StreetView coming to Google Earth within a few weeks

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According to Rafe Needleman of Webware, StreetView will be available inside of Google Earth

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“within a few weeks”. Rafe quotes an unnamed source with that info. He states that it’s not clear if this will be a public release or an internal testing release.

If done smoothly, this could be very slick. It’ll be interesting to see how Google implements it. I found one odd statement in his post, though. He states:

Google’s aerial images are seamlessly integrated into Google Earth already, in contrast to Microsoft’s Live Search Maps, which forces the user to turn on the “Bird’s-Eye” mode to see aircraft imagery.

What? Either he’s never used Virtual Earth (Live Maps, etc), he’s confused, or I’m mis-reading his statement. Still, it sounds way off-base. Bird’s Eye imagery is in addition to the “aircraft imagery” (which I assume means “satellite imagery”), and it’s a neat option to have. For just viewing normal, flat imagery, Google Earth works essentially the same as Virtual Earth.

Anyhow, this StreetView news is pretty cool. It’s been a long time coming, so I’m hoping it’s integrated in a creative and useful manner.

Some background on how Virtual Earth creates 3D buildings

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The Virtual Earth 3D blog has a post today

that explains in detail how they create each 3D city.  From the article:

Microsoft’s acquisition of Vexcel Corporation, a 20-year old provider of remote sensing solutions, provided the Virtual Earth team with a broad background in photogrammetry, geospatial data production, and digital elevation model (DEM) generation and refinement.  The models and their texturing are generated from aerial imagery generally captured at a 15 cm ground sample distance (GSD) by planes flying at roughly 5,500 feet over the target city and capturing a minimum of 5 views for each building (top and 4 sides). Since the Vexcel acquisition, this aerial imagery is increasingly being captured using the Vexcel UltraCAM series of high-resolution digital cameras, providing Virtual Earth’s 3D display with sub-meter accuracy.

Along with being able to generate massive numbers of models per city, they’re also able to load quickly for each user.  In fact, this is one of my favorite things about Virtual Earth.  They’ll load 3D models very quickly and very low-res, then slowly sharpen them up as you zoom in on them.

Google Earth, on the other hand, can only load full-res models.  Google’s models tend to look a little better than the ones in Virtual Earth, but the quantity and load time make VE’s cities look much better.

The full article goes into much more detail, and it’s well worth reading.

Woopra looks awesome

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GreekBrief.TV has a short video clip that introduces Woopra, a new analytics client. It’s similar to Google Analytics, StatCounter and others of that nature, but does a few things very differently:

  • Stats are delivered to a client that you install on your PC.
  • Stats are shown in real-time, with details about each visitor.
  • You can initiate a chat session with visitors on your site!

The site is open and you can create an account, but you are not yet able to add any websites or download the software, so I don’t have any firsthand experience to share. Once I get in, I’ll be sure to post my thoughts.

I don’t expect that this will replace Google Analytics, but I think it might complement it very nicely. Check out the video below for a bit more about Woopra.


GBTV #337 | Introducing Woopra from Neal Campbell on Vimeo.

StreetView now included in the Google Maps API

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Google has just announced that they have added StreetView to the Google Maps API!  It sounds like there are some neat things that can be done with it, and I’m anxious to give it a try.

The post at the Google Maps API Blog has much more information — go check it out.  If you make a cool mash-up using the new tools, feel free to share it in the comments section of this post.

When people are new to an area, what do they want from your site?

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I got an e-mail today that really got me thinking.  It read, in part:

What are the main things new folks in town are looking for in a church website?  Is it information on specific ministries?  If so, which inistries does that tend to be?  Children and families? Is it service times and directions?

What are the MAIN few things?

It’s a remarkably difficult thing to answer.  Different people are looking for different things.  By looking into the long tail keywords that find your site

you can get some idea, but it’s still very broad.

However, his e-mail said specifically “new folks in town”, which helps narrow it down quite a bit.  Based on that, we’ll assume a few things.  These wouldn’t be true in every case, but probably in most:

  • They don’t know the area very well.
  • They’re already Christians and they’re simply looking for a new church.
  • There’s a good chance they already know what denomination they prefer and they’ll stick to it, though that’s becoming less important to a lot of people.

