WikiLeaks around the world

WikiLeaks has been all over the news for the past few weeks. As politicians are quickly finding out, fighting something like WikiLeaks doesn’t stop it — it simply causes it to spread. Thanks to the big crackdown against them, their site has been mirrored all across the globe.

Laurence Muller spent some time tracking down the locations of the mirrors (with some useful tools) and built an excellent visualization of them.

wikileaks.jpg

His technique for creating this was pretty impressive. He first found the list of mirrors that WikiLeaks provided, then ran it through GeoLite City which resolved the mirrors to actual locations. He then wrote a PHP script to turn the location into latitude/longitune, and then to compile all of that into a KML file. Details about all of that work can be found on his site. Nice work Laurence!

To see it for yourself, you can visit one of the following pages that have the data loaded in the Google Earth Plug-in:
• Wikileaks Edges only
• Wikileaks Nodes
• Wikileaks Nodes with labels

Alternatively, you can download a KML file that has all three versions loaded, or watch the video below that he put together.

(via ReadWriteWeb)

View the 2010 Hurricane Season in Google Earth

Greg at Geodesic contacted us to let us know about a very cool animation that his company has built which provides a great visualization of the 2010 Hurricane Season. Based on the NOAA tropical cyclone track data, this file does a great job of showing all of the hurricanes in 2010.

2010-hurricanes.jpg

The file is rather large (9.35MB), but includes fantastic imagery of the various stages of each storm. For example, here is a great image of Hurricane Danielle as it was heading toward Bermuda:

danielle.jpg

You can read more about this project on their site. To see it for yourself, you can use this KMZ file .

How Local Search Ranking Works

We’ve been quite busy this year working on Google Places, Tags, Boost, and our shiny new addition: Hotpot. With so many different products and features now available for local businesses, we wanted to take a step back and explain how the ranking of local listings works when people search on Google and Google Maps.
Product Manager Jeremy Sussman takes us under the hood in this informative video. Below are a few key takeaways, but we encourage you to watch the video, which features helpful examples and visuals.
Local search ranking refers to the placement and order of local information on a Google or Google Maps organic search results page. There are a variety of factors we take into account to provide you with results that match your local search, and three of the primary signals are relevance, prominence and distance. The best way to help potential customers connect with your business is to ensure that your basic company information like its name, address and phone number, are accurate, and then to add rich details like photos, hours of operation and more. You can do this by claiming and verifying your business via Google Places. However, claimed business listings do not receive any special ranking treatment over unclaimed business listings.
Google Tags and Boost are great online advertising solutions for local businesses. Tags make your organic business listings stand out on the Google and Google Maps search results page with a bright yellow marker that highlights specific attributes such as offers, videos or photos. And Boost is an effective complement to your organic Places listing because it quickly and easily creates an ad that can appear alongside the search results – giving your business additional exposure to people searching online. Neither of these advertising products available through your Google Places account affect the organic ranking of your business listing on Google or Google Maps.
Conversely, Hotpot – our new local recommendation engine based on ratings from you and your friends – can definitely affect the ranking of the local businesses you see in your organic search results. If you’re signed in to your Google account and have enabled Hotpot, you’ll get personalized recommendations based on the ratings you and your friends provided – making it easier for you to discover new places you’ll enjoy.
Posted by Brianna Brekke, Senior Strategist, Google Places