Ebay bargains near you - a google Maps mashup

As I've mentioned before on other ebay bloggings I quite like ebay for picking up the odd bargain or two (I'm more of a buyer than a seller, and am currently sitting on an ebay rating of 310).

Spotted another useful website the other day, Auctions Near You which is a great mashup of Google Maps and ebay searching.

Enter your postcode, how far you are prepared to travel, the text of what you are looking for, optionally choose a main product category, and it's as simple as that, you get a map with all the local items, you can click on any of them to see a quick popup details, and then zoom into ebay to read the full auction details.

Perfect for searching for a new (second-hand) lawnmower (I'm getting nagged by Liz because it's taking her ages to mow the lawn at the new house with our old "lightweight" mower) or for other things that you want to pick-up locally.

My only complaint is that you can only restrict the search by main product category (not sub categories) and occasionally you get odd map results - one Northampton based lawnmower is appearing on the map as being in Rotherham (in Yorkshire) !

Otherwise, a great and useful site.

UK Traffic Conditions now on Google Maps

Traffic details on Google Maps

I noticed the other day that Google Maps have now started showing traffic details for most of the UK motorway network - simply click on the "Traffic" button on the top right above the map and you're shown live traffic details with normal traffic flow showing up in Green then changing to Yellow, Red and finally Black as the conditions worsen.

But there's more !

Clicking on the 'change' link next to the traffic speed legend and you're able to see historic average journey speeds for any day of the week or time period. With this you can easily see when the car parking opens on the M25 or the M6 snarls up past Birmingham, and it seems to be fairly accurate, my daily commute to Stockley Park is shown as getting difficult from about 6:30am, and is stop-start all the way round from 7:15am. Yep, I've been there a few times!

So far almost all of the UK Motorway (and Motorway grade A roads) are included and long stretches of a number of main A roads are covered as well (e.g. A1, A421, A43, A14), but there are still a few inexplicable gaps (e.g. there is a 1 mile gap on the M25 next to Abbots Langley).

Whilst I'm on the subject of traffic news I should mention Keep Moving which (once you've enrolled for free) you can setup your regular journeys (home to work, work to home, home to in-laws, etc) and then at a glance see what the journey time is likely to be and if there are any holdups on your route. You can get free texts sent to your phone or daily summary reports sent by email - I receive a morning text at 7am before I get stuck on the M25 and an email at 5pm before I attempt the journey home.

Keep Moving has a number of other features but they're not all that well integrated together on the website. There's CCTV images from the Highways Agency so you can check for yourself where the holdups are, eye witness traffic reports from other motorists, cheap fuel locations along your route and cheap food (from supermarkets) instead of being ripped off at a service station.

Some of these features can be a bit frustrating to use as once you've looked at the doom and gloom of the traffic holdups on your journey home you then have to separately search by road name if you want to look at the live CCTV images - so much better if they were available on the same map, but the data seems to be good and hopefully these usability things will improve with time.

Final mention goes to Route Scanner which mashes up Google Maps with live traffic information from the BBC Travel and Highways Agency. The Route Scanner search engine seems to be quite temperamental, it took several attempts for me to get details for my typical commute; I only got through when I entered details of nearby large towns on my route - post-code entry and both my home village were not accepted.

OnOneMap - a great Google mashup if you're looking to buy a house

OnOneMap

Here's a great site that I came across recently if you're looking for a new home, it's a mashup of Google maps with estate agency data to show you all* the houses for sale in a selected area.

It's really been well implemented with lots of Ajax popups, you can zoom in and out and pan the map, restrict the houses shown according to number of bedrooms, price, etc; show overlays of mobile phone masts, supermarkets, secondary schools and (as at about a week ago) flood plain information.

One of the really neat features I like is that at any page you can subscribe to an RSS feed (see earlier explanation I wrote on 'what is RSS and how can I use it') of all properties on your current map page and price range. So here for example is a view of properties for sale in our home village of Wrestlingworth and here's the corresponding RSS feed.

I only have a couple of minor gripes that the mobile phone database seems a bit patchy (there's a mast on the edge of our village that's not shown) and that there seems to be a problem with secondary schools not being displayed in Bedfordshire (which is probably due to Bedfordshire having a 3-tier infant/middle/senior school system not the normal 2-tier arrangement).

* Although I say "all properties" in your area for sale, in reality there's some time lag as to when properties appear on the site.
Running the same address search for properties for sale in my village on the better known rightmove.co.uk I found two more properties that haven't appeared on ononemap, and conversely one on onemap that wasn't on rightmove - so pays your money, take your choice I guess.

Unfortunately ononemap doesn't yet show overseas houses so you can't use it to look for your 'dream home in the sun' !

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Categories: CoolWebsites, Google, Map, Web2

Google maps come to France (and Germany, Italy and Spain)

As announced on Google's official Blog yesterday, country maps for France, Germany, Italy and Spain have now been launched in Beta by Google.

To be honest this has been long overdue as up until now Google's only had maps of the US, UK and Japan (clearly shows the global 'pecking order' as far as Google's concerned). Although officially there's only maps been launched for France, Germany, Italy and Spain, I noticed by scrolling round the map that maps for most of the rest of Europe have been loaded (to various levels of detail) including Portugal, Greece and Poland. Unfortunately Jersey and the rest of the Channel Islands don't get a look-in yet.

The level of detail (and hence I guess the source data) on all the main internet maps appears to be the same if you look at the village of La Cheze which is about 2 miles away from our Brittany Holiday Gite:

• Google's map is the largest and I think the clearest to navigate and scroll around
• ViaMichelin's map service has up until now been my personal preference for getting route directions
• Mapquest's map is as actually slightly bigger than Google's but I think looks a little dated and doesn't for instance show the river and Lake
• Multimap's map is nice and clear but the map size displayed is comparatively small
• Mappy's map is nice and easy to read and like Google's you can just drag your 'window' left and right to scroll the map. It also has a zoom in/out mode so that one click zooms the map (unlike Google where you can only use the scroll widget). The map size is however smaller.

Mappy and ViaMichelin loose marks in my view though for not having any obvious way to copy the URL or bookmark a map page. The only way I could find to do it was to use the 'email this map' to me option on the sites.

All the maps (apart from Google) have various 'click to show nearby hotels or cash machine' buttons. Google's instead you have to type in what Entreprise (company type) you are looking for - it's more exhaustive (here for instance is a map of plumbers near to La Cheze), but as you have to type your request in French it's not all that much use of you're a tourist.

Searching for Cash Dispensers near La Cheze correctly showed the location of one in the town centre on mappy (unfortunately though it only showed one of the two that are in the town), but it was much better than Google that suggested that the nearest distributeur de billets was some 35 miles away in St Brieuc or Rennes (and there was only 28 in the whole of Brittany ...). Strangely Google declared that there were 4 cash dispenser's in Brittany (i.e. the English spelling), the nearest one being in Lorient!

I think it just goes to show that although the map data is the same, the usability and the local search features vary greatly and are still far from perfect. Google's is however a strong contender.