Monday, January 31, 2005

a9 adds yellow pages search



Although they haven't hit St. Louis yet for storefront images, A9.com (an Amazon venture, offers a great new yellow pages search engine that plots hits on a street map, and adds images of the buildings when available.

From their site: "The most powerful technology A9.com invented for Yellow Pages is “Block View,” which brings the Yellow Pages to life by showing a street view of millions of businesses and their surroundings. Using trucks equipped with digital cameras, global positioning system (GPS) receivers, and proprietary software and hardware, A9.com drove tens of thousands of miles capturing images and matching them with businesses and the way they look from the street."

"The whole process (except for the driving!) is completely automatic, making it fast and efficient. Block View allows users to see storefronts and virtually walk up and down the streets of currently more than 10 U.S. cities using over 20 million photographs. We are driving and at some point hope to cover the whole country."

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