I guess this is old news, but I just noticed two new things on the Google Labs page: Google Ride Finder and Google Search History. I guess both the services are self-explanatory, but let me just give you a little detail about each service and then tell you what I think of them.
Google Ride Finder
As the Google description of Ride Finder goes, “Find a taxi, limousine or shuttle using real time position of vehicles“. And well, that’s what it does. You are given a map on the page where you’re given a place to select your state/city. As you do this, you get the number of SuperShuttles in that city/town and their locations. Wow, I wish we had this type of technology for New Zealand.
Google Search History
You might think there’s no use for this, because Google Desktop already does this and actually goes a step further and provides the results within those queries, but this one is no less – it lets you do all that and plus access your results from any computer. You also get a full text search of all the pages you found, an easy-to-browse calendar to see which queries you made which day, and also some extra information like the last time you saw a page, how often you’ve seen it, and more.
First, let me talk about Ride Finder. It’s really great to see Google elaborating more on Maps, and the fact that it’s also collaborating with the satellite mapping firm it acquired last year, Keyhole Corp, is somewhat great to see. I mean, Google Ride Finder is new technology: you can actually go and locate taxis, and the fact that this is Keyhole technology with Google Maps, brings us to a new level of collaboration (i.e. I don’t see Microsoft or Yahoo! doing this. Well they do it, but they remove the total brand value off the company, e.g. like what Yahoo! did with AltaVista).
Google Search Maps is also no less. It’s new technology too, as in I don’t think it has a serious, straight forward competitor. I tried it and the thing that I most loved about it was that it lets you be truly organised. All in all, I’m sure both of these services will go a long way.