Based on those items, what’s important?  I would have to say, in random order:

  • Directions/location.  Saying you’re on the “corner of 9th & Main” won’t help, since they don’t know where 9th or Main is.  Give them a good map, your full address, along with text based directions from each direction into town.  A photo of your building on the directions page can help put them more at ease too.
  • Your service times/locations/types.  Do you have a contemporary service?  What’s it like?  What time is each service? What building is each service located in?
  • Information for their kids.  Sunday school and nursery being the main two.  Where is the nursery?  What ages can go there?  Where is Sunday School for each grade?  Is there a program for their middle-schooler, or should they come to the service?
  • Membership information.  I don’t like to push this information on new visitors too much, especially if they’ve never joined a church before, but this fictional family is probably looking to put down roots.  At the very least, provide some information on what your membership process looks like.

What else?  What other items do you think should be on the list?

Hybrid view coming to Virtual Earth’s Bird’s Eye imagery

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On April 10, Microsoft plans to release Virtual Earth version 6.1.  Among the enhancements:

  • Enhanced experiences with bird’s eye view in 3D, and new bird’s eye hybrid view.
  • Reverse geocoding for U.S. users.
  • Walking directions for North America and European Union users.
  • Traffic-based driving directions.
  • New cross-browser support.
  • Improved printing support for maps.

That’s quite a bit of good stuff.  While I’ve always been impressed with the rate of imagery added to Virtual Earth, I’ve felt that they’ve been behind Google Earth/Maps in terms of features.  Improvements like this are helping them to narrow that gap.  Many of these are things that Google Maps can already do (cross-browser support, traffic-based directions, etc), but it’s nice to see them continue to catch up.

Bird’s Eye imagery has always been a unique feature that they have, so adding hybrid support to that will be neat to see.

How to extend the long tail

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Yesterday we discussed how the long tail can be one of your best allies.  Coincidentally, Jim Karter wrote a post yesterday with a great suggestion on how to discover more great long tail keywords to blog about.

His suggestion is very simple — keep track of what people are searching for on your site

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, then blog about the items that haven’t been discussed yet.  He is using the “Fluid Dynamics Search Engine” script, but there are other options as well.  If you use WordPress, there is a great little plug-in called Search Meter that will record all of the searches performed on your site.  In addition, I highly recommend that you use the service provided by HitTail

.  They track your incoming visits and suggest new keywords based on the previous visitors.  Between Search Meter and HitTail, you’ll quickly have a long list of new topics to blog about!

If you’re more aggressive, you can even write your own script to track searches.  On our church site, I’ve done just that.  I built a custom search engine using MySQL’s fulltext search, and I record each query in our database (along with date, time and number of results found).  I breeze through it from time to time to see what I’m missing.

Some of the things I’ve discovered in the past year or so:

  • People wanted information about having weddings at the church, so I built a page for that.
  • People can’t spell our staff member’s names correctly, so I added a bunch of misspelled keywords to each staff member’s page.  For example, you can find me if you search for “Mickey” or “Micky” or “Micki”.
  • People searched for “www.google.com” quite a bit.  That’s odd to me, but I built a proper landing page to help them out.

The list could go on and on.  By tracking the searches, I can not only improve the quality of the search engine, but I can build the content that people are already looking for.

The longer you can stretch out your tail, the better!

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WorldWind finally gets road data… sort of

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One of the problems with NASA WorldWind is that it uses public domain data, and most road data isn’t public domain.  Therefore, there really isn’t any road data in the application, which makes it far less usable.

However, OpenStreetMap data is public domain, and now you get get that data into WorldWind.   It takes a few steps to get it loaded, but Earth Is Square has the details.  Hopefully they can incorporate this data into a future release of the product so that more people can take advantage of it.

