In-Browser Google Maps Shows Your Location, Kind Of

Pin-pointing your location on a map online has gotten a whole lot easier now, thanks to Google. Yesterday, they launched a new in-browser feature called ‘My Location’ for Google Maps. It basically works like the mobile version. If you go to Google Maps, you will see a tiny dot in the left upper corner above the zoom bar, click it and it will show your exact or “approximate location”, I’d say.

‘My Location’ is built-in to Google Maps when you use Google Chrome 2.0+, Mozilla FireFox 3.5+, or any other browser with Gears installed [they hope to support other browsers soon]. Unlike the mobile version that uses your mobile phone’s built-in GPS to show your exact location, the in-browser ‘My Location’ uses http://www.w3.org/TR/geolocation-API/ which according to Google Lat Long Blog works like this:

“When you activate the My Location feature, Google Maps asks your web browser for your location. Typically, your browser uses information about the Wi-Fi access points around you to estimate your location. If no Wi-Fi access points are in range, or your computer doesn’t have Wi-Fi, it may resort to using your computer’s IP address to get an approximate location. As you’d expect, the accuracy of My Location varies with your location, and in some cases, Google Maps may not be able to provide a location at all”

As expected, when I requested my location, the blue dot was way off. In actuality, the location shown is about a mile from my place. And according to TechCrunch, there’s been a lot of people complaining that it has placed them at completely different cities and even wrong countries.

So, does this mean ‘My Location’ is a failure? Not really, but it definitely needs a lot of improvements.