Last summer, we wrote about the launch of a new service from Google called City Tours that marked the search giant’s first foray into the travel space. The service isn’t exactly flashy, but it’s quite practical: tell it what city you’re visiting, and it can generate an optimized travel itinerary featuring a number of landmarks within walking distance. Unfortunately it had a few shortcomings. For one, its directions were all based on distances “as the bird flies”. In other words, it was up to you to figure out the best way to navigate between these landmarks, because Travel Tours would sometimes direct you to walk directly across a river.
Read the full story at http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/28/google-city-tours/