Chikai Ohazama of the Google Earth Team posts some great news to the Google Maps API Blog today:

Users can now search through all of the world’s Keyhole Markup Language (KML) files, making the millions of Google Earth layers on the Web instantly accessible for geobrowsing and exploration. Last month, we encouraged you, our Maps API users, to create KML site maps for your mashups. Today’s launch is the next step towards making those sitemaps – and all of the world’s geographic information – discoverable by users worldwide.

Indeed, it works like a charm:

There are some more screenshots in Chikai’s post.

I especially like the fact that the set of returned KML is not just what’s available on Google Earth Community — although that place surely contains the bulk some of the best KML out there. This is important if KML is going to become an open, community-driven standard sometime in the future.

Being able to do a text-based search through the KML files available on the web for a particular view in Google Earth should do to the geospatial web what Google Search did to the plain vanilla web.

filetype:kmz shackleton

[Update 17.17 UTC: Just to be clear, you could previously already do a text search on KML files using Google Search, for example filetype:kmz shackleton. Now you can further pinpoint your query to get results just near your view in Google Earth, and you can also have them returned to you as placemarks, from across many KML sources.]