Scavengeroogle: A Google Maps Scavenger Hunt To Waste More Of Your Time On

I noticed another minor change to the googlemap look today. They’ve moved the “Map” and “Satellite” buttons, which used to be plain old links on the right hand side of the page, into the actual googlemap itself. They are positioned so they float on top of the image like the magnification slider does.

This actually seems pretty helpful for Scavengeroogling because I don’t know about you but I am constantly switching back and forth between the satellite and map views. Before you had to go to the right side to get it to switch, but now it’s right there within the picture which is sort of nice. Although… it is not TOO far in distance from where it originally was. Hm.. maybe the whole idea was to just get the actual buttons into the map.

But I can’t imagine that this is anything but a usability change. I don’t think it is a pre-cursor to a new feature introduction. In any case, lots of changes in the past two days. I think I read some news the other day that Yahoo is looking to upgrade their online mapping technologies someday, so maybe Google is changing things in anticipation of competition? Who knows…

I guess the googlemap guys are figuring strike while the iron is hot, because they’ve just launched a free 3D mapping and search product called Google Earth. This is just days after they changed both the google map slider magnification as well as added high resolution google maps in other countries.

This new satellite based mapping product is actually a standalone program. It uses the same technology from Keyhole in order to let you sort of “fly” in from space into street level views. Interestingly, about half a year ago my brother showed me a similar program that let you do exactly that, except I believe you “flew” in from far outer space in order to visit Earth.

The software is free to download and has the following features (from the press release):

- 3D buildings in major cities across the United States
- 3D terrain showing mountains, valleys, and canyons around the world
- Integrated Google Local search to find local information such as hotels, restaurants, schools, parks, and transportation
- Fast, dynamic navigation
- Video playback of driving directions
- Tilt, rotate, and activate 3D terrain and buildings for a different perspective on a location
- Easy creation and sharing of annotations among users

They have two other “subscription” upgrades, Google Earth Plus ($20) and Google Earth Pro ($400) that include a number of extra features. With the “Plus” you can plug in a GPS device, print in high resolution, and generally interact in more ways with the software such as importing stuff into it. I think the “Pro” is for research and industry types.

I haven’t tried it yet, and I’m not sure if I will soon because for one thing the current version is PC only and I’m on a Mac a lot. Also, I think it requires a decent video card, something I’m not sure I have on my PC. So I guess if any of you get to try it out soon, if you could let me know how it goes. I’m not sure if this will affect Scavengeroogle at all; maybe it will just be another way to look for clues if it is using the exact same mapset as googlemaps. I wonder a bit about the resolution, which looks decent, as well as the “tilt” that gives everything more profile instead of the usual straight up and down satellite shot…

Hi Scavengeroogles, a side note for your perusal: As I mentioned in an earlier solution, I’ve been considering starting up an informal email list for Scavengeroogle clues. I’d like to find out your opinion on whether this might work.

I have been having a hard time keeping to the regular schedule of 3 clues a week. It’s not so much the overall workload, but the set times that are difficult for me. It would be good if instead of releasing a clue at a certain time, I could just release it at any time.

The problem with this is that many of you visit the site on a regular basis - Pacific Time Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings, because you know that’s when a clue drop will occur. If I changed to a non-regular clue release, you’d have to visit the site more regularly (hehe, how’s that for getting more traffic, huh? No, I digress…) because you wouldn’t know when the next clue would appear.

So in order to counter that problem, I was thinking of doing two things: start up an optional mailing list and increase the “open solve time” from just a few hours to 1 day.

Now, I don’t particularly like mailing lists myself, even the non-spammy useful ones. But this mailing list would be used only for notifying you if a clue was launched, for those that WANTED to be notified. You could still just come check the site periodically instead, or just subscribe to the RSS feed through Bloglines or MyYahoo. Getting it by email would just be an option.

And because people wouldn’t necessarily get the notification email about a clue launch right away and in fact might get it HOURS afterwards, I would increase the time until a solution is posted to be a day long so more people would have an opportunity to play.

