Relaunched in mid March (2009), Google has added umpteen new streetviews to its local search service. This was announced by Kenzu Fong Hing in the Google Lat Long blog.

First time streetviews have now been introduced for several cities in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands – London, Liverpool, Manchester, Amsterdam and Rotterdam. Panorama photos of France, Italy and Spain have been expanded – for example, per mouse-click one can cruise the streets of Strasbourg, Reims and Cannes, or Genoa, Parma or Saragossa.

To find out which areas contain the panorama-views, one needs to drag the yellow ‘pegman’ around the map, using the mouse. Regions are marked in blue, where StreetView is already available.

Further areas are anticipated in the near future- according to the Schweitzer Tagesanzeiger newspaper, StreetView vehicles are documenting the streets of Switzerland. Germany saw the Google cars in 2008 (see our report).

Using this feature, the armchair traveler can sit at his computer (or mobile phone) and discover multiple locations around the globe. Reaction to this service remains however divided (see our post): especially at the moment, complaints are gathering momentum in the UK, according to the local media (eg. the daily newspaper The Independant). As a result, Google has been required to removed numerous photos.