Amazon.com and their search engine A9 has announced they have completed photographing many of the streets in D.C. for the “block view” feature of their online yellow pages. (Our friends at Gothamist wrote about their New York photos in January) Users can now view photographs of the storefronts of many District businesses alongside their telephone number and address. Like most online mapping, the photo alignment is far from perfect and sometimes requires scrolling down the street a bit before locating the business you’re looking for. Since Amazon has incorporated a feature where they record we consider is the best photos, we assume the index will become more accurate in time.

Which streets has Amazon indexed? Some searching reveals they’ve covered most of downtown and a variety of other dense neighborhoods including Adams Morgan and Georgetown. We quickly checked (and helped them identify the best photos for) a few D.C. institutions: Ben’s Chili Bowl, Kramerbooks, and Madam’s Organ. How have they done? Did they photograph the businesses in your neighborhood?

In related news, Google Maps offers detailed satellite imagery of D.C., and Microsoft’s TerraServer has the same images in even greater detail. If you think all of this is mildly creepy, just think what kind of data the spyblimp was able to uncover!