These two things actually have some beneficial side effects: With a longer solve time, more east coasters and people at work would get to “play” (you can of course “play” even if a solution has already been posted). The second side effect is mostly for me… I wouldn’t have to sit and “moderate” a session and write up a solution in such a short amount of time. I would of course check in periodically but would not have to be around the whole time. Though, it would mean that the “solutions pending” would not increase in near-real time as it does now (I do that by hand).

So the changes in the game would be non-regularly released clues and a change to a day long open clue instead of 3 hours.

Let me know what you think because I know some people really like the “timed” aspect. But I think I would still list names in the order that solutions came in… so maybe that’d be enough of incentive? =)

Woohoo! I had earlier postulated that the reason for the expanded google map slider magnification was to get ready for hi-res areas in the rest of the world. Sure enough, Luke P just took a look and saw that much of Europe and some of Asia is now at hi-res. Finally, Scavengeroogle is ready for the rest of the world!

As far as I know, this happened today because all those hi res satellite pics in Europe certainly weren’t around right when the Google maps slidebar was updated to 18/18 magnification earlier. I made sure to check that. In addition to Europe there are a ton of other countries represented in hi res, including some in Asia. Just a quick glance around, I saw Japan and Thailand had some squares.

What does this mean for Scavengeroogle? Well, in general it’s good because it gives us more regions to look for clues in. But it may make it more difficult as a game for players because they have to worry about looking in other countries, and it will make it more difficult for clue creators because the number of herrings is now increased exponentially. I guess we will see!

So, I’ll be expecting some clue submissions from the rest of the world, and in fact I’ll give those priority. Remember, you can submit planes, ships, airports and famous landmarks but I tend not to use those…

Mark L alerted us to an interesting change in the appearance of the google map: an increase of notches in the magnification slider. I think it JUST happened today, in fact I am sure of it because I happen to have a screenshot that includes the slider from yesterday when I was doing the “dragonfly” clue. As you can see, they seem to have added 3 notches, making it a maximum of 18/18 instead of 15/15 for full zoomed in.

Now, I am not 100% sure but when I did a zoom in of today’s slider to match with yesterday’s it seems as though the relative scale has not changed but for us the numbers will change. That is 13/15 is now 16/18. The slider is still 2 notches from the top, but because we have traditionally counted from the bottom in our game you just need to add 3 to adjust. Note, I am not 100% sure about this, would need to check each clue to compare it.

I am not sure that anyone else except the people who play here may have noticed the increase in notches, and that is only because it is important to the way Scavengeroogle is played…

Even more interesting is, the extra 3 notches added seem to be there to include the rest of the world? So I was thinking, is this a precursor to an inclusion of more high res satellite imagery elsewhere in the world? In fact, is it just my imagination or did they not have “country” names in the street map view before? Interesting… anyone else know if there have been significant changes in Google mapping of the rest of the world. I must admit I haven’t been paying attention because I’ve got my hands full with clue creation.

Also, did they have little “red dots” for major cities before? I think I am losing my mind here…

In any case, I will have to start getting used to 18/18. I guess the other thing we could do is reverse the scale, so that fully zoomed in is 1/18. Ahh… I’m too lazy though, let’s just leave it for now. =)

Hey, so I was just thinking about a suggestion that Mike Z had made in the comments, and I started to get excited about it. He suggests that we try a “real” Scavenger Hunt where the clues you are given are just things to find somehow through google maps. I had thought about something similar in the past, but not about a list of multiple things.

For instance:

Lake shaped like a fish
Plane with 2 Shadows
A Red Letter “G”

I dunno, it would probably take a lot of time for me to collate everyone’s answers at the end, but I bet it might be pretty fun. Plus, you could play all day long (or at least any time of the day) because we could just release a list of clues at the beginning of the week and have it go for at least a few days. Maybe we could do one every month or so… I’d call it “Scavengeroogle Hunt No. 1″ or something. I could try turn off comment moderation temporarily (it’s only on to prevent accidental posting of solutions before the bell) so everyone could talk about it as it’s going on. I suspect I wouldn’t need to do many “sanity” checks… people would probably get creative on what to submit and that’d be fun.

