Google Earth, Google's mapping solution, is turning into a database of user generated content. At the Where 2.0 conference that took place last week, Google held a tutorial entitled "Searching the Geoweb: Exposing Your Geo Data to Search Engines". The tutorial was presided by Lior Ron, Google Maps Product Manager and Mano Marks, Google Developer Programs Engineer.

It appears that Google has been working on coming up with a way by which you can have your geo-spatial content indexed by the Google Earth application and Google Maps. They index content on the Web and show it in search results in the above mentioned products. If another user wants to find user-generated content on Google Maps, he needs to turn on the "Show search options" function and change the "Restrict Results" to "User-created content". By doing so you will be able to find different articles related to locations on Google Earth.

Displaying the web content on Google Earth and Google Maps will most certainly increase the users' experience with these two Google products. Google managed to do so by introducing KLM and GeoRSS support in Google Maps API, thus letting users define their data in either KLM and GeoRSS. If a user is trying to index his data on Google Earth and Google Maps, he will benefit from extensive support explaining how to generate more traffic to his maps mashup site.

This new Google Earth and Maps function is available and Google has already indexed a number of KML/KMZ files it found on the Web. But, as the index grows, the search results will be in larger numbers, so Google might have to think of another way to display all the user-generated content.

This new option has been made available after a number of search related functions have been integrated into Google Earth and Google Maps, over the past few weeks.