Google’s Not Actually My Location At All feature
By Benny Har-Even in Editorial
Posted in Google on
They don’t stop those Google people do they. If you’ve used Google Maps on an iPhone or Android phone you’ll probably be familiar with the ‘My Location’ feature – which can pinpoint your location within a radius of a few hundred yards, even without GPS. And jolly useful it is too.
Now Google has brought it to your browser too – with some caveats. First you need to be using a browser that supports the Geo-location feature. Firefox 3.5 is the only one that has it built-in, but you can also use any browser that supports Google Gears as a plug-in– this includes Google Chrome 2 or dare I say it, Internet Explorer 8.
To get it to work go to Google Maps and click on the circle that appear at the top left, between the navigation pad and the Street View man icon. The first time you click on it your browser will ask you if you want to share location – obviously you’ll say yes - and then it will go and find data using a location API, which pulls in data from the best possible source. Your desktop PC or laptop is unlikely to have GPS built-in so instead it will look to the Wi-Fi or your IP address to determine your location.
However, the implementation in Firefox, and naturally Google Gear browsers (Chrome, IE) uses Google Location Services API rather than the alternative, ‘Skyhook’, and the problem is that Google’s isn’t that accurate - and some have reported themselves being located miles from where they actually are.
So not much use for finding local pizza restaurants, which is naturally the very first use I found for it.
Interestingly, Opera has plumped for Skyhook, but Google Maps doesn’t work with that so there’s no easy way to compare.
So far, in our testing, we’ve been quite underwhelmed by the feature. Testing in Firefox 3.5, the closest I could get was for Google Maps to show me the whole of Greater London – which I didn’t really need Google Maps to tell me.
A work in progress we think.
Rated: 73.33% (3 votes)
Loading ...Comment by - July 14, 2009 on 9:07 am
When I use ‘My Location’ on my desktop PC, which only has wired ethernet, I get told that I’m somewhere in London. However on my netbook with Wi-Fi turned on, it pretty accurately pinpoints my location, even down to getting my street right and putting me up the right end. I’m actually pretty impressed with it to be honest…
Make a comment
Tag cloud
Most commented posts
Highest Rated Blog Posts
- 3G iPhone, but still on O2. Really? (100%)
- Big in Japan (100%)
- Windows 7 making Mac OS X lose its lustre? (100%)
- Acer Ferrari One netbook photos (100%)
- Chrome OS netbooks - Sidekicks for geeks? (100%)
- Microsoft employees not all evil shocker (100%)
- Business Class (100%)
- I want my ‘Annex-M’ (100%)
- A lesson in 3D at Dreamworks HQ (100%)
- What I’d like to see in the new iPhone (100%)
