The winner of Google’s first annual Google Programming contest was recently announced. The prize was $10,000 and a trip to Google in Mountain View, California. The mission: to develop an interface that does “something interesting” with a small subset of Google’s database. The winner, Daniel Egnor, designed an interface to include a geographic search option. Egnor, a graduate of Caltech currently working in New York, used freely available government databases (TIGER and FIPs) to convert addressing information on documents to lat/long coordinates. With the interface, users are able to restrict searches to within a radius of a given addresses, answering such questions as “where are the hotdog stands near my school?” that are not easily answered through a straightforward textual search.

For more information on the contest and to see the Honorable mentions visit http://www.google.com/programming-contest/winner.html.

While Google doesn’t currently offer geographic search capabilities there are some search engines that have limited spatial search options:

• Anzwers – Australian search engine that allows searchers to limit web results to Australia or New Zealand through domain restrictions.
• GeoTags – GeoSearch is a search engine that relies on embedded HTML tags that allow for regional searches.
• Lasoo – Location-based search engine that searches for businesses around a point the user selects.
• MapPlanet – MapPlanet provides an interesting way to view the Internet in a geographic fashion. Using a Java applet, users zoom into a geographic area of interest where they can select cells from the map and visit the web site listed in the cell. The geographic placement is up to the person listing their site.
• somwherenear – somwherenear is a geographic search engine that lets you search for places of interest in the United Kingdom. Read about the start of this search engine here.