Saving Search Results in Google Maps

Google Maps does a pretty good job at ranking search results, but sometimes you want to save some of the results and review them later. You may want to compare them or to share a list of the most interesting places with someone else.

An easy way to save only some of the search results is to use Google My Maps. When you click on a result, a tooltip shows more information about the place and lets you save it to My Maps. You'll have to create a new map and add the results you like. Each result will become a blue placemark on the map. When you save a search result, the title and the description are pre-filled, but you can change them and add notes. You can switch between "Search Results" and "My Maps", enter a new query or go to the next page of search results.

When you're finished, click on "Clear search results" and make sure all the placemarks are visible. The personalized map can be printed, sent by email or embedded into a web page. It's also accessible in the My Maps tab and you can always add new places later.


If you want to collaborate on a map with other people, use Google Notebook (don't forget to install the plug-in). Create a new notebook, go to "Sharing options", make it public and invite other collaborators. To obtain a map-enabled notebook, switch to the text view in Google Maps. For each search result you want to add to the notebook, select the title and the address, right-click and choose "Note this".


A notebook can have multiple sections and you can write comments next to each note. When you go to the published notebook, you'll see a link that says: "View this notebook on a map". All the notes become placemarks on a map.

Google to Open up Its Social Platform

TechCrunch has the news that Google plans to open "a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google's social graph data. They'll start with Orkut and iGoogle (Google's personalized home page), and expand from there to include Gmail, Google Talk and other Google services over time. On November 5 we'll likely see third party iGoogle gadgets that leverage Orkut's social graph information - the most basic implementation of what Google is planning. From there we may see a lot more - such as the ability to pull Orkut data outside of Google and into third party applications via the APIs."

The idea isn't surprising if you look at Google's renewed interest in orkut, a social network that didn't get too much traction in the US. orkut has recently added a new feature that shows updates from your friends and the new design leaves a lot of space for gadgets. Google didn't exploit the wealth of information from a social network and ignored that many of its other services could be even more valuable in the context of a trusted environment. For example, a news or a video recommended by many of your friends has an added value. Your search results could be better if you subscribe to recommendation feeds from orkut communities related to your interests.

An internal Google video showed that Google intends to integrate all of its communication apps and to create activity streams for each user. All the streams from your contacts could be aggregated in a single place that shows what's going on with the people you care about. A glimpse from this project is the recently launched Shared Stuff that lets you share web pages with your contacts and keep track of the shared items.


I think one of the problems that hinder Google's social plans is the distinction between Gmail contacts and orkut friends, which are two separate lists. Google tried to synchronize them with the Google Talk integration, that automatically added your orkut friends to the list of Gmail contacts. In the future, Google could create a special layer for "friends" in Gmail: those who get the list of broadcasted activities. The list of Gmail friends could include your orkut friends and the Google Talk contacts.

iGoogle, the personalized homepage, is another central point in Google's social plans. The homepage lets you create gadgets that can be shared with your friends, you can share tabs and customize the page using themes. The gadgets are similar to Facebook's applications, except that they don't have a social aspect.

Google intends to open this data to other developers and to other social networks. Brad Fitzpatrick, who now works at Google, wrote an interesting article last month that proposed the creation of a decentralized social graph that combines data from different social networks. "There doesn't exist a single social graph (or even multiple which interoperate) that's comprehensive and decentralized. Rather, there exists hundreds of disperse social graphs, most of dubious quality and many of them walled gardens." Google could support this project by sharing its data and providing search features for the graph.

All in all, the social component of web applications is increasingly important and a big differentiator. YouTube was more successful than Google Video because it had a stronger community and many loyal users. While search is an important way to find things online, a social filter could enable to discover more interesting things without having to actively search for them.

Google Maps Brainstorming

In this video, Google Maps team from New York tries to figure out how to display the information about a business in a better way. The brainstorming doesn't generate too many ideas, but one Googler admits that the interface is "unreadable".


Even if Google shows a lot of information, it doesn't do a good job at helping you find a place you like. If you search for a pizza place in New York, Google Maps shows the same results for everyone and you can't refine your query with details about the menu, delivery area, price or the amount of recent positive reviews. Google Maps could also let you add a business to your favorites and personalize the search results based on your bookmarks and search history. As for the presentation, it would be nice to compare the results side by side and choose what are the most relevant criteria for comparison.

