I believe you’ve met your match. More on this later–unless 50,000 other folks have written about it when I wake up. Then I won’t bother.
Here are some of the comments from readers regarding Google Maps versus Mapquest:
Mellissa Pottle wrote this:
This is cool. I think Google has ensconced themselves as being the last to come out with the best products.
Kevin B wrote this:
Heh, yeah — the early worm gets eaten, and all that.
Matt, did you notice you can zoom in and out with the + and – keys? There are a few hotkeys.
I love being able to get directions as easy as typing “123 any st 94043 to sfo”. And I love the turn-by-turn popups. And… 🙂
Kev Spencer wrote this:
More javascript goodness. I’m liking those popup windows with the cool shadows. Go go gadget Google.
Justin Rudd wrote this:
I don’t know about old map data. I live in a city that is less than 3 years old, and Google’s maps are the only one that have my address. Not exact, but within a tenth of a mile.
Mapquest and MapPoint point my address on the map 10 miles from where I really live.
Andrew Ducker wrote this:
Of course, Mapquest recognises that there are countries outside of the US, whereas Google Maps doesn’t…
Praveen wrote this:
The Map tool from google is amazing , sure that it’l kick up dirt on this front and pave the way for yahoo to come up with something better.
rich wrote this:
The tricky bit about not handling Canada is that it affects Americans too — especially around the Great Lakes, the sensible way from point A to B can easily be to cross the border twice.
The user interface bites: the low-contrast map made me push my laptop display way back, streets with text on them are really wide, the zoom “slider” does nothing if you don’t slide to the next zoom level (why not have buttons, then?), the four-arrow button *loses where I was* and I can’t even click to zoom.
Google’s usually better at product differentiation than this.
Hah, wait, Canada *is* included, they just don’t tell you that on the first map you see! That’s silly, but a nice surprise.
Jeremy Zawodny is the author of the popular Jeremy Zawodny’s blog. Jeremy is part of the Yahoo search team and frequently posts in the Yahoo! Search blog as well.
Visit Jeremy’s blog: Jeremy Zawodny’s blog.
