A recent article by Adena over at All Points Blog mentions that some folks don’t “get it”.

Having been on the Google Earth Community BBS when the first Sketchup model appeared, I definitely see the value. Sketchup is a great tool for creating 3d models–my city’s planning department uses it extensively–but its audience has typically been limited to professionals because of the price tag.

I think that Google is smart enough to see why they need companies like @Last as part of their competitive strategy. Here’s a quote from an article about the acquisition of GeoTango based on an interview with Stephen Lawler of Microsoft

SilverEye and Smart Digitizer are particularly interesting because they allow “everyone to be a data creator,” as Lawler put it. They allow the public to contribute “local knowledge” for the greater good. Of course for Microsoft that means contributing, in time, both opinion (a restaurant review) and location information (where the restaurant is, or where that new street is) to Windows Live Local.

If Google is going to truly compete in this market, they need to make tools available that empower citizen-publishers. If they do this right, perhaps they will be able to build a “geo-web”, where users provide the content and Google provides the platform (and advertising of course).

Of course, the other possibility is that I’m letting my desire for a reduction in the price of Sketchup affect my reasoning…

I was browsing the site stats for earth.nanaimo.ca, checking out what kind of results people were seeing with common keyword searches. To my surprise, I saw some hits on specific KML and KMZ files published on my employer’s website:

Further experimentation shows that you can combine keywords with a filetype specification to narrow down your search results:

Now, I don’t think that this feature is fully fleshed out yet, but it provides some really interesting spatial search possibilities. Ways I would like to see this improved:

• allow results from both kml and kmz files by just specifying the KML filetype
• expand search capabilities to return KML files with content near a location, or within an area
• add a feature to Google Earth to “Search for external data nearby”
• I am not convinced that it is indexing the contents of KML within KMZ. This should be indexing the name, snippet, and description contents of both KML whether it is in compressed or not

I understand that this integration is being driven by Google’s focus on its own products and there are some areas where this will really enhance their offerings. However, it would be great if Google could also expand its spatial index to include keyword searching for other spatial data such as WMS and WFS services, shapefiles, e00 files, dxf files, etc.