Adding label to marker in Google Maps

I discovered that you can append the Google Maps URL with a value in parentheses to supply a label for the marker (instead of "Address:"). The only drawback that I can see right now is that the functions that generate the links are country-specific, so you would have to change the function for each and every country where you want to implement this.

Note that the code I'm using is for generating links for Canadian addresses, and that I'm using locations attached to a node profile, so I made allowance to for the label to be the username of the user, instead of the name of the node. More about that last bit in a minute, but for now here is the revised link function that creates the label, in this case from location.ca.inc:

function location_map_link_ca_google($location = array()) {
  $query_params = array();
  
  foreach (array('street', 'city', 'province', 'postal_code', 'country') as $field) {
    if (isset($location[$field])) {
      $query_params[] = $location[$field];
    }
  }
  
  $loc_label = '';
  if ($location['name']) {
    $loc_label = '+('. $location['name'] .')';
  }
  else if ($location['parent_label']) {
    $loc_label = '+('. $location['parent_label'] .')';
  }
  
  if (count($query_params)) {
    return ('http://maps.google.ca?q='. urlencode(implode(", ", $query_params)) . $loc_label);
  }
  else {
    return NULL;
  }
}

To add the 'parent_label' parameter, I altered the location_load_locations function (in location.module) as follows:

function location_load_locations($type, $node_or_user) {
  $res = db_query("SELECT * FROM {location} WHERE type = '%s' AND eid = %d ORDER BY lid", $type, $type == 'user' ? $node_or_user->uid : $node_or_user->vid);
  
  if (strcmp($type, 'user') == 0 || @is_nodeprofile($node_or_user->type)) {
	$parent_label = $node_or_user->name;
  }
  else {
	$parent_label = $node_or_user->title;
  }
  
  $locations = array();
  $location = array();
  $index = 0;
  while ($row = db_fetch_object($res)) {
    $locations[$index] = (array) $row;
    if (isset($locations[$index]['latitude'])) {
      $locations[$index]['lat'] = $locations[$index]['latitude'];
      $locations[$index]['lon'] = $locations[$index]['longitude'];
    }
    
    if ($extra = location_invoke_locationapi($locations[$index], 'load')) {
      $locations[$index] = array_merge($locations[$index], $extra);
    }
	$locations[$index]['parent_label'] = $parent_label;
    $index++;
  }
  
  $location = count($locations) ? $locations[0] : array();

  return array('locations' => $locations, 'location' => $location);
}

Now, wherever this change is implemented, each Google Map linked to will show the location name, if available, or show the name of the node or user it's attached to, if that's available.