Cheers Dann, While the idea sounds good, especially with the intent to drive more people to sites using Google Maps, there are lots of issues that should be clarified and discussed openly before someone can take an informed decision whether to allow marker / content indexing or opt- out.
I' ll raise a couple of them here just to get the conversion started and hopefully elicit some responses from Dann: :) 1. How many unique visitors per marker / map point will trigger a crawling i.e. who should worry the most (or least depending on your POV) about crawling, megacoprs, blogs, small mashups, large mashups? Unfortunately "many" is ambiguous! Also will the crawler just crawl that specific point / info window content or will it start crawling and every other marker? 2. Which pages / content should be protected by robots and how? The GInfoWindow content bubble content is produced dynamically either with DOM nodes or HTML (as a string). Also sometimes there is maximized content (maxContent) that is fetched asynchronously (AJAX). If someone wants to opt out what should be added in robots.txt? Which User-agent will we see? An example would be really helpful. 3. Will lat/lng pairs be disclosed? Or will they be reverse geocoded and have an address shown instead? Or neither of these will happen? 4. Will it be possible to allow crawling only for specific portions of the info window content? For example exclude contact details for privacy reasons but include other info? 5. How are visitors of Google maps going to infer that the content they view is from another website? How will you raise the brand awareness especially for first-level content producers (not just content mashups)? 6. How is this feature going to play along with KML feeds? What's the proposed course of action is cases where you index both the KML and the content through the API? What if the content has conflicts (e.g. a specific lat/lng pair has different content in the KML feed and the live website as seen by the API)? 7. It would be great if we could see an early preview before you launch this feature particularly since you opt-in everybody! We applaud the move for more exposure of the great content that is out there but we really feel necessary to bring forth these issues. Hopefully most of these will provoke thoughts and above all answers! -fotos www.rento.gr On Nov 20, 9:02 pm, "Dann (Google Employee)" <[email protected]> wrote: > In a few weeks, we're going to turn on functionality to log marker > locations and info window content within mashups using the JS Maps API > v2. This is very exciting since it'll enable us to include them in > Google Maps search results and will also introduce greater visibility > into your maps applications. > > Check out the blog post below for more > information:http://googlegeodevelopers.blogspot.com/2009/11/finding-mashups-needl... > > Once again, indexing hasn't been launched yet. Be aware that when it > does, it'll be enabled by default for all non-premier customers of the > API. To maintain privacy of data, see the bullet points below which > I've reposted from the blog post: > > ==== > > 1. We only index data from maps that have been viewed by many unique > users. For example, maps only viewed by you and a few friends won't be > indexed. > 2. If your page is protected by robots.txt, we will not index your > content. > 3. You can opt-out of the logging by specifying "indexing=false" when > loading the API For > example:http://maps.google.com/maps?file=api&v=2&key=abcdefg&sensor=false&ind... > 4. If you are a Maps API Premier customer, we will not index data from > your maps, unless you opt into indexing by passing in "indexing=true". > > ==== > > If you already know you wish to opt out, feel free to append the new > "&indexing=false" parameter in your maps applications now. > > As always, please reply back to this thread with any comments or > concerns you have. > > Thanks, > > Dann -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Maps API" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-maps-api?hl=.
