WebProNews

You've probably read stories about the police using YouTube to catch criminals. One guy even accidentally ratted himself out for mentioning his own YouTube videos.

Now, Google is sharing a story in which the cops used Google Maps Street View to help find a kidnapped child from Massachusetts all the way in Virginia.

"An interesting first (at least as far as we're aware): Google's Street View imagery was used by police officers to help successfully locate a kidnapped child in rural Virginia.  Nine year old Natalie Maltais, from Athol, Massachusetts, was found safely at a motel on Tuesday," writes Pablo Chavez on the Google Lat Long Blog.

The police retrieved global positioning coordinates from the child's cell phone provider. Then they "googled it" as a Telegram.com article on the story reports:

Deputy Chief Lozier said that on the Internet search engine site Google there is a street view where people can look at photographs of neighborhoods in many locations.

Using the street view, he was able to look back and forth from the intersection.

Looking across a field, he said he saw a long building with a red roof that looked like a motel. He then did a search on Google for motels in Natural Bridge and found the Budget Inn-Natural Bridge, which, on a map, appeared to be close to the intersection he was looking at.

For all the privacy-related negative publicity Google Street View has received, it's nice to see a positive story about how the service has been used for something truly good.