Anyway, here's the Google Maps brainstorming. Maybe you can help Google find the best way to structure the interface.

Google Shared Stuff

Google's social side is more visible every day. A new service called "Shared Stuff" lets you share interesting links with your friends and the entire world. You need to drag a bookmarklet to your browser's link bar or to click on the "Share" button from a web page (the button can only be found at Google Video right now).


When you click on the button, a new window pops out and you can choose between posting the page to your profile, emailing it to your contacts or bookmarking the page using services like del.icio.us or furl.


A profile page is public and can include information about yourself, a photo, links to your sites. You can select the photo from one of your public Picasa Web Albums. Here's the profile of Kevin Marks, a former Technorati engineer who now works at Google.


This page lets you see the latest web pages shared by your Gmail contacts:



There's also a page that lists all the popular items shared by Google users, but some of them are questionable (I saw pages that only had a single view):


... and a way to see popular items from a domain or for a tag:


You can also subscribe to feeds for all of these pages, but it would be nice to have a special feed for your contacts and gadget that keeps you up-to-date.

Overall, the service adds the social component to Google Bookmarks and integrates a lot of ways to share content online. It will be interesting to see if Google manages to build a community around the new service and if you can rely on it to find and disseminate what's cool on the web. Google will probably allow you to add the "Share" button to your site so you can replace all the bookmarking/sharing buttons for del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook etc. and provide a better experience to your users.

This is probably the first appearance of the Moka-Moka social project and Google will include shared information from other services (Picasa Web Albums, public events from your calendar, Google Reader's shared items or public Google Docs).

{ via Blogoscoped forum }

Promoting Your Own Services in Search Results

What happens when you have a search engine, but also some services that produce content? Well, you could use the search engine to promote those services or at least to leverage the fact that you have better access to their data.

Let's say you are Google and you own a very popular video site called YouTube. What do you do? Here's what Google did:

* YouTube was the first video site added to Google Video when it was relaunched as a video search engine. Even if Google added other sites, YouTube dominates the search results. Of course, YouTube has a lot of videos and a strong community that provides feedback, but Google Video still can't provide the right balance between YouTube and the rest of the sites.


* as part of the Universal Search, YouTube videos that appear in Google's search results have extended snippets that include thumbnails, links to related videos and the full video can be played inline. Google doesn't do this only for YouTube, but Google Video and YouTube are the only video sites for which you can play videos directly from the search results page. This decision was probably influenced by the fact that Google can't control the performance for other video sites and those sites didn't want to lose traffic.

But what if you are Yahoo and own a photo-sharing site called Flickr? The site doesn't have a dominant position like YouTube (6.42% for the US in July 2007, according to Hitwise) and an image search engine can easily integrate images from other sites.

Yahoo also shows extended snippets for Flickr images, but it commits the cardinal sin for a search engine: forget about relevance and promote arbitrary sites. For example, the first page of search results for [Google Reader] only includes Flickr photos, while you can find many other relevant images on the web (in fact, the first 49 Yahoo results are from Flickr). Other queries also show a very-difficult-to-justify Flickr domination. While Flickr is a great place to find photos, it's not very relevant if you want to find Vista screenshots: 9 from the first 20 results are from Flickr and all of them show Vista wallpapers. A search for minimal surface includes a single result from a math-related site, while the rest of the images are from Flickr.


The conclusion is that it's difficult to have a search engine and sites for user-generated content. You can be tempted to arbitrarily increase the influence of these sites and show biased results.

Using the Command-Line to Get Things Done

I've written before about Enso, a very interesting project that lets you perform tasks from a command-line that interacts with the user interface. The software comes with some basic commands (like launching programs, performing calculations), but it can be extended with other commands. Enso has recently launched in beta some plug-ins that add new commands.

Let's say you need to translate into French some text from an email message you're composing in Gmail. You'll have to select the text, open a new window or tab, go to Google Translate or other translation service, paste the text, choose the option to translate from English to French, click on a button, select the translation and copy it, go back to Gmail and paste the text. The new translation commands for Enso let you perform the same task much faster: select the text, trigger the command line (press Caps-Lock), type the first letters from the command ("translate to French") and the translated text will replace the selected text. Of course, you won't get a more accurate translation, but at least you won't lose the original context and get distracted by other tasks.


