Trend for MapQuest: Down

Overall, this looks like a good update for MapQuest, but these updates are only minor and won't be enough to win back users who have abandoned the service. Our friends at Experian Hitwise were kind enough to provide us with fresh traffic data for Google Maps, MapQuest, Bing Maps and Yahoo Maps. While MapQuest managed to edge out a slight lead in February, Google Maps now owns 45% of the market, while MapQuest's market share has fallen to 35%. Yahoo Maps is now at 6.6% (down from 10.2% in February) and Bing Maps owns 4.3% of the market (up from 3.6%).

For many Internet users, MapQuest is still synonymous with online mapping, but this group is shrinking and Google's relentless pace of releasing updates and new features isn't likely to let up anytime soon.

Once you have created your model, it has to go through an approval process and, if accepted, will be added to Google Earth. Sadly, there is no way to see if another model of the same building already exists except for loading up Google Earth, but even then, you can't be sure that somebody else's model isn't already waiting for approval.

Overall, this looks like a very smart way for Google to enhance the 3D experience in Google Earth and it will be interesting to see if Google will also build more services on top of these 3D-rendered cities at a later point.

It also shows that Google has access to a vast repository of aerial photography of all of these locations. Microsoft's Bing Maps highlights this feature in its bird's eye mode, but Google doesn't surface any of these images yet.

Last week's update to Google Maps introduced new ways to report errors for Google Maps users, so Google is clearly thinking about using a crowdsourcing approach to mapping for Google Maps. Google also announced that it now includes data from a number of US government organizations like the Forest Service and the US Geological Survey in its maps.

In the US, the Census Bureau creates a fairly accurate base map, and this data is available freely and represents the core data set for the OpenStreetMap project. With Map Maker, Google also offers an easy-to-use mapping product that even non-geographers can use to create and edit maps and which Google has already employed to let its users create maps for countries where no accurate maps existed until now.

While the new maps that were launched last week also include new errors, the overall detail of the maps has clearly increased and now even includes data for the boundaries of land parcels in some municipalities.

Why?

The question, of course, is why Google plans to make its own maps now. For one, chances are that Google is currently paying Tele Atlas a lot of money for using its maps. Mapping services are notoriously protective of how their data can be used, which is one of the reasons Apple can't offer turn-by-turn directions in the built-in mapping application on the iPhone, for example. Google probably wants to be free to do whatever it wants with its maps without having to worry about licensing issues.

By providing its own maps and an API for others to use these maps, Google could potentially become a major competitor to Tele Atlas and Navteq now, and if Google continues to make these maps easily available to developers without cumbersome licensing restrictions, it could bring radical change to the mapping business.

If you look at the new maps today, the most obvious changes are better data for park boundaries and the trails and paths that now appear prominently on the maps. In addition, if you see a mistake on a map (a bike trail that is marked as a road, for example), you can simply right-click on the road and the drop-down menu will now include the option to report a problem (there is also a link at the bottom of the map). Sadly, this feature doesn't allow users to redraw maps themselves. Instead, you can only leave a short text comment. Other mapping projects like OpenStreetMap allow users to quickly redraw the lines themselves, though at the cost of increased complexity and a high learning curve. For now, Google promises to resolve each edit within a month.

All of this additional data also adds a new layer of clutter to the maps, though. For now, it is not possible to turn the information about trails and paths on or off, for example. If you are planning a route to drive with your car, you probably won't care much about the bike trails. At the same time, if you are planning a bike trip, it would be nice if you could just highlight all the biking trails in a given area.

Focus on Better Maps Instead of More Satellite Images

The competition between online map providers has mostly been around adding new and higher-resolution satellite images lately. The Bing Maps July update, for example, came in at over 41TB of new satellite imagery and aerial photography. Now, it looks like Google is going back to pushing the envelope by focusing back on the straightforward mapping features that make up the core of every good mapping service.

Currently, as far as we can tell, the only market where Google already offers these ads is Japan, where logos for companies like 7-Eleven and McDonald's appear on the maps. Kit Eaton from Fast Company wonders if the new ads will be contextual and generated based on user input. Judging from the ads that appear on the maps in Japan, these logos will appear on the map, no matter what the user is looking for. At least on the maps in Japan, these logos are very small and don't get in the user's way - though they definitely add more clutter.

Microsoft's Bing Maps already offers a slightly more sophisticated advertising package where certain sponsored listings are highlighted with a business' logo when a user performs a relevant search.

Just yesterday, Google also launched a new layout for the Place Pages on Google Maps that shows details about a business such as opening hours, images, and reviews.

