A visit from Google

The Google photo technology in use.


Everyone knows about Google’s “Street view,” the awesome Google application that lets you cruise city streets without leaving your computer screen.

Google is now expanding their street views to include interior photography of the businesses seen along the way. We’re happy that Google has chosen Capitol Hill Books as one of the first businesses in Denver to be photographed for this new project. Today, the Google photographer came into the store to take a look around and use her state-of-the-art 360 degree camera to show what it is like walking through our store (She was a quite nice person as well and the Google people were really great and communicative about the project to us.).

Eventually, Google will link the photographs to the street views of our store. So when you see our store on Google Street View, you’ll be able to click to see pictures of our store from the inside as well. We’re very excited about this project and we’ll be sure to update you about when the photography and content will be available online.

Soon: Capitol Hill Books inside and out.


But why did Google choose our store? Well our prominent location for sure, but also because of our above average number of Google searches for our store that actually led people to our site. Our own internal statistics show more than 35,000 hits since we upgraded this site a year ago.

So on the one year anniversary of our new, improved Capitolhillbooks.com (additional props to former employee, Tom for originally putting this site together), we just want to thank our customers for continuing to use the website. We continue to improve because of them.

3 thoughts on “A visit from Google

  • Woah! That’s so awesome. I want to hear all about it. Do they know when it might launch or how many other businesses are part of the Denver project?

  • The Google reps said it would probably be a couple of months. Apparently they are also doing this in several cities both nationally and internationally. Denver is one of the earlier cities because Google has an office here.

    I am not sure how many other Denver businesses are included. It sounds like they are chosen based on a combination of having a widely-visited Web site and having a prominent physical location on Street View. The paperwork they gave us made it seem like businesses would apply to have Google do photography, but they actually contacted us about this. So I am not sure how it works with other businesses. Pretty cool though.

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