The search commands let you select some text and type the name of one of the supported search services to launch a new page with the corresponding search result. This is faster than using your browser's search features or extensions like Hyperwords because you don't have visually identify the right option from a long list. Unfortunately, these commands defeat the one of the main purposes of Enso: don't lose the context. An alternative way to implement them would be to use APIs like Google AJAX API to display search results without leaving the page. In fact, my favorite use of this API is a tool called Linkify that allows me link to a search result by selecting some text from a textarea and choosing one of the search results displayed in a small sidebar.

There are also commands for controlling music players or to convert LaTeX markup into a nice mathematical expression. Of course, an API would make it easier to build many other plug-ins for Enso.

For now, Enso works only on Windows 2000/XP/Vista and the main program costs $20 (there's a 30-day trial), while all the plug-ins described above are free. I think a better approach would be to pay for some additional commands and make the main program free. When you can find a lot of great software like Google Desktop, Launchy, Quicksilver, Foxytunes, I'm not sure many people are going to pay for Enso.

The software comes from a small company called Humanized that promises "to provide you with the most humane software we are capable of making". Great interfaces, easy to use software, simplicity - I've heard these things before (I wonder where?).

"Some tasks—for instance, teaching a child arithmetic—are intrinsically pretty complicated. But some aren't. Setting the time on a wristwatch, for instance, shouldn't be that hard; on old analog wristwatches, it basically involved pulling out a knob, twisting it until the watch showed the correct time, and pushing the knob back in again. But on newer digital wristwatches—ones that claim to be more powerful and feature-loaded than their analog counterparts—it involves pressing a series of buttons in a hard-to-remember, often unforgiving order. Most people dread setting the time on their digital watches, and for good reason."

Google Launches Gadget Ads

As mentioned earlier this year, Google tested a new ad format that uses gadgets to display interactive content. The gadget ads are now officially launched and available for many (but not yet all) AdWords advertisers. "The new widget ads represent a more aggressive push by Google to attract big brand advertisers who like flashy ad units rather than the simple text ads commonly run in Google's ad network," reports The New York Times.

The main benefits of the new format: it's easy to create a gadget using Google's API, the gadget can be stored and/or cached on Google's severs and people can add the gadgets they like to Google's personalized homepage. "Gadget ads can incorporate real-time data feeds, images, video and much more in a single creative unit and can be developed using Flash, HTML or a combination of both. Designed to act more like content than a typical ad, they run on the Google content network, competing alongside text, image and video ads for placement," says Google (my emphasis).

Because most of the normal gadgets can be embedded into a web page and many people already use iGoogle, the gadget ad will be a familiar presence. "Google Gadget Ads are nearly identical to Google Gadgets, except that they run as rich media ads on the Google content network. By adding a small bit of code called a click URL to your Google Gadget, the gadget becomes a Google Gadget Ad, capable of running as an ad on thousands of content network sites. Otherwise, the two can be identical in their basic construction and content." This way, Google also solved the problem of monetizing iGoogle in a clever way: users will voluntary add gadget ads to the homepage and interact with them. The ads won't be perceived as annoying because you chose to include them in your homepage. "Widgets are a dream for marketers. They allow them to extend their brand off of their individual sites and allow their brands to live as long as consumers want them to live," thinks Dimitry Ioffe, chief executive of Media Banners.

Here's an ad for Nissan that lets you see information about traffic from Google Maps (example of US zip code: 90210). There's also an option to explore the car and a link to Nissan's web site, but the gadget is attractive because it's useful:



The gadgets can be contextually targeted or site targeted, but you won't find too many of them right now. Unfortunately, Google doesn't offer granular options for publishers, so if you choose to display image ads, you'll also get video ads, Flash ads and now gadget ads. Because advertising agencies can add anything from Flash animations to mini-websites created with AJAX, some of the ads could be obtrusive. If you look at the samples offered by Google, some of the ads show an animation for 10-15 seconds to attract your attention, while others are static until you interact with them. Here are some quotes from Google's editorial guidelines:

* Audio and video effects are allowed, but must be user-initiated.
* Users must have the ability to 'mute' all sounds in the ad, if applicable.
* Google Gadget Ads that contain Flash must not exceed 50% utilization of a user's computer.
* Gadget ads that directly capture any personally identifiable user information must have an applicable privacy policy which is directly accessible from the gadget ad.
* Animation is restricted to a maximum of 15 seconds (at a 15-20 fps frame rate).
* The ads must be 50K or smaller in size "on load".

