With many of us using smartphones with GPS now, we’re starting to take for granted applications like Google Maps being able to pinpoint us. But using computer is a different story. Sure, there have been plugins, and things like Google Toolbar, but those are things that most people aren’t going to bother to install. But starting today, location is now built in to Google Maps in the browser — provided you’re using the right browser.

If you are using either Google Chrome 2.0+ or Mozilla FireFox 3.5+, you’ll now notice a little dot in the upper left-hand corner of Maps, just above the Street View guy. If you click that dot, Google Maps will show you your location on the map. It does this using the W3C Geolocation API standard, according to Google.

I don’t know about you, but when I look at an online map and see outlines of buildings, I get a little frustrated. I want to be able to click somewhere, and find out exactly what’s there. And with a new feature in Google Maps, you can do just that.

If you right-click somewhere on the map, it will bring up a menu with a bunch of options. The new last option allows you to select “What’s here?” And if Google knows — which it does for a lot of places — it will pop up information about what is actually at the location you’re pointing at. If it knows the name of say, a store that is there, it will give that to you. Otherwise, it will give you the address of where you are pointing.

Moving around in Google Street View is not always intuitive. You always end up clicking aimlessly a few times before you can really figure out how to move about. Well, now navigating within Street View is easier thanks to the “pancake.” Google is adding a useful tool called the “pancake” to Street View on Google Maps that lets you travel to a new point within a photo panorama by double clicking on the place or object you would like to see. Google says that it has been able to accomplish this by making a compact representation of the building facade and road geometry for all the Street View panoramas. As you move your mouse within Street View, you’ll see the pancake, which you can move up and down a street and then click on a restaurant, road, building or object nearby. The pancake is shown as a circle on roads and a rectangle when following the facade of a building.

Sometimes there are many ways to get from point A to point B, whether you are walking or driving. Until now, Google Maps’ directions feature has given you the route they consider the best and allows you to drag and drop the route to change your path. Today, Google Maps is adding functionality that suggests additional routes so that you can see all of them on the map for comparison.

Under a “Suggested Routes” heading, you will now be able to access other routes to the same destination. This is a feature that GPS systems in car, like a Garmin device, have been offering for quite some time so it makes sense that Google would want to catch up. Google says that they choose alternative routes bases on many factors, including distance, travel time, and number of turns. Google Maps boils this data down to what is the lowest “cost” and ranks the routes based upon the “cost.”

Henry Hudson never did find the Northwest passage to India, but this year marks the 400th anniversary of his third voyage—the one where he came to New York and sailed up what is now the Hudson River (he made it as far as modern-day Albany). Hudson showed that often it is what you stumble upon on your way to somewhere else that turns out to be your great discovery. To celebrate the anniversary, the Henry Hudson 400 Foundation has charted all of Hudson’s voyages onto a Google map, along with overlays of historical maps. The overlays are kind of clunky, but just being able to see the actual routes Hudson took is kind of cool.

I only wish the custom map was available on the Google Maps site itself (maybe it is, but I wasn’t able to find it, although I did find this map of Hudson’s third voyage which was put together by an elementary school class). In fact, Google Maps should have an “Explorers section” where you could see famous expedition routes from Lewis and Clark’s to Shackleton’s voyage to Antarctica. Many of these have already been mapped out for Google Earth or as custom Google Maps, but it would be nice to have them all in one place as a section within Google Maps, or at least make Google could make them easier to find.

Update: Tragically, one of the skiers, Rob Williams, was not able to be saved. Our thoughts go out to his family.

Yesterday, a group of technology entrepreneurs from the UK on a skiing vacation in the Swiss Alps (Verbier) lost two of their party around 4 PM CET. Other members of the group put out a request on Twitter in order to learn the numbers of their mobile phones, so they could use the signals to track them down.

According to follow-up tweets, one person (Jason) was rescued using a combination of GPS, Google Maps to determine longitude and latitude, and the signals returned from his iPhone, but another one (Rob) was still missing as the two had apparently been split up. It’s been 7 to 10 hours since the last Twitter messages at this point, so unfortunately we can only hope and not confirm if Rob has been found by now.

Below are a number of screenshots with Twitter messages from some of the group.

Transit planner HopStop launched its free iPhone application last week to rival the mobile version of Google Map’s Transit option. The application, with support from iPhone’s GPS functionality, offers all the same services as the website. This includes trip customization, maps marked with nearby subways and bus stops, a taxi mode that estimates time and cost of travel and contact information for taxi companies, and the ability to re-route transit plan provided.

In the past, Hopstop was ahead of competitor Google Transit in terms of providing transit info for a widespread amount of metropolitan areas but Google has caught up (and maybe surpassed) with its Maps-based transit planner. And Google Maps is integrated with iPhone 3G’s GPS, making Google Transit a free native application that doesn’t have to be downloaded.

Can you name Google’s top ten products? If you look at how Quantcast ranks Google’s subdomains, you can get a sense of which Google products are the most popular, since they each have their own subdomain. Google’s main search engine tops the list with an estimated 136.6 million unique visitors in the U.S. Then comes Google Maps (36 million), Image Search (31.7 million), and Gmail (10.5 million). Google Docs, Sites, and Knol are still too small to make the top-ten, but are all showing decent growth.

YouTube and Orkut are not included below because they are on their own domains, but YouTube would be second with 70 million unique visitors. Orkut is not popular in the U.S., so it would not be a factor in this particular list. And I took out sorry.google.com, the domain Google uses to try to catch bots and spyware. It would have ranked No. 8.

Google is getting in on the voting season by offering a Google mapplet that will offer a wealth of voter information before the big day in November.

The site is not yet complete, but it will provide users with “voting location, registration information, and more.” What that more is has yet to be determined since, as the site points out, “all voting location information will be available by mid-October. Until then, please check with your state or local election officials to verify your voting location.”

If you input your address into the service, it won’t return any of the promised information. Instead, it provides you with the number of days left before you can’t register to vote and helps you acquire an absentee ballot if you need one.