To generate the maps, the small team of Micello users, which numbers only about a dozen employees, takes whatever maps of various businesses, colleges, and other large indoor locations are available and manually maps them out for use in the mobile application. The process of converting an online PDF, for example, to a mapped locale in Micello takes a couple of hours, explains Micello co-founder Anil Agarwal.

To start, Micello will provide maps for the San Francisco Bay area where they already have 150 indoor locations mapped. They will then proceed to map the rest of California and, following that, they'll move onto other major metropolitan areas in the U.S. By the end of next year, they plan to have over 5000 places mapped across the country.

An interesting side note about Micello is how fast they've managed to create this new and incredibly useful resource. They revealed their alpha only months ago at the 2009 JavaOne conference held in June. At the time, the founders were simply looking for feedback as to whether people thought this would be an application worth pursuing. The response was overwhelmingly positive, leading the company to move forward with their plans to create what is Micello today.

In addition to navigating the maps, aided by the iPhone's GPS to show you where you are, Micello users can also locate their Facebook, Twitter, and iPhone contacts within the map community and share their stories, feedback, and other notes about the places they visit. Users can submit error reports, too, if something isn't accurate and the Micello team will make the correction.

Premium Offerings and Future Plans

Further down the road, premium features will be available to businesses and other organizations which will allow them to annotate their listings with additional information, whether that's what speaker begins his presentation at the convention hall downtown or what Macy's will have on sale today. The application may even tap into the "alerting" feature of mobile devices to pop-up optional alerts to customers informing them of a special event or sale.

Versions of Micello for Blackberry, Android, and WebOS platforms are only months away as is a Facebook application. For more information, stay tuned to micello.com for updates.

Update: We just heard back from Google - here is the official statement about which phones will be able to contribute traffic data to Google Maps:

Google Maps products that include location services will make use of this information for traffic. This includes the downloadable Google Maps for Mobile product for mobile phones as well as the Google Maps application for Android phones. One exception is the maps functionality that Google provides for the iPhone - the iPhone does not provide any location data that is used for traffic crowdsourcing at this time.

Google is obviously aware of the potential privacy issues involved here, but according to Dave Barth, the product manager for Google Maps, Google will "find the start and end points of every trip and permanently delete that data so that even Google ceases to have access to it." This way, nobody can find out where a car actually came from.

According to Google, enough users use these phones to make this project feasible. In my experience however, the data for these arterial roads isn't quite as trustworthy as the data for highways.

Overall, though, this is a great project and the more users are aware of it, the better the data will become. However, it is also worth noting that some GPS manufacturers have been using data from their users' GPS systems to crowdsource traffic data for years, though chances are that Google will be able to recruit more users and hence create a better experience for its users.

It Works, But The Competition is Better

When you are looking for a house, location is a key factor, and just like Zillow, Google Maps puts a house's location at the front and center of its presentation. Looking at houses on Google Maps, however, also quickly makes it clear that Google is only aggregating data from listing web sites and getting its data from brokers who update their listing on Google Base. This means that listings on Google Maps are not necessarily as up to date or as comprehensive as those you could find on similar services.

It is also quite obvious that real estate listings aren't the focus of Google Maps. Google's competition generally offers far more options when searching for a house (type of house, lot size, year built, etc.), and does a better job at displaying other important information about a house and the neighborhood (quality of local schools, for example).

While it is good to see that Google is re-dedicating itself to the real estate market, this is hopefully only the beginning of the company's efforts, because in its current state, these listings on Google Maps are a nice addition to a great product, but don't hold up as a real estate offering in its own right.

Now, when a user clicks on "What's here?" Google will return as specific a result as possible, be that an address, a "natural entity," or a place name. When combined with the "At this address" feature, "What's here?" can even be used to return a full list of businesses located at a given address. Hypothetically, that is. The list of conditions for this feature functioning as laid out in the announcement seems to be a bit long and convoluted.

As we zoomed in, specific addresses and place names started popping up on the left side of the screen:

As for finding businesses, however, we found the usefulness of the feature to be limited. Businesses at a specific (down to the street number) address could be found, but businesses across the street or one number over were not linked. And if a range of addresses was selected, we were out of luck unless the business was a significant place, such as a local landmark or historical site. Also, we would have like to see this option integrated better with options such as "Search nearby" to help users find businesses by vertical (restaurant, mechanic, etc.).

Another glitch is that the same rich data (photos, links) was shown for some map points that were a half mile apart or more, even when zoomed in relatively close.

