Google offers views of festive store window displays in NY City and beyond

By Trevor Mogg December 22, 2014

google offers views of festive store window displays in ny city and beyond business view — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Doing all of the holiday shopping online is a no-brainer for an increasing number consumers. Curled up in your favorite armchair or burrowed deep inside a warm bed, you can get all the presents sorted with a few simple swipes and taps, leaving sharp-elbowed street shoppers to battle it out in stores, and freeze their bits off as they scuttle between them.

If you’re a big Christmas fan, one of the downsides of this particular approach is that you miss out on all the extraordinarily lavish window displays painstakingly created by department stores in a bid to provide you with a bit of light relief from the stressful job in hand. Of course, if you live far away from a big city, you don’t even have the option.

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The good news is that thanks to Google’s Business View service, it’s now possible to get an eyeful of these festive displays simply by hitting the Web. The Mountain View company recently rolled out images of window decorations at Saks Fifth Avenue, Macy’s, and Bloomingdale’s in Manhattan.

Alternatively, you can head across the pond to London to discover what Selfridges and Liberty have come up with to entertain passing shoppers.

“Holiday shopping in London may be blustery and cold, but the lovely, inviting window displays are sure to warm the heart,” Google’s Soufi Esmaeilzadeh wrote in a blog post announcing the latest addition to Maps.

The festive imagery give Google a chance to promote Business View, a service linked to Street View that lets stores, restaurants, hotels, and other similar businesses offer interior views of their premises.

Topics

Business

Contributing Editor

Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…

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