Now Available in dsSearchAgent IDX: Google Street View

Yesterday was a big day for us. First, we finally released our new admin (yay!), and second, we saw an announcement that Google finally released API tie-ins to their Street View imagery (see my post on Geek Estate or the original announcement). Although we had been getting requests to integrate Street View into our IDX solution (demo) for quite some time now, the imagery was previously only available through Google Maps. However, with the new announcement and release, developers can now hook into the Street View imagery directly.

I / we have been incredibly busy lately, but when we saw the announcement, we knew we had to get this out to our customers ASAP. Well, I’m really happy to announce that it’s already been integrated! Check out this $2.7M Newport Beach beauty to see an example.

While I think it’s a really, really cool feature, there are limitations. First and foremost, it’s (obviously) only available in areas where Google has street view imagery. For example, just because we service the Charleston Trident MLS doesn’t mean that Google has street view there. Second, the placement and centering of the street view imagery is an inexact science at the moment. Our code currently tells Google’s servers where the house is, and they tell us if they have imagery there and then show it. Unfortunately, when Google does find a match, we don’t really know if the match they found actually represents the streets around the house. All that said though, it’s still an absolutely amazing technology that we are very grateful to Google for.

For now, it’s only enabled on our demo account, but if you drop a comment at the bottom with your name and a link to your dsSearchAgent IDX solution, I’ll be more than happy to enable it on your own account. We’ll should be able to add the option to enable / disable it on your own accounts to our new admin either today or Monday.

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Update: You can now easily enable Google Street View in our Control Panel.