14 DAY TRIAL // Google Street View is an interesting tool and a very useful one on some occasions. But, for the most part, the majority of people just use it to browse through familiar places or far-away cities. A latest addition to the product brings a bit more practicality to Street View. Local businesses are now marked in Street View imagery and users can click an icon to find out more about the place.
“I’ve been working with my teammates to help improve the discoverability of content in Street View. Our new release of local businesses annotations in Street View is the first step down this path,” Stéphane Lafon, a software engineer working with Google Street View, wrote.
“When you’re touring in Street View and see a business that piques your interest, now you can find a clickable icon that will take you to the business listing where you can find out the name, hours, read reviews, and more,” the blog post added.
The feature depends on the data Google has on local businesses, but the company has been building up a lot of info on small and local businesses, especially in the US. At the moment, the feature includes the top listings for the area you are viewing. Google says more info and also public transit locations will be added in the future.
Google has been working hard to have a solid position on the small- and local-business market. Advertising from this type of companies adds up to quite a bit of money and the market still has a lot of untapped potential. Place Pages are an example of this.
With Place Pages, Google is building up a directory of all ‘places’ in the world that includes all manner of info on businesses and places of interest. Place Pages were introduced last year and the feature has been included in Google Earth and has now been introduced for mobile phones as well.