Book Map

In case you didn’t see it, this is pretty cool…

Using a whole lot of data, Matthew Gray (a googler who started the same day as me) generated a map of the world showing places mentioned in books:

Of course, there’s a lot of bias in the data because it only includes books we’ve scanned, but it’s a really neat visualization. It took 45 minutes to generate the map on google’s servers. It’s amazing to think that things like this just weren’t possible several years ago.

More info on the google book search blog