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

Definitely MapQuest

[sakeneko]

I've caught them in exactly two errors in four or five years of regular use. I'd gladly pay a monthly membership fee for them if they weren't a free service. (SHHHHH!!! Don't tell them.) ;>

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).

Seriously?!

[NoData]

"I've been using MapQuest most of my life,

HOLY SHIT do I feel old.

Sweet Spot

[l810c]

My main problem with ALL of the online mapping sites(And even Street & Trips and Rand McNally software) is they miss the Sweet Spot.

Somewhere between 2 and 3(or similar) on the zoom scales. 2 is just a tad too close, you click 3 and BAM you get the whole town. No neighborhood street names or other smaller details to help guide you on that last mile. Sure I could print directions or two maps, but it's still very annoying.

It would nice to be able to click on a particular street name or other landmark and have it 'stick' through zoom levels.

Yahoo(and Some of the others also wack out my neighborhood map. I live 2 houses from the county line and Yahoo breaks my street on the county line putting the ends 200 m apart. It would cause somebody using it for directions to my house to drive about a mile out of the way if coming from the other county.

Oh yeah, and why is the push pin marker on the wrong side of the street 80% of the time?

Maps for walking routes?

[bokelley]

Something I have been looking for is a mapping site that will let me plot a route - say from 42nd and Madison to 14th and 6th - as I would walk it, not as a car would have to drive it (that is, ignore one way streets and such). Generally, because I want to find out how far I have to walk to get to a meeting or something.

Extra credit would be if I could draw a diagonal line through a park (since I can cut through). Or if it estimated walking time the way it done driving time.

Any ideas?

Some UK map sites

[bartash]

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

Re:Some UK map sites

[moreati]

If you have a recent java installed, then map24 knocks the veritable socks off all the competition. It displays an interactive vector map, complete with smooth scrolling, zooming and mouse over feature description.

The formatting of the route planning directions leaves a little to be desired, but that's the biggest fault I can think of. On the whole it compares favourably even to MS Autoroute - except it's free, always up to date and cross platform.

If you don't have java it falls back to a static image.

Regards

Alex

I've always preferred MapBlast

[Delusional]

MapBlast has always produced easier-to-read maps and better quality directions, in my experience. Sadly, their availability waivered for a while there (presumably financial/business model difficulties), and at some point they got bought by ... M$. But you can still type in mapblast.com, it just points to a mapping page on MSN, which, at least so far, retains most of the quality that I always appreciated.

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.

Re:Mapquest ~= Yahoo Maps =~ NavTech

[nicfit]

True, the both use Navtech (as well as other data sources depending on the area being rendered), but the routing engines themselves are different. NavTech == data. Although NavTech may have a routing engine, MapQuest does not use it. And up until the AOL acquisition of MapQuest, Yahoo Maps was just a front-end on top of MapQuest technology.

An alternative service

[NearlyHeadless]

Not for the U.S., but check this out.

Don't visit Rhode Island!

[MarcQuadra]

Don't visit Rhode Island unless you want directions like:

"Go up this street to where the jewlery store burned down, take a left onto 6 and get off near where the old onramp used to be, then head towards Fort Thunder, which is now a Stop and Shop"

Seriously, that's how we give directions here. I didn't believe it until I caught myself doing it.

Microsoft Streets and Trips

[someguy456]

I hope I don't get modded down into oblivion, but I really like Microsoft Streets and Trips. I have the 2002 edition that came with Microsoft Works Suite. Online maps are slow (I'm on modem) and they don't feel right. I get the feeling that they are limited to certain rectangles. With S&T, I can get the feel for the whole map. I can scroll to the edges just as easy/fast as I would scroll on a web page or spreadsheet. From the routes I've gotten from around my area, I can't say either (Yahoo, MapQuest, S&T) is any better than the other. For example, they all insist on me taking highways, even if it takes longer to get there (yes, I know about scenic, shorter, faster,etc, but it didn't make much of a difference)

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.

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.

MSN! (asbestos undies on...)

[frenchgates]

I love MSN best for maps because it is the only one I've found that lets me expand the map display to actually use the resolution of my monitor instead of scrolling the postage stamp map around.

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

Aereal photos

[YetAnotherName]

MapQuest has the aereal photos feature. 'nuff said.

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:Security issues with MapQuest

[ruiner13]

"MapQuest has some security issues, and I wouldn't recommend using it without cookies turned off or blocked. "

Oh no! They'll find out the quickest path between all the porn and bong shops in the Indianapolis metro area! The horrors!

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.