Understanding Google My Business & Local Search
Google Maps – Still Loading Slow? Try HTML
My family lives out in the country. There are deer, turkey and bears wandering through our front yard. Even though we live in the boonies we are only 10 minutes from my office in Olean, 90 minutes from Buffalo, 3 hours from Toronto and only 5.5 hours from NY City. We have the best of both worlds with one exception.
We still have dial up. Not 56k dial-up, but end of the phone line, crackling 23k baud on a good day, dial-up.
Web 2.0 sites are problematic at best and many new sites take forever and a day if they decide to load. Given the general movement towards more complex sites, a number of sites end up being completely off limits to us. Satellite is not really an option, DSL and cable are not available.
It is interesting that Google Maps, even with their blue line upgrade, seems to know that I have problems viewing Maps and automatically offers up their HTML version on days when the telephone lines are weighted with snow (like today)…
When I select the HTML view, I get the Text view (same as the business listing view) with a small map that loads quickly even at my todays 20k baud:
This faster loading view can be accessed at any time by adding the command &output=html to your query and you can use it as a starting point with the url: http://maps.google.com/maps?output=html. This offers up a simple, single query field look much like Google.com.
A relatively complete list of other Google Map query parameters can can be viewed at this mapki.com page for those of you that really want to dig in.
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Comments
10 Comments
Hey, that’s a neat tip, Mike. We don’t have dialup, but my laptop runs slower than our PC. That’s a pretty handy little trick.
Bears? Really? How cool! We’ve got the deer and turkeys here, but sadly, no bears.
We do have bobcats just around the corner from here, though. They are wonderful to see.
Miriam
Yes, we’ve seen bears three times this year. Once they flipped over our 300 pound worm composting box and sent it flying. No bobcats though.
Mike
I run faster than my lap top can load on some days.. this great to know.
As for the wild animals – we’ve got everything but the bears in the woods near my house. We do have a big cat of some type. I’ve seen the foot prints but not the beastie. Them was some BIG @$$ prints by the way. Retractable claws so it wasn’t a large dog either, needless to say that was the worlds quickest dog walking day in history.
Here in Barcelona its just some lizards and some homeless cats and dogs..does that count? :p
We do have DSL, but it is provided by Telefonica which are nothing more than a bunch of thieves so downtimes are likely to happen, even the &output=html won’t save you from that! 🙁
Luckily, there is increasing availability of affordable 3G solutions. Sounds like a solution for rural areas?
Well for now I am sticking with &output=html as we don’t have 3g service in this area and I don’t get any bars inside my house. There is one spot near my snow covered car where I do get one bar. 🙁
Mike
Sorry to hear about the slow connection 🙁 I don’t know how I’d cope with anything slower than DSL.
Very cool link at the end for the Mapki.com page (Map geeks unite!)
@Jim
No need for condolences on the line speed. I can always get my butt in gear and make the long drive to work. 🙂 As it is, I usually load up 3 or 4 pages in tabs for my morning reading, brew the coffee and when I get back to the desk, the pages are loaded and I am on my way.
The mapki page is very cool, I agree.
Mike
“This faster loading view can be accessed at any time by adding the command &output=html to your query and you can use it as a starting point with the url: http://maps.google.com/maps?output=html. This offers up a simple, single query field look much like Google.com.”
I’m not really good at command line stuff and all that. Could someone use the instructions above in an example map location for me please? Then I can just substitute my location into the line. Thanks
Mikie
Here is a sample query http://maps.google.com/maps?&output=html&q=blumenthals+olean+ny
However, it is not even necessary to construct the query from scratch you can just goto htttp://maps.google.com/maps?&output=htm and enter it in the search field.
Mike
no more html version of google maps
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