Embed Ask City Maps

Embed Ask City Maps

Ask City map now allows you to embed the maps into your blog/website similar to Google Maps.




Though 'Ask' has a clever function not seen before - searching within a polygon.

This map was to find Bourne Ultimatum films showing in cinemas in Greater London

How is this function achieved?
Draw a Polygon of the search area. (used the M25 as boundary)

Then when the polygon is completed (double click to close)
a little search magnifying glass appears.



Clearly the Ask help is not updated with this

There is a some way to go, only a few results where returned. Looks like the bounding box was (map extent) was used rather than the actual polygon.
But a good step in the geographical spatial search method.

Real spatial searches in 'Search Engines' and web based maps? Maybe very soon.
A quick fast method would be to send the centre coordinates with a radius distance and use a spatial database (postgres is extremely powerful and fast at this) to return all the locations based on the search terms to give the user the first ten.
*postgres can do this in milliseconds.