Best Online Mapping Site?

bbulzibar asks: "I've been using MapQuest most of my life, but now as my mind is slowly expanding, I want to see if Yahoo! Maps is a better service for driving directions. According to one article I have read, Yahoo! is better at displaying maps, but what about calculating directions? Does anyone have any experience with differences? For example, Yahoo! and MapQuest give differing routes to go from Bloomington, IN to Madison, WI." I particularly like MapBlast's "Line Drive" direction style -- what's your favorite online mapping software?

Comments

Some UK map sites

[bartash]

In the UK try Streetmap or Multimap. IMHO UK Yahoo maps isn't very good.

Mapquest ~= Yahoo Maps =~ NavTech

[lemming552]

They both get their maps from NavTech. I'm surprised they'd give a different result.

I always amused by the direction that Navtech would give for one path a couple blocks from home. It would direct me over the barrier between the N & S lanes of a road. Doubly Ironic that my wife worked for NavTech at the time.

Other than that, I use mapquest more often than not, just out of habit.

MapsOnUs / TeleAtlas

[emcdermid]

My preferred site is www.mapsonus.com, which uses data from TeleAtlas North America (aka TANA, formerly Etak).

A few years ago, I was told by someone in the know that TANA tended to be more accurate in actually knowing where a given location was, while NavTech was better at turn-by-turn directions. No idea where MapQuest fits in (at the time, I thought they used NavTech).

IMHO, it's worth checking several sources to triangulate. Just check the fine print on the generated maps, to ensure that you're not looking at two presentations of the same data.

Re:huh?

[jbum]

Yahoo used to get their maps from Map Quest. Since 2002 they've been providing their own service. Both companies use data from Navigation Technologies Corp.

Here's an article on Yahoo's shift from MapQuest:

Yahoo! to MapQuest: Get Lost

Re:Microsoft Streets and Trips

[cmowire]

Good points. ;)

The best part about S&T is that it's more interactive. I've got DSL and S&T is still faster. You can reroute the map if you *know* there's a better way. You can define multiple points on the journey and have a complete route. You can use it to print out *good* directions to meet up at some point.

Best part of all is portability. You can download a S&T map to your PDA (Ain't vendor-lockin grand?) or keep it on your laptop and view the directions that way.

Aereal photos

[YetAnotherName]

MapQuest has the aereal photos feature. 'nuff said.

Re:Definitely MapQuest

[_Sprocket_]

There's an El Camino Real Blvd in Clear Lake, Texas (just south of Houston) near JSC. I thought it was one of these local things, but if there's one in Silicon Valley I must be wrong.

Heh. It caught my attention when I moved from the Clear Lake area to the Bay Area. Bugged me, too.

El Camino Real is "The King's Road". There are actually two El Camino Real's - one in California and one in Texas. They are esentially the first interstate roadways in the New World. In both cases, they were built to link a series Spannish missions.

Following El Camino Real in California is a bit twisty, but one can piece it togeather. Texas' El Camino Real appears to be a bit simpler.

I would guess Clear Lake's road is simply a nod to this historic highway (located much further to the north).

Don't pick, use Google

[babbage]

When searching for an address, I've taken to just searching Google for it. The search is recognized as an address, and the top two links are for Yahoo & MapQuest; each gets opened in a new browser tab for comparison. Sometimes I prefer one, sometimes I prefer the other, but being able to have them side by side so easily gets the job done nicely.

Random recent observations, based on things I happened to be searching for earlier today:

• Given an address in Dorchester MA, Yahoo couldn't find it and gave me a generic map of the city; MapQuest got it just right, and had a properly zoomed in map of the street I was looking for.
• Given an address in Somerville MA, both sites were able to find the address, and gave a map with substantially the same magnification. However, Mapquest was the only one that indicated one way streets, which is kind of critical info when figuring out how what route you'll have to take.
• Given an address in Paris FRA, Mapquest gives up, but Yahoo will automagically redirect to yahoo.fr and the map you were looking for. It's a different site, different layout, all in French, etc -- but the info you're looking for is available from Yahoo, and it wasn't from Mapquest. (On the other hand, Google was also a letdown here -- it's search term parser doesn't seem to be able to do anything useful with a foreign address. Maybe this example would work on google.fr...)
• Subjectively, I kind of prefer the web design on the Yahoo map site. But then, they used to drown me in popups. But then I stopped using browsers where that's an issue, so it doesn't matter again. MapQuest isn't so bad if you click the "Big Map" button over on the right side of a given map, but the setting doesn't seem to be sticky across searches, and it really ought to be a user preference controlled by a cookie.

For searching for domestic addresses, neither Yahoo Maps nor MapQuest has completely won me over. Searching both is easy enough that, barring a site redesign on the Mapquest side or a software upgrade on the Yahoo side, I for one will probably keep using both.

Does anyone know of any good alternatives to the "big two"? Or how about for international addresses -- is Yahoo good enough for addresses in e.g. Canada or Europe, or are there better local alternatives? I've seen streetmap.co.uk cited a lot by Londoners, but I don't know what people tend to use elsewhere, or if streetmap.co.uk has any major competition.

Re:Is NavTech Data OpenSource/Freely available?

[Coffee]

It is, although not preparsed or incredibly well formatted. All of the mapping systems (for the US) use the US Census TIGER/LINE data, which can be downloaded in original form. It's not the simplest of data to decode, and the reason that NavTech et al. charge for theirs is that they went through the trauma of fixing the more horribly broken bits, and realigning the data to be more usuable.