« Global warming at its worst | Main | Google recruiting Mozilla developers »
January 27, 2005
A9 YellowPages shows pictures of businesses you search for
Amazon's search engine, A9, now has photo listings in their yellow pages. This is a great feature, and I thought I'd test it out on the local Publix. It did turn up with an image, but was about half a mile down the street. It does allow you to "walk right" or "walk left" so you can see more images and eventually I saw Publix. It still has a little bit of work to be done, but it is a pretty nice feature.
The most powerful technology A9.com invented for Yellow Pages is “Block View,” which brings the Yellow Pages to life by showing a street view of millions of businesses and their surroundings. Using trucks equipped with digital cameras, global positioning system (GPS) receivers, and proprietary software and hardware, A9.com drove tens of thousands of miles capturing images and matching them with businesses and the way they look from the street.The whole process (except for the driving!) is completely automatic, making it fast and efficient. Block View allows users to see storefronts and virtually walk up and down the streets of currently more than 10 U.S. cities using over 20 million photographs. We are driving and at some point hope to cover the whole country.
Posted by Ryan at January 27, 2005 04:54 PM