About The Map

The million-marker map is an experimental set of Flash and JavaScripts add-ons to the Google Maps API that allows you to display and interact with very large data sets on a regular Google map.

The map also offers a way to select markers with a paintbrush; you can geographically constrain queries by painting a region on the map, like using the QuickMask tool in Photoshop.

This map is an offshoot of nyc.eatmap.org, an upcoming restaurant search project for New York City, which is an offshoot of eatmaps.org, a more general restaurant search application, which is itself an offshoot of a still more general URL-to-thing application being developed by Jason Williams and Maciej Ceglowski.

We are slowly wending our way up the layers of abstraction.

The simple demo here displays all restaurants in New York City (about 27,000 markers).

The current demo only works in Firefox and Safari, and the paintable search interface is limited to the NYC metro area.

Using The Extensions

This is a buggy, experimental, alpha release, so please proceed carefully. We do appreciate praise, blame and bug reports.

We make no claim whatsoever about this being consistent with the Google maps terms of use.

We plan to relase the map component source code (ActionScript and JavaScript) under an open source license as soon as we have had a bit more time to use it ourselves.

Thanks to Zhao Hailong and Davies Liu for their help with the initial implementation, Stamen Labs for cheering us on, Peter Gadjokov and Ann Hess for feedback.

About The Map

Using The Extensions

Contact