Google Ride Finder Announced

nthitz writes "Need a ride? Now Google has included the ability to lookup where taxis are in real time! The new service is called Google Ride Finder. Using a combination of Google Maps and Google Local you can see where certain taxis are at the moment. Currently there are only 11 major cities that are supported, and there are still only a few cab companies that are involved. The service is pretty cool, but if they don't add more cities/companies, who knows how well it will do. For more info check out Google's Blog."

Would be nice for public transportation!

[sjrstory]

Neat idea, but I'd like something that tracks public transportation vehicles. Accessible via a WAP browser, it would be a great thing to have while waiting at a bus stop at 3am wondering WHERE the frigg the bus is!

Google Gmail April Fools: Infinity and Beyond Stor

[snotclot]

Did anyone else see the GMAIL login page become this: well i'm not good enough to download the page, there's a funny handdrawn picture, but here's the text: Welcome to Gmail A Google approach to math. On the eve of Gmail's one-year birthday, our engineers were toiling away furiously. Notes scribbled all over the walls. Complex calculations on napkins and empty pizza boxes. Millions of M&Ms. The result?... starting today, we're beginning the roll-out of our new and top secret Infinity+1 storage plan. The key features are: Write, don't worry. You want to stop caring about storage. We want to keep giving you more. Today, and beyond. The gift that keeps on giving. 1102.353769 megabytes of storage (and counting) for every user. No complicated equations. No tough algorithms. Just this one graph: Gmail turns 1 today. And we've always loved a good joke. We know we won't reach infinity, but check out what we will do ... Gmail Sign In Username: Password: Don't ask for my password for 2 weeks. Forgot your password? Learn more about Gmail. Check out our new features! A few words about Gmail and privacy.

Re:April 1st!!!

[adamfranco]

April 1st!!!

Yeah, I hate this day on /.

I'm coming back tomorrow when all the bogus crap is over.

Still NO Distance Scale on Google Maps...

[Ron Bennett]

I've contacted Google numerous times about the problem of no distance scale on Google Maps and yet still no distance scale; I mention this here since the Taxi finder feature is using Google Maps.

Map makers, the ones that actually collected the data for the maps Google, etc uses, know how important scale is for both creating an accurate map *and* as well as for the user of the map ... without a distance scale on the map, the user is left wondering how far two points are - distance is important in determing whether one has enough gas, money, time, etc to get to the intended destinaton.

In short, Google Maps is nice, but without a distance scale, it's of limited usefulness.

If anyone from Google is reading this, please chime in regarding this matter - thanks in advance.

Ron Bennett

I thought this was a joke

[Palal]

I thought this was a joke (they like their jokes), but I guess not.... last year's joke was GMail. This year's is: http://www.google.com/googlegulp/ [google.com]

indeed

[Cryptnotic]

Differently useful (I don't want to say just as good, since they're different things) would be a way to click and drag to get a distance between two points. Or a way to click to set a point for directions (instead of typing in an address). I have a feeling they're working on these things.

hate April Fool's Day

[Propaganda13]

I checked it out and found it totally useless. The cab company in Milwaukee is legit. The cars hop around like gps errors, the dispatcher won't necessarily send the closest since it might be taken already. Most people I know use only 1 cab company.

Bus tracking would be a much better idea. I don't think they have tracking equipment, though I could be wrong.

Rather than advertising for Taxi services...

[Andrew Cady]

I'd like a search engine for car pooling. The only reason 90% of the cars on the road have no passengers is the inability to organize a more efficient scheme; this would require only centralized planning. A computer service would be ideal for the task, so long as it had sufficient start-up popularity. Google does. Get on it, Google; save us some gas money.

methinks

[toQDuj]

they should have turned it around. google for cab drivers that will show them where potential customers are :).

B.

Re:Rather than advertising for Taxi services...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm very hesitant to do this, because the self-promotion seems so shameful, but I totally agree with the concept of creating a Carpool website. So I did. It's called Pooln [pooln.com]. It's kindof of a social network approach to carpooling. It's very much a work in progress.

If you're interested in checking it out I'd start at www.pooln.com/blog [pooln.com] where I talk about features, development, and issues related to carpooling. There's a form in the right column where you can type in zips to test it out.

Like I said, I'm pretty unsure about posting something I've created, so feel free to mod this down if it's too much like an advertisement.