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?

Yahoo++ || --Mapquest

[SeanTobin]

I've found that Yahoo is better at finding roads when I don't have the complete information (i.e. no zip code). I've tried a few times to find an address in mapquest, only to give up and find it instantly in yahoo maps.

I'm sure there are several examples going the other way as well. In any event, its always better to have several competing services than one monopolistic non-innovative service.

Some UK map sites

[bartash]

In the UK try Streetmap [streetmap.co.uk]or Multimap [multimap.com]. IMHO UK Yahoo maps [yahoo.com] isn't very good.

Re:Maps for walking routes?

[Pathwalker]

maporama [maporama.com] lets you do that, at least for the UK.

It gives 3 route planning choices - by foot, by foot and subway, and by car.

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:Definitely MapQuest

[JoshRoss]

You can get great trip ticks through AAA.com, if you are a paying member.

Mapblast's Line Drive

[hedgehog2097]

In the UK: My vote is for Line Drive on Mapblast [mapblast.com] for directions, and streetmap.co.uk [streetmap.co.uk] for er, street-type maps.

Line Drive is surprisingly accurate (to 1/10 mile) if you reset your mileometer at every turning and reference point, and follow the distances. But who does that? (A: me, I'm a navigational klutz and need all the help I can get)... MapKlutz Hint: Do a return journey route too...

...Oh, and MS bought Mapblast, so it sucks now (sorry, forget where I was for a minute!)

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 [internet.com]

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.

Re:They are (often, mostly) the same

[CoreyCrawford]

We actually use quiet a few different mapping data backends, some of which are NavTech, GDT, TeleAtlas, and other "special" data compiled from various resources.

Security issues with MapQuest

[sgifford]

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

There's a cross-site scripting attack which allows people to steal cookies for the site, which will include personal information such as the last three searches you did.

See this advisory [securiteam.com] for more info.

Aereal photos

[YetAnotherName]

MapQuest [mapquest.com] has the aereal photos feature. 'nuff said.

Re:Use Vindigo

[oniroku]

Vindigo for Palm devices provides exactly what you are looking for - it's the one killer app for handhelds.

Re:Sweet Spot

[mindriot]

There's a mapping service for Germany and most of Europe here [map24.de]. I like their interactive map display using a JAVA applet. Works well on Linux as on Windows, and allows you to zoom around very freely. Worked well for all routes I needed recently. Don't know about your other points of critique, but at least I find the interface usable enough to get good results, and mostly exact enough to get a decent enough description.

Re:Another: mapsonus.com

[obfuscated]

mapsonus was built by the good people at Lucent.

They not only let you store locations, but do a point to point map (A->D with stops in B, and C) which is _really_ nice.

They also have a light integrated yellowpages and you can also look up landmarks on it.

They also have the feature for shortest route, fastest route, avoid freeways, favor freeways, etc.

Mapsonus is definately underrated. You should give it a try.

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 [pacificnet.net] is a bit twisty, but one can piece it togeather. Texas' El Camino Real [houstonculture.org] 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).

Yahoo is more reliable

[Anonymous Coward]

I've found that using Mapquest has given me bad directions too many times. Mapquest seems encounter problems sometimes when a street doesn't really follow a straight line. For example, people have used both Yahoo and Mapquest to get to my home (I live in a city in California). As you come off the highway, the road curves to the right, but as long as you stay on it, you can reach my home correctly. Yahoo correctly tells people there is a slight curve to the right. However, Mapquest seems to (and don't ask me why) intepret the road as splitting off and tells the user to take a LEFT on a completely different road. This can happen a lot in the city too (for me in both Chicago and San Fran). Yahoo hasn't branched me off to wrong streets yet, but I wouldn't say Yahoo's directions are 100% either. However, I would highly recommend Yahoo over Mapquest any day.

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:Microsoft Streets and Trips

[wolf-]

At the atlanta Winxp Launch Event, they were giving away Mappoint 2002. I had owned Streets and Trips 2001 and liked it. Mappoint's COM extensions were great for integrating it into other apps.

When Streets and Trips 2004 came out, grabbed a copy of it on sale (was like $25) after rebates.

Just got my copy of Mappoint 2004 about 2 weeks ago. Really like the updated maps.

What I do think needs some work is the GPS interface. MP can track the location of your vehicle from a gps device, but it does NOT help you on your trip by telling you what turns are coming up in relation to your current location.

Re:Definitely MapQuest

[Graff]

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.

Well, depending on your definition of "first interstate highway" you would have to give that title to either the Boston Post Road [wikipedia.org] or one of three roads [dot.gov] built in the 1950's. The problem is that interstate roads didn't truly exist in a legal sense until the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956.

However, the Boston Post Road is widely recognized as the first major road in the United States, it has existed in one form or another since at least 1673. The El Camino Real [pacificnet.net], in comparison, has been around since about 1769.

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.

European maps

[MacFreek]

For US-based addresses it's either MapQuest [mapquest.com] or Yahoo maps [yahoo.com]. I think they are very simular.

For Dutch maps (where I live), I use locatienet [locatienet.nl] or Andes [andes.nl]. The first one being slightly better.

There are way too many options nowadays. See Oddens [geog.uu.nl] for a collection of links, including to historic maps (not useful if you just want to find an address, only for the curious of heart).

MapsOnUs

[Dont tempt me]

Just another one to throw into the fray, but MapsOnUs (the backend site to Maps.com) has one feature that's invaluable to me -- it displays the lat/lon for every intersection along a route. For GPS tinkerers, it makes it nice to know the lat/lon of a place you've never been too, and with a few utilitys on the internet, you can even make it into a route for the crudest of GPS's.

I haven't found another that had the lat/lon easily displayable.