Information Madness

Ever since Google released its mapping services for India, we are seeing lot of useful applications using Google Maps. Google Maps Mania recently reported that Google Maps India now features the ability to search for points of interest and addresses for quite a few cities now. It also has expanded its coverage for more cities now. Since July, now you can find Gandhinagar (Gujarat's Capital) Map online and thats just one example. If you now look at Google Maps for India, you would see lot more cities included.

For example, if you want to search for IIT Bombay in Mumbai, Go to maps.google.com and type in "IIT Bombay, Mumbai" and the google maps will show the location on the map. Its pretty neat and slick. I tried so many places for Mumbai, Delhi, Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Chennai and many more.

Search functionality is available for the following cities:
Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Ahmedabad Agartala, Agra, llahabad, Amritsar, Bhopal, Bhubhaneswar, Bikaner, Chandigarh, Cuttack, Darjeeling, Dehradun, Diu, Ernakulam, Gandhinagar, Goa, Guwahati, Gwalior, Haridwar-Rishikesh, Indore, Jaipur, Jaisalmer, Jamshedpur, Jhansi, Kanchipuram, Kanpur, Kochi, Kolhapur, Lucknow, Mangalore, Mount Abu, Mussoorie, Nagpur, Nashik, Ooty, Patna, Pondicherry, Port Blair, Raipur, Rajkot, Ranchi, Solapur (Sholapur), Srinagar, Surat, Thrissur (Trichur), Tiruchirappalli (Tiruchchirappalli), Trivandrum, Vadodara, Varanasi, Vizag (Google Maps Mania)

Once you are at the city level for Indian Google map, type in your search query for example I have Google Maps centered at Mumbai city. Now I entered "Pizza Hut" in the search box and Google Maps shows the list of Pizza Hut places in Mumbai with their phone numbers, addresses and location on the map. Thought they have mentioned that the placement of the location on the map is approximate. But atleast you can get the address and phone number.

Once you click on any of the marker point, it will give you the "more info" option if available. If you click on the "more Info", it gives you the web pages related to that location, reviews if available from different web sources. For example, some of the queries that I searched for were getting data from mumbaipages.com. So probably, google is collecting these addresses and contact information from different web sources.

Check out this URL for your own experience.