Google Maps in Webby Award Winners

The Webby Awards for 2008 were announced today. Four of the winners use Google Maps:

• Chow- the People's Voice Winner in the Food and Beverage section
• Yelp - the Webby Award Winner in the Guides / Ratings / Reviews section
• Trulia - the People's Voice Winner in the Real Estate section
• Kayak - the People's Voice Winner in the Travel section

Chow

Chow is a great website for anyone who loves food. The site is full of recipes, food discussion boards, videos and restaurant and bar guides.

The restaurant and bar guides are of course driven by Google Maps. Each geographical area covered gets its own Google Map. The location of bars and restaurants are tagged on the map like many other review sites. However what sets Chow apart is that you can narrow the tagged search results by nearly a hundred different categories of food, from Afghan to Vietnamese. I know when I'm searching for a restaurant I tend to be concerned first with the location and then with the type of food I would like. It is therefore invaluable to be able to quickly see, for example, all the sushi restaurants in the Bay Area.

Yelp

By coincidence Yelp also tags restaurants on Google Maps. Similarly the restaurants on Yelp can be searched by location and the search results narrowed by a huge number of different categories. Yelp's big selling point is the huge number of user submitted reviews that are available for most of the listed restaurants.

Yelp was first reviewed on Google Maps Mania way back in November 2005.

Trulia

Trulia is a real estate website that uses Google Maps to show the location of available properties. The search results can be narrowed by location and by price.

Trulia also recently added a street view option (where available). Which means you can now virtually explore an area you are interested in before visiting for real.

Trulia was originally reviewed in October 2005.

Kayak

Kayak is a travel search engine that searches hundreds of travel sites from all over the world for flights, hotels and rental cars. The hotel section of the site utilises Google Maps to show the results of hotel searches.

Clicking on a tagged hotel on the map opens an information window revealing the cost per night and the hotel's star rating.

Kayak is also used in a website we reviewed on Monday called MapifiedKayak.


Congratulations to all four winners!