Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Street View, Los Angeles.

However, I see a much more immediately valuable use that could be put to text scanned from the images — quality improvement of address pinpointing functionality.

I’ve written before about a number of the causes of errors in maps, and one of the most frequent errors is in how addresses get incorrectly pinpointed down streets. If Google Street View images were scanned for text as Philipp describes, address numbers for businesses and residences could be much more accurately associated with locations.

Street View could be used to improve mapping quality in many areas.

Detail - Google Map Ads

This is really cool news for all of those out there who’ve been developing Maps mashups, particularly, because if you’re using the API you could potentially make something off of your work, particularly stuff that’s compelling enough to get lots of traffic.

It’s also very cool that Google’s apparently allowing developers to choose if the ads will appear at all in their maps, and if so, how many.

If you haven’t seen the ads appearing in the maps before, one of the best-known examples is to search for Hotels in New York City:

(click to enlarge)

Though, I’m supposing for this new twist there must be ways for ads to just appear contextually for place map queries which do not include any sort of keyword. Perhaps that only happens in the Maps API.

This no-brainer integration of ad content, affiliate marketing, flexible API, and well-developed content/utility is the reason why Google continues to gain business and user-devotion. Good job, Google!

Now, the question will be — when might people be able to do self-service to buy the ads in Google Maps?!? I haven’t looked recently, but I’m supposing that these are primarily large-brand and/or national ads, since I haven’t seen any mentions of new targeting factors in the advertising blogs and forums…