A Review of Online Mapping Sites: Introduction

A weblog for members of the Canadian Cartographic Association and other individuals interested in all things cartographic

A Review of Online Mapping Sites: Introduction

Published Saturday, October 22, 2005 by CCAer | E-mail this post

ZDNET reported on a Hitwise survey conducted in July, 2005 that indicated Yahoo! Maps captured 41% of the users in the online mapping market (presumably in the American market only), followed by MapQuest at 33.4%. Relative newcomer (at the time) Google Maps captured less than 10% of the market and other online mapping services captured less than 5%. The statistics might have changed since then but are the most popular online mapping sites the best? A comparitive survey might be useful.

Seven online mapping services were considered. For an online mapping service to be considered, it had to provide

street maps for central Ontario (my home base) and
directions between two locations in the same area.

This is obviously a very biased approach to deciding what to include and others will have different standards. The online mapping services considered included the following:

Each site was assessed by user interface, search capabilities, maps, and results. Over the next several days each of the above online mapping site will be reviewed.

October 23: Google Maps / Local
October 24: Map24
October 25: Maporama
October 26: Mapquest
October 27: MSN Maps
October 28: Rand McNally
October 29: Yahoo! Maps
October 30: Summary

2 Responses to “A Review of Online Mapping Sites: Introduction”

Anonymous on 7:35 AM

I agree with your approach, I take the same view on online mapping. What use is a map with data only for the USA when you live in Canada (or the UK).

It is good to see maps (Cartography) and GIS intergrating online. It really visualises the power of spatial information.

The Cartographic and GIS fields are very small communities, having the big players like yahoo,google and msn coming in and expanding it to the masses is a good thing.

Remember 90% of all information has a location.

Its like when 'toy story' came to our screens and raised the bar in computer animation.

With the power of most new computers its easy to handle large amounts of data. Now it is important to understand the data.

mapperz
http://www.mapperz.blogspot.com
x never marks the spot, x,y does with a bit of z.
Anonymous on 4:55 AM

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