Google will now take you to the Moon, and Mars, if you know how to ask

A long, long time ago, in a computer near you, you may have had Google Earth installed and used it to explore the Moon. Google is bringing that now to almost all of us, regardless our installed operating system and applications, through the Google Maps website. If the Moon is not enough, let's explore Mars as well.

Immediately, we dream of having street view of the planets, but the NASA Mars Rover has not yest returned enough imagery that Google can get it's hands on it for our pleasure. That's ok, there is still some amazing imagery available, you can zoom in an impressive amount in your attempts to find the perfect valley to live in.

Google using your data to help you travel, now helps you find your hotel

Google has expanded its services to now include natural language searches that use a hotel reservation in your Gmail as a point of reference.

Was that too much, too fast? Let's start at the end, you will now be able to ask Google to show you restaurants nearby your hotel with the simple phrase "Show me restaurants nearby my hotel." The value here is that Google is smart enough to know where your hotel is, allowing for the natural language support.

Taking it a step further, you are covered even if you forget the name of your hotel, or where it is, Google remembers this stuff and can get you directions to and from 'my hotel' as well.

New contextually aware Explore button coming to Google Maps for Android

In its simplest form, you should soon expect to see a new Explore button pop up in the bottom right hand corner of your Maps screen. Do not always expect to see the new button, it will be contextually aware of not only your location, to show you relevant local information, but aspects like the time of the day, your preferences based on your Maps history and the weather.

Google offers the specific examples of taking note of the time of day so to not provide you info for breakfast spots at dinner time. They also explain that they will not promote a day in the park if there is bad weather rolling in.