As Search Engine Land mentioned today, Live Maps has pretty decent maps in Georgia that have been useful to a lot of people looking to follow the news there (we get a lot of base map data from AND in the region). In some cities, like the capital city of Tbilisi, we have good high res aerial imagery as well. But basemaps and imagery should just be the first step of exploration in Live Maps; turning on the ‘Explore’ feature exposes tons of user contributed content from across the web and is a great way to learn about a region. We crawl and index sites like Platial, Virtual Globetrotting, wikipedia, Live Maps Collections and hundreds more to create a fantastic explore experience.

After doing a search for a City, you can hit the ‘Explore Collections’ link in the result panel or you can go to the Collections –> Explore Collections menu at any time. Once turned on, use the filtering tools in the result panel to change sort order, show only photos, filter by tag etc… As you drag and zoom the map, your results will refresh.

note - You may see a lot of duplicate listings as you explore – this is generally from crawling a KML file that appears at multiple websites; in our next release we have a couple of optimizations coming to eliminate the dupes.

Here are a few Explore links to get you started – Wikipedia articles in the North, Exploring Tbilisi, Photos.