I think a successful gadget ad should include useful content so you could use it as a stand-alone mini-application. It should include animations only if they're necessary and not just as a distraction. LabPixies is one of the companies that creates cool gadgets for all kinds of companies. "Gadgets are easy to install and easy to use, with no technical knowledge necessary, so they work very well as a distribution platform. Gadgets are the next generation of content syndication," says Ran Ben-Yair, co-founder of LabPixies.

"Gadget ads provide new mixed media interactions across Google's AdSense network. A Starbucks ad unit could display a web feed of the latest 5 tracks playing in its stores, query the local weather and suggest either an iced or hot drink, display local stores on a Google Map, and help you browse seasonal offerings from within a single ad unit. Google serves all of the content via proxy, and the rich media load never touches Starbucks' servers," thinks Niall Kennedy, who also found a directory of branded Google gadgets.

Searching for Celebrities in Reuters Videos

Reuters has a wealth of interesting videos, but the descriptions don't include all the persons that appear in the footage or the time when they appear. That's why Reuters started to use face recognition technology developed by Viewdle to power a new search engine that finds people in the videos.

"The technology, devised by Viewdle, analyses each frame of video footage, looking 'inside the clip' to identify the appearance of people on-screen. (...) The technology is largely impressive and Viewdle says it's building the world's biggest people-in-video reference database and has multiple patents in preparation," reports Journalism.co.uk. Viewdle is one of the companies selected for the Techcrunch 40 conference.

The project is part of Reuters Labs, which showcases a lot of interesting technologies that improve the way you interact with news. Reuters Popup Video lets you add comments for a certain part of a video, while Newsbeats mixed news with electronic music (the service was discontinued).

Google Presentations Finally Launched

File manager

Google has finally released the presentation app. You can only import Microsoft PowerPoint files that have less than 10 MB and export a presentation as an HTML file with images. You can change the theme or the layout of a slide, but there aren't too many options available. There's also an option to create the first slide of a presentation from a document, but it only works for short documents.

Editing a presentation

The presentation can be shared with everyone and any viewer can follow the presenter or take control of the presentation. The preview includes a group chat feature based on Google Talk's gadget that shows the active collaborators and viewers. If all the viewers click on "View presentation", they can watch the presentation at the same time.

Viewing a presentation

To see a scrollable overview of all the slides in a presentation, check the "Printable view". It's also a way to search inside a presentation, but you can't go to a certain slide.

"As with its other applications, Google intends to add additional features, like customization for mobile screens and the ability to integrate files stored on remote servers," mentions InformationWeek. But for now, Google's new presentation app is pretty average: it doesn't have options for embedding, you can't export the presentation as a PowerPoint file, there's no option for adding transitions, notes, audio files or content from the web. Google Presentations' strongest point is collaboration, but it delivers far less than other online presentation apps.

"Presentations are a natural addition for Google Docs , as they are usually created with the intention of being shared. Web-based, collaborative presentations offer users much-needed relief from manually managing and compiling group members' input in separate attachments, and they make it possible for multiple users to view a set of slides while a moderator controls the presentation. Users will see that these features are still in simple, early stages; the Google Docs team is making them available today in response to strong user demand for presentation-sharing, and updates and improvements will continue to roll out over the coming months," explains Google.

It's also worth mentioning that the new member of the Google Docs family doesn't have a name and that Google Docs & Spreadsheets transformed into Google Docs.

The local copy of the presentation

Update: Here's an example of published presentation.

Yahoo Buys Zimbra to Compete with Google Apps

Yahoo paid $350 million for Zimbra, a collaborative online suite that integrates email and group calendar using an AJAX interface. The application can be installed on your server or you can choose from one of the many hosting solutions. Because it's open source, you can install it for free unless you need support or some proprietary components.

The ugly-yet-versatile application has many of Gmail's features (conversation view, labels, attachment preview), but adds IMAP support, attachment indexing, saved searches and shared address books. Zimbra Mail is closely integrated with the calendar, so you can always see the recent events and the events that take place in a day mentioned in a message. Zimbra also offers an offline version, mobile clients for many devices and great compatibility with the most important enterprise software.