So before I get excited, is this something that anyone would want to play? I’d still do the old method of posting clues as well. But I am willing to try this at least once, no matter how crazy it might be on my end. =)

Please leave a comment if you might be interested or if you have any other ideas regarding this…

Hey fiends, er… friends! In case you’re wondering, no the clue submission didn’t drop off the face of the earth. Er, the googlemap. No, there have actually been a huge number of clues suggested and I’m just going through them now. (Btw, there are so many that I can’t email everyone back who sends in a clue submission, but thank you very much for sending them in!)

I’ve decided not to run clues during the weekends because it’s a little too hectic for me. But we’ll try do clues every weekday.

I know a lot of you come to this site looking for a “live” clue only to find out there is 5 minutes left to solve one. Well, one way to keep up to date on clues is to add the Scavengeroogle RSS feed to your RSS news aggregator (if you have one). Now, I’m not an expert on RSS and I haven’t even really tried it out yet. But this SHOULD give you the latest clues.. I believe it will give you every entry actually. I’m not sure if it will list solutions as well, because I have solutions shut off from appearing on the main page (they only appear linked to the clues)

Anyhow the RSS feed is:

http://www.bloglander.com/scavengeroogle/feed/

If you so desire, I think you can also add it to MyYahoo through here:

And I believe people who use Bloglines can get it from:

I’m looking to put these buttons in the sidebar, but until then they’ll just be located in this post.

Also, I decided not to set up an email list… I didn’t want to deal with the unsubscribe/subscribe thing and plus it’s not like you need more clutter for your mailbox!

See you tomorrow!

Sorry for the off topic post. I’m going to post up a new clue around 2:00 PDT or so. But in the meantime… I noticed (from the “Teacup” clue) that some of you are from Oregon or go to school there. I’m thinking of taking a trip there some time, but I’m not sure yet. Would you have any recommendations (besides Crater Lake which I’ve been to when I was a kid) for places to visit? If so, could you leave a comment… thx!

Hey kids, a quick note. When sending in a Google Map URL please use the “Link To This Page” and NOT the URL in the location bar of your browser! As seen in the screengrab to the left. If you just copy the URL, it won’t necessarily copy the correct location! Try it for yourself and see. I’ve been tossing a lot of clues and solutions because of this…

For more information, please visit the FAQ

Incidentally, I was wondering if anyone else is getting “Googlemap Wrist Syndrome” like me. I was surfing around about an hour yesterday in the godforsaken plains of Nebraska/Kansas/Oklahoma looking for something interesting when I noticed my wrist really started to hurt. I use the computer quite a bit, but usually am not bothered by carpal tunnel or any wrist problems. I dunno, it’s the repetition I think. I don’t do a lot of gaming involving the mouse either, so maybe that’s why this seemed unusual.

Actually, I would really like to be able to control the scrolling of the googlemap with my mind. Yeah. Attach some electrodes. That would be ideal. Someone needs to invent that, like, tomorrow.

Speaking of tomorrow, see ya all then.

By the way, I thought I’d drop a quick note on the so called “posting schedule” of clues. So that you don’t have to continually reload the page all day long… We are shaping up to get into the habit of posting 1-2 clues per day, not including weekends. That’s about all I can handle right now. Diehard Scavengeroogles should look for new clues mostly in the morning, around 9-11 PST, though of course there will be exceptions.

Solutions to clues that haven’t been found by 5 or more people will generally be posted up after about 2 days. So that you don’t tear your hair out! Also, I have been known to have a soft spot for dropping extra word clues for tough ones. I don’t want your eye doctors to get TOO rich.

Also, I try to update the “Pending Solutions” as quick as I can (this is done manually because I need to check the solutions) but there can often be lags… so if you don’t see the little numbers move up after submitting the answer, that’s because I haven’t gotten to it yet.

Happy Scavengeroogling!