Well you could just scroll around trying to locate a location IF you know where it is located. However more often you may need to locate some place by its name, or address, or some other identifier.

Lets do some searching and see what we can find. How?

First, on the left side of the GE screen at the top of the 'panels' is the SEARCH panel.

The Search panel has three tabs, labeled, 'Fly To', 'Find Businesses', and 'Directions'. Then there a one line text box with a drop down selector, and a 'magnifying glass' GO BUTTON.

We will use the Search panel with the 'Fly To' tab selected first.

Below the one line text box (into which we type locations, addresses ect.) is a list box area that will, as we do searches, retain all our previous searches we have done in THIS session of GE. This will allow you to 'select' a previous search to be 're-done' easily without having to retype the search.

Below that are some 'VCR' controls, a triangle 'go' button, a square 'stop' button, and an 'X' button. The 'go ' button will 'play' all the searches you have accumlulated thus far like a slide show, one after another. The 'stop' button will stop the show, and the 'X' button will CLEAR the previous searches from the accumulation window.

Notice, the search text box has a suggestion of "Fly to e.g. Tokyo, Japan", indicating a typical search you might type in. Type in 'Tokyo, Japan' and click the maginfying glass (the 'go' button'), and watch the main viewing screen FLY TO the location.

And after a short 'flight', you're there... Tokyo, Japan, just as you requested.

You might be surprised just how well GE does in this respect. From here in Tokyo, Japan, lets try to go to the 'Eiffel Tower'. Now we all know the 'tower' is Paris, France, but will GE know? Type in Eiffel Tower, and hit to GO button.

Another flight to exactly where we wanted to go. Neat.

Try another. How about the 'Empire State Building".

Anyone else an 'airport fan', like me? How 'smart' is this GE. Lets try a three-letter airport designator. Try 'LAX'.

Yeah, but Los International Airport is a pretty well known airport. How about a smaller airport. Okay, How about Duluth, Minneasota 'DLH', which is not your average conversation piece? Try it.

Boy, GE is doing pretty good. How about a tougher one. Lets try a smaller 'local' airstrip. Near Minneapolis is a small regional airport named 'Flying Cloud Airport'. 'Locals' might know where it is, but it is not probably known well outside the area. First you would have to know its airport designator, which is 'KFCM'. Try it.

Well, not only is GE finding these places by a 'location' designator, but observe how it is filling in the list of previous searches. GE converted our entry of 'KFCM', into "Flying Cloud Airport".

Wonder what it would do with another small airport like 'Lake Elmo Airport'.

Well, not only did GE find the Lake Elmo Airport, just east of St. Paul, Minnesota, but it also identified all the airport related entities in the nearby area. You will discover that this result is very much like searching 'For Businesses', if you had selected the 'Find Businesses' tab in the search panel. It will discover all 'similar' entries nearby.

The result of our last search for an airport by 'name' (as opposed to a designator) resulted a whole bunch of entries we may no longer desire in our list of previous searches. How do you clean up undesired entries. Simply select with your RIGHT MOUSE BUTTON those entries you would like to get rid of and select DELETE.

You will recieve a dialog box similar to this asking you to confirm that you DO want to delete this entry, AND ALL this entries descendents.

Click 'OK'.

A short video from Google regarding searching in GE

First lets make sure the list of previous searches is 'ready' for a 'slide show tour'. Your list of previous searches should look similar to this (assuming you have been following along).

Yup, you bet. First lets deal with the 'too fast', or 'too slow' issues of playing tours. You need to select 'TOOLS/OPTIONS...' from the main GE menus. You should then get a dialog box like this...

Select the 'Touring' tab at the top to view setable options for the tour settings. You can adjust the 'Tour Pause' from 0 to 60 seconds. A pause of at least 2 seconds is desireable. I set mine at 4 seconds, but you will have to determine what works for your system. You can also adjust 'Fly-to-speed', and the 'Tour-speed'. You can either adjust the slider bars, or type a value into the speed text entry boxes. Your computers speed, the amount of your computers memory, and the amount of your computers memory you have set aside as a 'cache-space' for GE will affect how well a tour plays on YOUR machine. You may have to adjust the settings until you get acceptable results on your computer.

Adjust your settings as you desire, then click 'Okay' when your done.

Now on to adjusting the order of 'tour-play' (BTW, knowing to readjust item order will be an issue in making placemarks comming up in later tutorials also, so please pay attention).

