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?

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?

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.

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.

Is NavTech Data OpenSource/Freely available?

[jwiegley]

It looks like everyone uses NavTech data for all of these in car navigation systems.

I was wondering if the data on the CDs you buy from NavTech is actually available in a handy electronic form for free?

It just seems like linux is missing a really cool opportunity to cash in on the embedded navigation market but doesn't seem to be doing so and I was wondering if this is because we can't get any access to decent electronic roadmap data without significant cost or NDAs.