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Tuesday 29 May 2007

Google Maps in Ireland

I was very pleasantly surprised to discover today that Google Maps not only added the ultra cool Street Level view to selected (US) Cities but they finally added some up to date street level maps for (more) of Ireland. I can't tell yet if it's the entire country but they certainly are pretty recent for the area around Leixlip West.

Directions now work in a real sense since the improved mapping now means that it is aware of most local streets and roads but the Google maps Geocoding API still can't handle Irish addresses it's a bit hard to search for places and then get directions between them. What works for me is to locate the start point and then save it in "My Maps", repeat the exercise for the destination point and then use the fact that the maps search parser will search "My Maps" first to enable it to feed locations into the navigation engine.

Here's hoping that they get their act together and give us some updated satellite imagery soon too.