Google Maps at Home and at Work

Street View Now Available in Estonia and Latvia

Google have made a number of announcements concerning Google Maps today. They have officially announced the availability of Street View in the Baltic states of Latvia and Estonia that Google Maps Mania reported on yesterday.

Save Home & Work Locations

Google has also added a feature to Google Maps that allows users to save home and work locations. If you go to the 'My Places' tab in Google Maps you now can save your home and work locations.

Once your locations are saved you can use 'home' or 'work' when searching for directions to quickly add those locations and avoid having to type in the full address.

New Google Places API Features

For Google Maps API users Google has added keyword search and rank by distance to the Google Places API.

The Google Places API filters places by 100 different categories, such as restaurant, clothing_store, and bar. The keyword search feature allows users to search for places based on an arbitrary text string. For example, instead of just searching for restaurants you can now search for Mexican restaurants etc.

The rank by distance feature allows map developers the option to rank searched for venues and places by distance from a set location. This means you can now offer users the choice of viewing search results both by prominence and distance.

There is a good demo map showing both keyword search and rank by distance in action here.

Polish UEFA 2012 Stadiums in Street View

The Official Polish Google Blog has announced the release of Street View for the four Polish soccer stadium to be used for this summer's UEFA European Football Championship. Now you can use Street View to get a sense of what it is like to be down on the pitch looking up at the towering stands.