Shouldn't pop artist Ed Ruscha be getting some credit for A9's new block-view feature in its yellow pages. Four decades ago, Ruscha mounted a motor-driven 35mm camera on a car and drove up and down Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles making the photographs that became his 1966 book Every Building on the Sunset Strip. The accordion-fold book was a literal, deadpan rendering of, well, every building on the Sunset Strip.

Now the folks at A9 have mounted digital cameras and GPS units on SUVs to photograph every commercial building in ten cities (so far), including Los Angeles. Is A9 conscious of its debt to Ruscha? The product page makes no mention of him but does trumpet the "completely automatic" nature of its picture-taking, which was pretty much Ruscha's method as well. The results are also strikingly similar.

Here's the entrance to the Chateau Marmont as photographed by Ruscha (top, a bad photo of a photo) and by the A9 team (below, a screenshot).

Was Ruscha dreaming of search engines when he produced his book? According to Ed Ruscha and Photography, he once said of his book: "It's like a Western town in a way. A storefront plane of a Western town is just paper, and everything behind it is just nothing." Not exactly tailor-made for an A9 press release.

Still, artists are not always reliable guides to their work. And the ease with which Ruscha's high concept has become a handy search enhancement suggests a hitherto unseen lay line between Pop's focus on serial imagery, machine processes and everyday products and today's database-driven ecommerce aps. Maybe there's more search-engine gold in Ruscha's other books from the '60s. Various Small Fires and Nine Swimming Pools — probably not. Some Los Angeles Apartments — already done by print and the web. But Twentysix Gasoline Stations and Thirtyfour Parking Lots — hello, OnStar, are you listening?