Google Earth featured content, which launched last week, allows you to explore localities in a very compelling way. If you zoom in on the Great Pyramid of Egypt, for example, a screen pops up with information from Discovery Networks. There are also Turn Here videos, an Emeryville-based startup that plans to produce 25,000 short videos this year about neighborhoods and local attractions, so you can check out restaurants and other places before visiting. This is a great new platform for local businesses to relatively inexpensively advertise, and also an interesting educational tool.
The featured content in Google Earth has interesting potential implications for Google search results of the future. For example, if you search for “New York,” the search results could be segmented in such a way that you can easily explore the City via Google Earth, watch relevant videos, listen to local music, as well as discover traditional information-based and keyword relevant websites.
October 27th, 2006 at 1:23 am
[...] Imagine a website, in the vein of Second Life or The Sims, where students are avatars and have to travel around the world to discover clews and achieve goals. The game would not only incorporate Google maps and National Geographic videos (as I’ve already mentioned is happening in Google Earth), but also 3D simulated spaces, where students can meet and interact with historically significant characters and students from different places and even time. There could be a time machine, for example, where you scroll along a time line and the civilizations of the earth change, depending on where you locate the cursor on the time line , so you can explore the Mayan cities, or the pyramids in Egypt, or the great civilization of China, and learn about the technological and social advancements of the human race. Time and place can be manipulated, but does exist, so your avatar has to travel to the airport, board and travel on an airplane, and find taxis to move around foreign cities, which heightens the realism of the experience. Thoughts? [...]