"Zimbra is a global leader in email and collaboration software and its services are aimed at universities, businesses, and ISPs worldwide, which is a major driver of what made the company so attractive to us," explains Yahoo. The decision to buy Zimbra had a lot to do with the growth of Google Apps and the potential partnerships with universities and ISPs that could endanger Yahoo Mail's position. By combining its existing solutions with Zimbra, Yahoo could extend its influence in the corporate space. After all, both Yahoo Mail Beta (previously known as OddPost) and Zimbra Mail are heavily influenced by desktop email clients like Microsoft Outlook and sacrifice the performance for a familiar interface.

When Zimbra was launched, in 2005, many people were impressed. "I would go out on a limb and say that it combines the best of both Microsoft Outlook and Google's GMail," said Om Malik. Others think this is not the right approach: "To me, Zimbra doesn't in any way resemble my mental model of a web application; it resembles Microsoft Outlook. On the other hand Gmail, which is also an Ajax-based email application, almost exactly matches my mental model of how a web application should look and feel."

Both Gmail and Zimbra were revolutions that had a big impact. Here's how Zimbra described enterprise email's problems in 2005:

As an email administrator, are you happy with how much time you spend per mailbox on basic "care and feeding"? Is Email Broken? Web browsing and email are the two killer applications of the Web. Given the ubiquity of email, it is perhaps surprising that we users are not a happier lot. The frustrations oft associated with the email experience stand in contrast to the relative satisfaction of web browsing and web administration.

You can judge for yourself if Zimbra solved email's problems from this demo or this Flash tour. As for Google Apps, the competition from Yahoo could accelerate its development. Here's some free advice directly from Zimbra:

"Since all Google Docs are stored on Google's servers, public companies would face big Sarbanes-Oxley compliance issues if they deployed Google Apps. Zimbra's Web 2.0 messaging and collaboration platform provides enterprise customers with freedoms that Google Apps just can't provide, including the ability to archive for compliance purposes. They can use Zimbra as a hosted service or deploy it on-site. They can use it online or offline while retaining killer AJAX functionality. They can offer their employees access from any desktop, Web, or mobile client."

Google's Server Names

Here's a list of the Google Servers used by different services as they're returned in the HTTP headers. Not all of them have transparent names and some of them may suggest interesting data (like the ctcserver for the not-yet-existent Google Call service linked from Google's robots.txt). Google Web Server is a modified version of Apache custom server that runs on Linux.

Server Name	Services
GWS (Google Web Server)	Web Search, Image Search and many other services
GFE/1.3 (Google Front-End)	Gmail, Calendar, Picasa Web Albums, Docs, Blogger, orkut, Reader and many other services
GWS-GRFE/0.50	Groups
bsfe (Blog Search Front-End)	Blog Search
OFE/0.1 (Ocean Front-End)	Book Search, Patent Search, Catalogs (Ocean is Google Book Search's code-name)
SMS search frontend 1.0	Google SMS
Search-History HTTP Server	Web History
Auto-Completion Server	Google Suggest, Firefox/Google Toolbar auto-complete
TrustRank Frontend	Safe Browsing
GCS/1.0	Safe Browsing
SFE/0.8	Finance
FTS (C)1997-2007 Interactive Data Managed Solutions AG	Finance charts
asfe	Base
mediaserver	Base (images)
cffe	Product Search (Froogle)
btfe	Thumbnails: Image Search, Google Video, Youtube
Video Stats Server	Google Video
cachefe:image (Cache Front-End)	Picasa Web photos
staticfe	interface images (Picasa Web)
ctcserver	Google Call ( www.google.com/call )
GoogleChartServer/1.0	used for dynamically-generated charts (e.g.: Google Video's stats)
NFE/1.0 (News Front-End)	News
mfe (Maps Front-End)	Maps
Keyhole Server 2.4	Maps, Earth (imagery)
PSFE/4.0	Alerts
igfe (iGoogle Front-End)	iGoogle
COMINST/1.0	Testing software installation (Pack, Picasa)
TWS/0.9 (Translation Web Server)	Translate
mws (Music Web Server)	Music Search
R2FE/1.0 (Reviews Front-End)	Reviews (Music, Movies)
zfe	Reviews
pfe	Co-op
codesite/5477219	Code
ga-reporting-fe	Analytics reporting
ucfe	Analytics
lpfe	Analytics (www.google-analytics.com/siteopt.js)
Toolbar Gaia User Service Server	Google Toolbar authentication
cafe (Ad Conversion Front-End)	Conversions
AdClickServer	Google test ad server
Google Trends	Google Trends
TFE/0.0 (Transliteration Front-End)	Google Indic Transliteration
Apache	most Labs services

{ Thanks, Tony. }

Online Presentation Apps: Google Presently's Competition

TechCrunch reports that Google will launch a new product next week at Techcrunch 40, while The Inquirer found out that "Google is presently touring publishing houses to show Presently, so even if they make hacks sign an infuriatingly Web 1.0 non-disclosure agreement, an announcement can’t be far off." Now that Google's presentation tool (code-named Presently) is about to be released, let's see what are the most important online apps that let you create and share presentations.

