Coming Soon: Google Store View?

"Are you the manager? We'll just need to drive this into your store for a few minutes..."

It hasn’t gotten a lot of play yet, but the folks over at Search Engine Land got a hot tip last week that Google is inviting themselves into New York City stores to take panoramic photos for something called “Google Store Views.” While Google Street View seemed to make sense from both a usefulness standpoint (“It’s that yellow store on the corner…”) as well as from a “let’s create our own maps so we don’t have to license any for our navigation products” standpoint, this might not work so well for stores.

For starters, the inside of a store changes a lot faster than a street.  Are we supposed to use it to see if a store has the particular kind of tube socks we like? Unless there’s some elaborate inventory integration going on here, it’s hard to see where they’re going with this.

While it makes sense for Google to keep pushing the envelope and make sure they’re a player in the hot “local info” space, the augmented-reality app that might arise from having a 360-degree view the interior of say, every store in Manhattan seems just a little too difficult to pull off, logistically-speaking. It’s one thing to locate a store or a retaurant on the street, but it’s another to locate individual products based on their location within a store, especially considering that shelves allow for things to be stored on top of one another.

Let’s not forget about the fact that most stores absolutely hate people taking pictures inside them. Everyone owns the street-it’s a public space-but stores are private property and subject to many, many more restrictions. The challenges that Google Store Views faces seem insurmountable, even for Google.

All that said, good luck with this one, Google, we’re waiting to be impressed.