American Grand Prix Street View

The first practice session of the American Grand Prix is about to start at the Circuit of Americas in Austin, Texas. You can now race around the circuit on Street View. Google visited the Circuit of the Americas in May of this year and the Google Street View car had a lot of fun driving around the track.

Clicking your way around the whole track can be a little tiring, therefore I've stitched together about 200 of the Street View images so you can sit back and just watch as we race around half of the track.

So seat belts on and get ready to Race Around the Circuit of Americas.

Location Biasing in the Google Maps API

Everyone hates stupid map search results. However map search results can be very hard to get right - there are a lot of towns and streets in the world with the same names.

If your application continuously directs users to the wrong location then you are very quickly going to lose those users. If I live in San Francisco and I search on a map for Broadway Street the chances are I'm not looking for the Broadway Street in Pearland Texas but for the one in San Francisco.

Therefore one way that you can improve search map results for the majority of users is by using location biasing. Thankfully you can now add location biasing to your Google Maps search using Google Places API Autocomplete.

Autocomplete in the Google Places API now automatically biases results towards the user’s location based on the user’s IP address. Therefore the closest locations to the user will appear at the top of the autocomplete suggested addresses.

However there may be cases where you don't want to bias search results based on the users location. For example if your application is a map of the most visited San Francisco tourist locations you might want to restrict search results to the San Francisco area. Using Location Biasing in the Places API you can also bias results to a specified area by defining a location and a radius. This ensures that the Place Autocomplete service preferences results within that circle. You can also use the components parameter to filter results to show only those places within a specified country.

Location biasing isn't a perfect solution to map search results and you may not want to use location biasing in your maps. If that is the case you can effectively turn it off in the Places API Autcomplete search by setting the location to '0,0' and radius to '20000000' (20 thousand kilometers), so that your results encompass the entire world.

Mapping the Disappearing Forests

The University of Maryland's Global Forest Change Map is a Google Map showing forest extent and forest change globally between 2000 and 2012.

By comparing over half a million satellite images the University of Maryland were able to analyse forest loss and gain across the world. From the analysis they have created a number of overlays showing both forest loss and forest gain. You can view each of the overlays on this Google Map and observe the results of global deforestation.

A Guided Venice Gondola Tour

Roll-up, roll-up, for the magical Gondola tour.

Google today added some beautiful Street View imagery of Venice. I've quickly put together a Venice Unilapse application that allows you to view some of the highlights of the new imagery. In the application all you have to do is scroll up and down the page to progress through my little tour of Venice.

So hold on tight as I take you under the Bridge of Sighs, across St Marks Square, down the Grand Canal and past the Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute.

The Street View Gondola Arrives in Venice

St Marks Square

Street View has arrived in Venice! Over the summer Google took to the canals and walkways of Venice using gondolas and the Street View Trekker backpacks. The result is that you can now tour one of the most beautiful cities on Earth on Google Maps.


The Bridge of Sighs

Every Sports Field Everywhere

Everyfield has set itself the daunting task of mapping every sports field on Earth. To complete the task Everyfield needs your help. Register with Everyfield and you can map your local sports fields. Map a lot of sports fields and you might even get your name to the top of the Everyfield leader board.

Everyfield uses the Google Maps API to provide a heat map of all the sports fields mapped so far around the world. There is also a searchable map of all the fields which you can search by location and by your favorite sport. So if you are looking for a field for a particular sport Everyfield should have the answer.

Tacloban Building Damage Mapped

The American Red Cross has mapped building damage in Tacloban, the capital of the Philippine province of Leyte. The map uses data gleaned from the first rapid damage assessment carried out soon after Typhoon Haiyan by the Copernicus Emergency Management Service.

The Copernicus EMS analysis was carried out by comparing satellite imagery from before and after the typhoon. The American Red Cross map colors the city's building footprints by the estimated damage suffered by each building. The resulting map shows that hardly a building in the city has been left undamaged by the typhoon.

You can read more about the building damage assessment process on the European Commission website and you can donate to the American Red Cross' appeal here.

Property Bubbles Bursting All Over the UK

An Englishman's bedsit is his castle. Which is lucky because in the present housing market bubble a bedsit is about all you are likely to be able to afford in the UK.

Illustreets has created an awesome animated Google Map of England and Wales showing the monthly volume of home sales by postcode from January 2009 to August 2013. The map provides a great illustration of how the property market in the UK has recovered since the beginning of 2009. The map also shows the seasonal patterns of property sales in the UK, dropping off in the winter months, especially in January, and rising again in the spring and summer months.

Users can adjust the value of properties that this wish to display on the map and select any postcode to view a chart showing median house prices vs. monthly property sales.

The Ultima VII Google Map

Here on Google Maps Mania we do like our interactive game world maps, whether that be for recent game releases - such as the GTA 5 Map - or for ancient computer games now almost lost in the mists of time - like the Ultima VII Google Map.

The Ultima VII map uses the Google Maps API to present the world of Britannia in all its isometric greatness. Using the map you can explore the heavily guarded Castle Britannia, visit the Isle of Deeds and locate the mysterious Spiritwood. The map also shows the locations of game characters, monsters and other points of interest.

Those who travel to Britannia should remember that with the moongates now broken, even with the best maps, there is no way to return home.

The Age of the World's Buildings Mapped

Russia's Mercator has joined in this year's trend to map the ages of all the world's buildings. Mercator's Houses of Moscow maps the ages of all Moscow's buildings.

The map shows a distinct pattern in Moscow's development. The center of the city retains many of its pre-revolution historical buildings and remains mainly largely untouched by later developments. Modern developments from the 20th and 21st centuries seem to be fairly evenly distributed across the rest of the city.

The Age of Greater Reykjavík is a map that shows the age of the Icelandic capital's buildings. The darker the color of the building on the map the older it is.

You can mouse-over any of the buildings on the map to view its age of construction and address.


The Five Boroughs: Building Age NYC uses NYC's Pluto data to map the age of all buildings in the five boroughs of New York City. That is an incredible 1,053,713 buildings in total. The map is a great resource to help you find New York's hidden historical buildings.

Block by Block, Brooklyn’s Past and Present uses the same data to show the age of Booklyn's buildings.

CitySDK's map shows the age of nearly 10 million buildings in the Netherlands. It is a great mapped visualization of a very large data set, which provides a great tool for exploring different patterns of urban development in Dutch towns.

The iBag Viewer is an interactive map of the same Dutch building age data set. In my opinion the choice of colors in the CitySDK map make it a much nicer map to look at, however the iBag Viewer includes two really handy controls; a date slide control and a map opacity control.

The date slider allows you to filter the results shown on the map by building age. You can therefore use the control to find out where all the oldest buildings are in any Dutch town. The map opacity control also allows you to adjust the opacity of the OpenStreetMap map tiles.


Ljubljana Building Ages is a map of building ages in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Buildings on the map are colored by age and a line graph provides a quick visual overview of the ages of the city's buildings.

The Ljubljana map was inspired by the Portland, Oregon: The Age of a City. This MapBox map colors 544,033 buildings in Portland by age.

If you live in Chicago then you can check out Wired's MapLab map of Chicago's Building Ages.