Sharing

SlideShare lets you upload PPT, PDF and OpenOffice presentations without creating an account. The file size limit is 30MB and it's easy to upload multiple files. You can view the presentation in a Flash player that doesn't support keyboard shortcuts or switching to a certain slide. SlideShare uses an interface similar to YouTube, so you'll find many features from the video-sharing site (comments, tags, groups, favorites, stats, embedding code), but also a way to download the presentation. Unfortunately, you can't actually edit the presentation, so the site is mostly useful if you want to create an online version of a presentation that can be shared with other people.



Creating

Preezo lets you create simple presentations, but it can't import PowerPoint files. The interface is simple, there are few formatting options, there's no collaborative feature, you can't search text in your presentation or export your presentation. You'll probably like the slide sorter and the wide variety of transitions. The presentation can be published online and embedded into a site.



Spresent uses advanced vector graphics animation to create nice-looking charts, tables, shapes. The interface is inspired by Adobe Flash (the tool for developers, not the player).



Collaborating

Zoho Show can import presentations (less than 10 MB), but I wouldn't recommend trying to edit them. Zoho Show does a poor job at rendering presentations and it's one of the weakest Zoho apps. You can add shapes, arrows and change the text formatting. Even if the application says you can collaborate when editing a presentation, the feature is not functional.



ThinkFree Show also has a 10 MB limit for uploading files and the rendering is not very good. There's a quick edit mode that allows you to modify the text and a power mode that uses a Java applet. The Java interface looks exactly like Microsoft Powerpoint 2003, but it's much slower and has less features. You can collaborate with other users, but you don't see the changes in real-time.



Both Zoho and ThinkFree have full online suites. ThinkFree hosts more than one million documents and has a social networking community around office documents. Here's an interesting comparison between Google Docs and ThinkFree, from ThinkFree's blog:

Google Docs and Spreadsheets obviously has a larger market share in the industry, after all with the Google name and marketing team behind it its bound to have few users out there. GD&S is a great lightweight tool, but having the best MS Compatibility and the highest level of feature functionality of any online office suite has propelled us into the second spot.

While Google is attempting to become the platform of choice, with everything from Gmail to a news service, we have focused on the office functionality and delivering it in ways that no one else can:

* offline/online, and now a hybrid with ThinkFree Premium
* on-demand/on-premise
* tiered accessibility Power Edit (Java) / Quick Edit (AJAX) / Flash
* tiered sharing - private, shared restricted, shared unrestricted, read only, published

Google Presently has a big chance to become a powerful alternative to these applications if:

* it can do a good job at importing PowerPoint files (and not just small files) - most presentation apps have problems
* you can export the presentation as a PPT, HTML or SWF file
* the collaboration works as good as in Google Docs - I couldn't find an app that allows real-time collaboration
* it can add content from the web (Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Google Maps)
* you can embed the presentation in your site (or just some slides)

The PowerPoint viewer from Gmail is already a good option for embedding presentations and the screenshots from TonicPoint (acquired by Google) show an already mature application.

Google Maps in Your Sidebar

Mini Map Sidebar is probably the greatest Firefox extension for maps and geographical information. Its simple interface hides a lot of powerful tools that help you find places directly from your browser's sidebar.

The sidebar lets you drag and drop addresses from the current web page, search the map, get the latitude/longitude, embed the map or send a link by email. It's also easy to switch from Google Maps to Yahoo Maps, Windows Live Local or Google Earth. You always have a list of recent addresses, so you can go back to another address with just a click or select them when you want to get directions.

The extension also adds two options in the contextual menu that let you open the selected address in the sidebar or in a new tab.

Other interesting features: geodiscovery (if a page has geotags, you can view the locations - for example: some Flickr photos), preview KML files before opening them in Google Earth, find places reviewed at Platial and Tagzania.

Overall, the extension is very useful if you need to map a lot of places and opening Google Maps in a new tab is too time-consuming.