Lets attempt to make the FIRST saved search become the LAST on the the tour.

RIGHT CLICK on the first choice in the list of search choices, KEEP HOLDING DOWN THE RIGHT MOUSE BUTTON and begin DRAGGING the selection down to the bottom of the list. Notice you cursor CHANGES to arrow with a small SQUARE BOX below it.

This is your indication that you are MOVING SOMETHING to a NEW position.

While still holding down the right mouse button drag your selection to the position where you desire the new placement to be located. In this case I would like my choice (which was the FIRST) to now be the LAST, so dragging to the last postion, then release the right mouse button. And then your list should look similar to this...

Lets CLEAR the list of our searches so far. Hit the 'X' button in the search panel control bar.

Okay. Lets find a favorite place of mine. The Firefighter Hall & Museum in Minneapolis, MN. It's address is 664 22nd Avenue Northeast. Lets search for it.

Our main GE window flys to the location, display the searched address BOTH in the search window panel, and on the satellite view of the map at the STREET NUMBER LOCATION. Lets zoom in and see exactlty what I mean.

It's a little difficult to see in the image, but GE has drawn an 'X' on the STREET at the address location. Afterall, we searched for an address, and thats what GE found. GE does not know that we are actually trying to find the actual museum building. It is actually on the south side of the street, between the parking lot, and the athletic field.

Now I happen to know the museums location having been there many times. Is there any other way to deteremine where the actual building is located. The answer is MAYBE. Lets see. Read on.

From the satellite view we could do some deduction and try to just pick what we feel is the best choice. We might be correct, maybe.

But before we do that let's check one more configuration issue. We want to make sure when we click the 'open book' icon we get a whole new separate window, and don't just split our own map window. In the main menus select TOOLS/OPTIONS. Then select the GENERAL tab of the OPTIONS dialog. Then check and ensure the "Show web results in external browser" checkbox (near upper left-hand corner) is CHECKED. If not, check it. Then select "Okay".

I mentioned in Tutorial #2 about switching to Google Maps from GE by clicking the 'Open Book' icon near the top of the GE window. Here...

Click the 'Open Book' icon and switch to Google Maps.

And we end up here.... Now select the "Street View' of Google Maps.

The map switches to Street View. NOTICE (repeat NOTICE) the BLUE OUTLINE of the streets. I mentioned the Street View in Tutorial #2, but did not really deal with it that time. Well, now's the time.

What is Street View? Imagine a specially equipped vehicle driving down a street. It has four cameras pointing North, South, East and West. EVERY few feet (or so) of travel each camera takes a photo (one for each direction). Then the images are later reassembled into a 360 degree view along EVERY 25 feet of a street. Then EACH 360 degree view is assembled a 'movie-like' view of the street. You can pan, zoom, and navigate up and down each street that has been photographed. Thats a LOT of photos. Yup.

Back to the BLUE OUTLINED streets. That is how you can determine which streets have been 'street-mapped'. How many streets have been street-mapped, and in how many cities? We'll deal that in a bit. But back to our issue, where is the museum building?

Notice, there is a small Help Box stating you either drag the 'small-man' figure to where you desire the view to start, OR, just click the blue outilined street where you desire. Lets click near the 'x-box' drawn on the blue outlined street near where we think the museum might be. We get this...

Well, apparently we're on 22nd Ave NE as shown both by the two small left and right pointing arrows near the bottom, (which we'll let you change your position up and down the street), and by the sub-title at the top of the window (which will always tells you your current position on the street). Now there is no 'compass pointer' shown, but the default direction of views seems to be NORTH, and we think the museum is on the South side of the street.

We can change or compass position by clicking either of the left-right arrow icons located in the upper left corner of the STREET VIEW window (not the arrows of the MAP VIEW WINDOW). Lets click the left arrow TWICE. And we get...

Lets see, we were pointing North, then clicked the 'turn left' arrow twice. So, now we're looking West down 22nd Ave. towards some bridge over the street. Does that agree with the satellite image in GE. Yup just west of the parking lot, there appears to be a railroad track. This must be the railroad tracks over 22nd Ave. Click THREE TIMES on the 'move-left' arrow. And now we get this...

We are now pointing south, and there is some parking lot, and a building. Lets move west down the street a bit by clicking (TWICE) on the 'NE 22nd Ave' right pointing arrow that has a small 'W' near it.

