Searching the Geoweb: Exposing Your Geo Data to Search Engines (Monday 1.30pm - 3pm)

Mano Marks and Lior Ron from Google Maps API team talking about geo search in this afternoon's session - Searching the Geoweb: Exposing Your Geo Data to Search Engines.

"43,566,346 geotagged photos on Flickr" - now that's precise! Although presumably it was also incorrect as soon as it had been typed. The point being that there is a huge amount of content on the web that has been geo-tagged in some form.

No information is forthcoming on how Google Maps ranks the search results to produce the most useful ordered list of results- for example, in the way Page Rank is used for the Google web search - but the suggestion is that site owners should "expose as much data as possible alongside geo-coded content".

Seems obvious - although maybe not desirable for a lot of people.

Lior made two new announcements:
1. Geo Server support - here's how
2. A new type of Google site map to allow webmasters to submit specific geo content

There is no moderation or checking procedure for geo-content collated and displayed via Google Maps. This is, of course, the same model used in web search. However, it is recognised that this could be more problematic for geo-content where users may be using the results to plan 'real world' activities such as driving to a particular location.

Mano starts to talk about some of the more technical aspects, including how you should decide between GeoRSS and KML formats.

The suggestion is that you should use GeoRSS if you:
- are already outputting RSS
- want to convey that 'updates' or 'most recent' items are contained within the data
- only ever represent point data

Use KML for everything else.

Oh, and Google "don't comment on future plans" in case you were wondering, which made for some fairly un-interesting answers to the questions from the audience.