Google Maps Updated To Include Weather Conditions

Hear that? That's the sound of Google making another type of online service obsolete. Google today announced an update to Google maps that, working with Weather.com, will show you what kind of conditions you'll be looking at for your weekend trip to the mountains. All you've got to do is open up Google Maps, type in your address, and select the Weather layer from the list of options in the upper right-hand corner of your screen. Current temperatures and conditions are shown all around the world and Google hopes this will make travel easier (or at least a bit better planned out) than ever before.

Once you're inside a weather-covered map, you'll find that you're able to see current weather conditions in several forms, icons denoting everything from clouds to rain to the amount of sun you'll be getting. Additional sun and moon icons are included so you'll know when it's day or night anywhere on earth – not that you couldn't just have looked at the clock and figured it out before, but this is convenient for those who learn visually. The wispy cloud cover floating overhead is provided by the U.S. Naval Research Lab In addition to seeing basic information with a single icon and temperature, you're able to click on an icon to bring up a weather forecast for that area reaching out into the next four days.

You can enable and disable basically everything as you browse, change units for wind speed, temperature, and turn the whole business off from the same view menu in the upper right you clicked to enable it. This is certainly a new age for Google Maps, taking a massively popular weather site in Weather.com and combining it with Google Maps taking a whole step out of a lot of people's every day lives. Sound like a winning combination to you? Head to Google Maps now and give it a whirl and tell everyone here how you like it!

[via Google Blog]