Techdirt suggests Google Maps should become even more wiki-like

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About a week ago, Google started allowing users to add/edit/delete items from the map.  It’s a neat idea with a lot of great potential, but opens up the possibility of vandalism.  Timothy Lee of Techdirt has a great suggestion on how to help address the problem:

…as far as I can tell, there’s no way to see all of the markers in a particular small section of the map (say the block where I live). There also doesn’t appear to be any easy way to automatically monitor changes within a certain radius of a particular location. These features (analogous to Wikipedia’s watchlist feature) would make it a lot easier for public-spirited Google Maps users to keep tabs on map changes and quickly revert vandalism. I’d personally be happy to help police edits in the area around my apartment, but there’s currently no easy way for me to do that.

I think it’s a superb idea.  Like him, I’d be happy to watch my local area and check for bad edits, as I’m sure many other people would be happy to do.

See user-created contentThey’re quite close to having this feature already, but it’s not quite there yet.  If you click on the “See user-created content” link after performing a search, you can see all user-created items for that search phrase in your area.  However, there is no way to search for ALL user-created items in an area, or way to narrow those items down by date.  I think a simple process would work:

  • Let me define an area — a simple bounding box would work.
  • Give me an RSS feed for changes/additions/deletions in that area.
  • I’d drop that RSS feed into Google Reader and always know about changes to locations near me.

It seems pretty simple.  Google, are you listening?

The beauty of the long tail

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The Long Tail

About 3-1/2 years ago, Chris Anderson of Wired coined the phrase “the long tail

“. If you’re not familiar with it, the term is a way of expressing the advantage of going after thousands of unique search queries (or products) rather than focusing on just a few big ones.

Product-wise, Amazon is the king of this. They sell many copies of popular books, but they’re also able to sell millions of copies of obscure books simply because they’re not constrained by the square footage of a single store. Those individual sales of lesser-known books generate a massive number of sales each year.

The same idea works with search engines. While it’s great to rank well for some power terms, the real magic (and money) is when you rank well for thousands of less-popular searches. According to Google, 20-25% of the searches they see each day are queries that have never been searched before. That’s a staggering number! Millions of searches today will be brand new to Google. The wider you can rank in your niche, the more of those visitors you might pick up.

Here is an example using the website from our church. In the past month, we’ve had 7,084 visits from search engine visitors, and they’ve used a total of 1,958 different queries. It’s not a huge number of visitors, but it’s pretty good for a church site.  Let’s dig into a few of those searches to see what they’re so helpful to us.

Here are a few of the queries that landed on us. I’m glad we rank well for these, but they’re not especially beneficial:

  • mt bethel umc — 542 visits — Of course, this is our most popular. I’m glad we rank well for it, but those are people that are already looking for us.
  • must ministry — 16 visits — It’s great that people found us when searching for this ministry, but they could be anywhere in the country and it probably wasn’t of much value for them to find us.
  • churches — 3 visits — Of little value, since they’re probably not from the area.
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How about the long tail? These are searches that occur far less often, but are very valuable:

  • easter egg hunts in marietta ga — 3 visits — People looking for an egg hunt in our area and found our site. There is a decent chance that they decided to visit as a result of this search.
  • methodist church marietta — 2 visits — Using Google Analytics, I can see that the two visitors looked at 14 pages on our site. At least one of them probably came to visit.
  • adult softball leagues in cobb county georgia — 1 visit — We have exactly what this person was looking for.
  • cobb county georgia church youth groups — 1 visit — This one visitor viewed 13 pages on our site. They were looking for a youth group in our area, found one, and wanted to learn more.
  • daycare centers in east cobb county — 1 visit — They viewed 16 pages on the site. Again, we had exactly what they were looking for, and they’ve probably paid us a visit as a result.

The list goes on and on. In the past year we’ve had over 9,000 different queries that attracted two or fewer visits. These are big, long, ugly queries like the ones shown above — but they’re the ones that work.  If someone enters a long, precise search query and your site is near the top, you have a good chance of getting the sale/lead/visit/whatever.
So how do you build long-tail traffic? It’s pretty easy. Just follow basic SEO principles to help Google really understand your content. Things like:

  • Text-based navigation (not images).
  • Text rendered as text, not buried in images or flash.
  • Frequent internal links in the text of your site.
  • Proper title and H1 tags.
  • Well-formed URLs.

Build lots of quality content, then make sure Google can fully understand what your content is all about.  Do that, and over time you’ll find yourself loving the long tail.

Filed Under: SEO