Google Now Integrates Video, Book and Photo Results on its Maps

You'd say Google just came up with a new means to express itself, it's placing video content everywhere. Two days ago, it toyed around with placing video content on the left hand side of the search results page, now it's giving it a try with integrating it in its Google Maps service.

That wouldn't be such a bad thing, if the content was always relevant or the integration didn't look half-baked, or the thumbnail preview had been added just to keep the feeling of I-don't-know-what alive, its utility being equal to zero because the embedded video has already contained a preview. Redundancy in its finest hour. Have I mentioned that the embedded video is too large for the info window? This must have been an after hours homework for some not-so-well-paid Google employees, who've just wanted to get the job done and have never cared much about optimizing the interface or anything else for that matter.

Besides the video, I said that there's also been some more services previewing the search conducted with Google Maps with their products. Books from Google Books search and geo-tagged photos from Panoramio (it is also Google property, I would really like to see whether they will integrate images hosted by others like Flickr. YouTube is already the biggest there is on its market, but Panoramio still has ways to go and catch up with Yahoo's similar service).

Google Maps has tried to make a funny on its blog, the post relating to this is being written by "The Google Maps Search Box", which encouraged people to search for Christmas Books in Jerusalem in order to check out the Book search or some others for the respective categories. I haven't tried many of those just because the first one I searched for turned out to be such a disappointment: the Google Geyser was the video that did the trick of ruining my morning. Maybe you'll find something really useful. If you do, make sure to holler.