31 May 2007

Google buys photo community website Panoramio

Search engine Google continues its latest shopping spree with the acquisition of Spanish photo-sharing community website Panoramio.

Users of Google Earth will be familiar with the small blue and white compass icons dotted all over the map that open up a photo of a specific location when clicked on. The Panoramio layer of location-tagged photos was added to Google's virtual globe program as a default layer, together with the Wikipedia layer at the beginning of 2007. Both layers are among the most popular layers of Google Earth.

Panoramio is a community website whereby digital photographers can geolocate, store and organise their photographs. Earlier in 2007 Panoramio announced that the number of georeferenced photos in its database had hit the one million mark. This rapid expanse of its database was made possible through a growing community of users continually uploading photos to the site and tagging them with their geographical location.

While it is free for users to keep their photos on the Panoramio website, photographers receive no payment for the use of their photos on applications like Google Earth. Although the majority of photos submitted are taken by amateur photographers, many show a very high standard. Photographers keep full copyright of their work, but not every uploaded photo automatically shows up on Google Earth. Photos are uploaded to Google Earth on a monthly basis, with photos being filtered by Panoramio, as well as by Google.

The price Google has paid for Panoramio has not yet been revealed. While the terms of the acquisition are still being negotiated, Panoramio are hoping to close the acquisition in mid to late June 2007. The spring season of 2007 has been marked by Google's extraordinary spending spree, among which we saw the acquisition of online advertising company DoubleClick, video conferencing software firm Marratech AB, feed management provider Feedburner and security software company Greenborder.

Panoramio links a photo with the exact geographical location from which it was taken, a feature that's a welcome add-on to geo-mapping technologies like Google Earth and Google Maps. Apart from being used in Google's Geo product mix, it is not yet clear how Panoramio' s technology could further be integrated into Google.

Earlier this month, Yahoo! - one of Google's main rivals - began to add thumbnails of Flickr images for popular domestic and international landmark searches into their main search results. With the launch of Google's universal search feature also this month, the world's leading search engine has also started to integrate photos, along with other types of media, into its SERPs. As a result, it might not be farfetched to assume that the Panoramio technology will enable Google to produce more relevant pictures to geographical searches.

Other possible ways in which Google could use the Panoramio content could be the enhancement of the street view feature in Google Maps, which was rolled out only a few days ago, or the integration of new features in Google's photo management software Picasa.

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