instant though.
- porter 16y agoYou should give it a short time lag. Instead of it immediately trying to find out my location, make it find my location after I stop typing for 2 seconds.
- feross 16y agoHi, I'm the creator of YouTube Instant. This is pretty awesome. Congrats!
- xentronium 16y agoHi guys. Ever heard of Google Instant, Youtube Instant and Google Maps Instant? Well, I made Google Picasa Instant. By the way, I'm looking for a job too! ... Okay, Actually I didn't but it could be possible.
- michaelhart 16y agoI did make an Instant Google Image Search. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1681775 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1681775
- ericb 16y agoI think waiting for a space to be typed so you know the newest typed chunk is a usable discrete piece of data along with a small delay for when no space is typed would make this work better. In thinking about how this compares to youtube instant, I'm not sure an autocomplete would work well at the global level without more thought and refinement.
- DavidMcLaughlin 16y agoThe funny thing about the "instant" search is around the time of AJAX exploding four or five years ago, this type of "real-time" search was all the rage. Over time it disappeared, most likely because it both wastes resources and a lot of users found it annoying. From that, auto-complete suggestions was the next evolution. Now we seem to have gone full circle. As impressive as it is that they're handling way more searches than before with lightning speed, the whole thing seems really naff. The marketing video for Google Instant in particular is hilarious - "I don't even have to press Enter!" I work for Nokia and we used to have "real-time search" on Ovi Maps and this was removed around a year ago, again due to a confusing and poor user experience. After all this buzz I saw some people on the internal communication tools ask if we have the technology internally to do instance geosearch. Marketing is everything.
- Amanjeev 16y agoYes and I hate marketing. It is not the true way a true innovation or innovator can get credit. It is just a bunch of fat men, sucking on the wet end of their cigars, choosing to show what they want with the power of their money.
- cmurphycode 16y agoThis is a classic engineer response. It's not about who does it first, it's about who does it right. We didn't have the technology to implement this properly 5 years ago. I've never seen the Ovi Maps tool you mention, but I'm willing to bet that it wasn't polished enough to make it natural for users. Now, I'm not entirely convinced that Google Instant is polished enough either- anecdotally, I've already seen some confusion. But saying "it's all marketing" willfully ignores the lesson we've all been taught by Apple: a revolutionary feature that isn't intuitively usable is no revolutionary feature at all.
- DavidMcLaughlin 16y agoActually, to me it seems like the real lesson most companies are picking up from Apple is to grossly overstate every little thing they do in the name of hype and buzz. I mean, revolutionary feature? Seriously? My whole point is this revolution happened five years ago and people learnt their lesson and moved on. I'm sure a lot of developers will be asked to put this back in, but on the plus side if you're not dealing with Google scale it's a trivial thing to implement.
- k3dz 16y agoinstant is cool no doubt.. but the proactivity becomes irritating after a while
- rakkhi 16y agoI really like this - can you make an iPhone application that does google maps instant search?
- michaelhart 16y agoIt works on iPhone and Android. :)
- rakkhi 16y agoIt does too! I have added it to my home screen but the accuracy does not seem to be that great - e.g. searching for a Roka restaurant in Canary wharf london doesn't work, postcode search in UK also doesn't seem to work
- shortformblog 16y agoThis is clever. Who cares if it's copycat? I bet you if it was slickened up slightly it'd be a perfect fit on Google's stable. I think transition animations and auto-zoom would help. And how about this for an idea: Why not split up the boxes in two, one for city and one for address? It seems this might work better with a box for general tuning and one for fine-tuning. Just a thought.
- pavel_lishin 16y agohttp://i.imgur.com/YFCKK.png http://i.imgur.com/YFCKK.png Modal popup came up about three times. There's gotta be a better way of handling that - I wasn't even typing very fast.
- michaelhart 16y agoIt wasn't your fault. Unfortunately, it's a combination of no buffer between queries and a lot of people using it at the same time. I did remove the alert window, but it will take time to propagate to my CDN.
- adrianwaj 16y ago- http://google-maps-utility-library-v3.googlecode.com/svn/tags/keydragzoom/2.0.1/examples/ http://google-maps-utility-library-v3.googlecode.com/svn/tag... check out these samples to allow users to zoom into a point when they've found it, eg: http://google-maps-utility-library-v3.googlecode.com/svn/tags/keydragzoom/2.0.1/examples/dragzoom.html http://google-maps-utility-library-v3.googlecode.com/svn/tag... - Great to see business listings too: http://www.google.com/uds/solutions/mapsearch/reference.html#_resultlistings http://www.google.com/uds/solutions/mapsearch/reference.html... http://www.google.com/uds/solutions/mapsearch/boot-complete.html http://www.google.com/uds/solutions/mapsearch/boot-complete.... http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/javascript/v2/examples/control-googlebar.html http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/javascript/v2... Good work so far.
- dreadlabs 16y agoNot to be spammy but i've compiled a few services onto one site: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1682068 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1682068
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- olegkikin 16y agoIt's broken Example: 110 W 75th st, new york, ny Compare to the correct location on google maps: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=110+W+75th+st,+new+york,+ny&z=15 http://maps.google.com/maps?q=110+W+75th+st,+new+york,+ny...
- Ras_ 16y agoWhoa! It only needed four letters to pinpoint my home street in Finland.
- mkramlich 16y agoI like how typing "Paris" went to Paris, France and then adding ", Texas" takes you to the location expected as well. I like to see tricky cases like that handled the least surprising way.
- jscore 16y agoI type "New", it shows me 3 cities on the map (New York one of them). I then continue " York" and it doesn't do anything. I think Google's phone call might delayed a bit.
- michaelhart 16y agoUpdate to v0.2 just went live Major features: - Intelligent zoom - More efficient API usage - Markers clear with new searches