San Francisco — Relentlessly striving to make its services more useful, search engine giant Google Inc. is now reaching for the sky, has added a weather layer to Google Maps, which adds a grid of icons allowing users to see the current temperatures across a city, region or the globe as well as the new feature seamlessly integrates forecasts into the Maps experience, the company announced last week.
The service culls its weather conditions data from Weather.com, while the cloud coverage that can be viewed when zoomed out is obtained from the US Naval Research Lab.
Credit: Google
“Whether you are arranging a trip overseas or a picnic at a local park, knowing the weather forecast is a crucial part of the planning process,” Google user experience designer Jonah Jones wrote in a blog post. “Today we are adding a weather layer on Google Maps that displays current temps and conditions around the globe, and will hopefully make travel and activity planning easier.”
The feature is accessible via the drop-down menu at the top right of the Maps screen, which also contains the other layers, like those for traffic and transit. To add the new weather feature, hover your mouse over the widget in the upper right hand corner of Google Maps screen that lists the various options for the map and select the weather layer from the list of options.
The layer only become visible once a user zooms out to about the neighborhood level. A whole bunch of data points pop up showing weather conditions across the entire map. Its a pretty streamlined feature and makes the integration of weather updates more seamless than trying to type in neighboring cities into a weather search.
Interestingly, for someone planning a trip, mapping out weather conditions becomes extremely effortless as they already pop up everywhere along your route. Even cooler, Google partnered with the U.S. Naval Research Lab to bring real-time cloud cover data to the map. The normal view of each location’s weather displays current conditions, with icons denoting sun, clouds and rain, but clicking on a specific city’s weather icon brings up further details such as wind and humidity, as well as a four-day forecast. This view also makes it possible to click through to an hourly or 10-day forecast on Weather.com.
“Altering the units of wind speed (Mph/KMph) and temperature (F/C), and enabling or disabling the clouds (when you are zoomed out), can also be done from the left-hand panel,” Jones explained.
Additionally, the search engine giant Google also mentioned that it is including more than 40 new domains to Google Maps, advancing the total to 130 countries with customized maps domains and support of over 60 user interface languages.
“A Maps domain is a customized entry point to our maps, designed for a particular country, which makes searches for places and localities in the country more efficient,” says Google Maps business product manager Jarda Bengl. “For example when someone in Argentina searches for “Córdoba” we know that he probably meant the one in Argentina and not the other Córdoba in Spain.”
“This means that whether you are in Sri Lanka, Venezuela or Cameroon you will have now a unique domain to get directions, local information and find new favorite places,” Bengl added.
The map above shows the countries with new domains in dark green.
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