Now were at the parking lot entrance to some building. Try this. Click and HOLD down the left mouse button. You can pan around left-right-up-down to adjust your view. Do that until you get something similar to this...

Now you are indeed looking at the Firefighters Hall & Museum in Minneapolis. Are you sure. Well, maybe. But I will assure you, thats it. How could we verify it. Well, the museum has a web page at http://www.firehallmuseum.org/ and perhaps they have a photo of the building that we could get a verification from.

Well, not only do they have a 'photo', but they THE EXACT SAME Stree View map we just generated. Yes, you can link street view cmaps into YOUR web page. The process to do it is NERDY, maybe we'll deal with that in another tutorial much later.

A short video from Google regarding Street View in Maps

So through various means we have identified a specific location, in this case a building, the Firefighters Hall & Musuem building. It's this one...

In order to 'save' this location so we can return to it whenever we desire, and to 'mark' it so we can 'see' it easily we need to put a PLACEMARK on the building. You can do that several ways. First from the main menus select ADD/PLACEMARK like this...

OR... by clicking the ADD PLACEMARK icon like this...

Or... by RIGHT MOUSE BUTTON selecting on the "My Places" in the PLACES PANEL and then selecting ADD/PLACEMARK like this...

Will ALL result in this...

A blank PLACEMARK DIALOG BOX, and a FLASHING YELLOW PUSHPIN icon.

First, drag the pushpin icon by selecting it and dragging to the map position you would like to identify. The NEEDLE END of the pushpin is the maker location. Like this...

So now the the pushpin needle is over the roof of the building, and no matter what level of the window we zoom to, the needle point will remain in its precise location. Maybe you don't like a 'pushpin' as an icon choice, or maybe its size, or color. Well, all can be changed and adjusted. We'll deal with those issues in Tutorial #4 later.

Next we'd like the pushpin to have a 'title' so it has some identifying text next to it. Just type in the title you'd like to see in NAME text box of the PLACEMARK DIALOG. Like this...

Then click the dialogs OK button and this what you get...

We end up with the pushpin fixed in place, and an entry the PLACES panel titled "Firefighters Museum", with an 'X' in the checkboc next to it. Click on the 'X' next to the entry and turn it on and off. Observe your placemark on the screen. We can turn an individual placemark on or off as we desire. Leave it turned ON. Zoom your main map window OUT and observe your placemark.

Even when zoomed way out like this our placemark is still there. Lets move our map to a very different location. Type Tokyo, Japan into the search box, and do the search.

Now we are a long way from the museum location. DOUBLE CLICK on the museum entry in PLACES panel.

Well, GE flew all the way back to the museum location, zoomed in automatically, and GE displayed (a mostly empty) dialog small window with out title in it. Neat.

A short video from Google regarding placemarking in GE

Yes, to both questions.

First, saving a placemark. RIGHT CLICK on the placemark you created in the PLACES panel, and select SAVE AS... like this...

The you will receive the "Save File" dialog box. The "Save File" dialog box may different looking in whatever operating system your computer is running, but the principles are the same.

Do whatever your system requires to navigate to the DIRECTORY where you desire to save your file. The dialog suggests "Firefighters Museum.kmz" as a filename. That is okay for now (more about file names later). Select the SAVE button. We have created the "Firefighter Museum.kmz" file on our computers disk.

Seceond, can you distribute you placemark(s) ot others. Yes, sure. ONE (of several) ways to accomplish it is via an email message. So, assuming your email program (whatever one your using) allows you to ATTACH files to a message your in business.

In your email message, navigate to the location where you SAVED some .kmz file (.kmz files are the default file type for GE) and attach the file to your message. Send the message. When the recipient recieves the message they can unattach the .kmz file and view it THEIR copy of GE. The complete details it exact process of how to place a .kmz file someone sent you (or you aquired by other means) is upcomming in the NEXT tutorial.

Some good practice is to EMAIL A .kmz FILE TO YOURSELF. Try it.

We learned about...

• How to search for locations by name, identifiers, or addresses
• How to use Google Maps 'street-view' feature as an assistant
• How 'clean-up' a cluttered search results list box
• How to tour and adjust the timing of a tour
• How to a find a specific location on the earth
• How to mark, return to, and save a locations PLACEMARK we created