Block search, anyone?

February 15, 2007 7:44 PM

Are there any new resources for the block search mapping that A9 used to have? You know, pictures taken sequentially along city blocks and mapped to the streets... I've missed it since they took it down, but it seems reasonable they would have sold the image library and technology to someone else...
posted by setanor to computers & internet (6 comments total)

http://virtualcity.ca/
http://maps.live.com/

Searching for "street-level mapping" found me those.
posted by bizwank at 8:05 PM on February 15, 2007

well, local live has the birds-eye views, but nothing from street level. the canadaman one looks interesting.
posted by setanor at 8:21 PM on February 15, 2007

Stanford was working on something similar a while back. Street-level photography but much more seamless.
http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/cityblock/

As far as I know, it's still just a proof of concept. I miss blockview.
posted by Jeff Howard at 9:33 PM on February 15, 2007

If you just want to look at the technology then http://photos.pagejaunes.fr is an extensive French version which is still live.
posted by fire&wings at 1:22 AM on February 16, 2007

Thanks for asking this, and I wish I had an answer. I loved that site, and when I think of all the time I spent clicking "best view" to correctly center the photos on streets I knew, it makes me want to cry that it just vanished in a puff of smoke. You would certainly think that Google would want to buy all those photos and metatdata, although maybe Amazon wouldn't sell it to them just on principle.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 6:55 AM on February 16, 2007

preview.live.local.com has street level photographs. A9 listed the names of the commercial establishments on a diagram. Local doesn't do this but it does have street level pictures. It also has pictures of the view up and down the street. A cursory investigation suggests that only Seattle and San Francisco are part of the preview and only the city centers at that.
posted by stuart_s at 8:59 AM on February 16, 2007