Last summer Google introduced a new service dubbed City Tours which generated a tour of various attractions near a location within walking distance of the starting point. It debuted in Google Labs as the service still had some rough edges, but it proved useful enough to become quite popular. It had a few major drawbacks, though some of which have since been remedied by the dev team which is now providing an update on their progress.
“Six months ago we launched City Tours on Google Labs with the goal of making vacation planning as easy as searching the web,” Trevor Johnston, software engineer from Google Zurich, wrote. “Though City Tours is still in Google Labs, the purpose was clear and the demo was popular, so we’ve continued to work on it over the past few months to take into account the hundreds of suggestions from users all across the globe.”
The biggest update and certainly the most welcome one is the addition of actual walking directions giving users the exact path they must take to reach their destinations. Up till now the tool would plot out a straight-line path between the locations and leave the users to figure out exactly how to get from one point to the other. This led to sometimes less-than-helpful suggestions with paths going over rivers or other obstacles.
Now, City … (read more)