And god help the user who clicks on an intersection. The feature didn't seem to recognize intersections, only street addresses, so no business results could be found given "the corner of X and Y" as coordinates.

All in all, the "reverse geocoding" concept is a necessary and overdue function of Google Maps; however, we feel this feature still needs improvement if it's going to be a handy tool for users with places to go and businesses to find.

Today, MapQuest released its first iPhone app, MapQuest 4 Mobile (iTunes link), and after testing it for a while, it quickly became clear that MapQuest's app is a worthy challenger for the iPhone's built-in mapping application, which is based on Google Maps.

Directions and Local Businesses

Just like the MapQuest web site, the iPhone app focuses on finding local businesses and directions. One of the nicest features of the app is that you can save your maps and routes on the MapQuest.com web site and then retrieve them on your phone. Finding local businesses is also very easy thanks to a carousel with different types of businesses that sits at the bottom of the map. You can just click on the gas station icon, for example, and the map will highlight all the local service stations in the area.

With regards to giving directions, MapQuest 4 Mobile offers a number of very useful features, including the ability to add multiple stops. You can also easily email links to maps and directions directly from the phone. Of course, the app is not a full-blown GPS application like the forthcoming Tom Tom for iPhone, but when you hold the phone in landscape mode, the app will bring up a nice oversized display with the next turn that is very easy to read (though you should probably let your passengers handle the app while you're driving anyway).

Plans for iPhone 3.0?

It will be interesting to see how and if MapQuest will make use of the new features in the upcoming iPhone 3.0 release. After all, these will include push notifications and the ability to provide turn-by-turn directions (MapQuest's BlackBerry app already offers this as a subscription service through AT&T). We have already heard from some companies that plan to use push notifications to send out alerts based on a user's location, and apps like MapQuest 4 Mobile and its competitors could definitely benefit from these new features in iPhone 3.0.

By using a rectangle that conforms to a building's geometry, Street View suddenly also feels a lot more three-dimensional than ever before. According to Google's announcement, Street View can do this thanks to using laser point clouds and by analyzing the differences between consecutive pictures.

Another cool new feature is the ability to go back to your starting point by simply clicking on the return arrow in the Address Box.

As is so often the case for this kind of product, the best way to get a feel for it is to simply head over to Google Maps and drag the little Street View guy to some interesting locations.

More 3D in Google Map's Future?

Given that Google is already surfacing some 3D data in Street View now, it is interesting to speculate what else the company could do with this data. Current 3D maps are often a bit clunky, but at this point, Google's Street View cars have covered an enormous amount of data, and by using a technique similar to Microsoft's PhotoSynth, Google could create an even more compelling 3D experience. Photosynth creates almost 3D-like representations of scenes by stitching together photos shot of the same object or landscape from different angles.

The mobile version of Google Maps on the Pre only made a short appearance, and it didn't look like it really featured anything new, but the experimental version of Gmail looked very impressive. Besides adding support for labels, the most interesting new feature (if Google ever releases this version) was offline access. To make this work, Google makes use of the AppCache and client-side storage features in HTML5, both of which Safari on the iPhone fully supports. Gundotra also stressed how fast the app ran.

Hopefully, Google will ship this new mobile version of Gmail soon, as it looks to be a major update of the current Gmail web app. It will also be interesting to see if Google decides to use the same technology to bring offline access to Google Docs to mobile phones (and standard browsers) as well.

Gmail Demo on iPhone and HTC Magic

Video courtesy of AndroidCommunity.com

Google Maps on the Palm Pre

Video courtesy of PreCommunity.com

According to Hitwise's Heather Hopkings, Google came very close to catching up with MapQuest in December, but somehow, MapQuest managed to gain some ground again in January. Currently, MapQuest holds 39.49% of the market share in the US and Google Maps is at 35.67%.

Update: Hitwise just supplied us with a new graph that includes data for Live Maps and Yahoo Maps.

What is even more interesting, though, is that most of MapQuest's traffic comes from 'brand searches' - that is users who specifically search for 'mapquest.' Eight out of the top ten search terms leading to MapQuest were variations of its brand name and they accounted for 62% of MapQuests' visitors. For Google Maps, only two out of the top ten search terms were branded and they only accounted for 4.2% of Google Maps' traffic.

Old Habits

It is quite amazing how MapQuest manages to hang on to its top position. Google Maps gets over 60% of its traffic from Google itself, yet it seems that using MapQuest, even though it is barely keeping up with the latest technological advancements on the Internet, is still synonymous with online mapping for a majority of Internet users.

In many ways, this means that a service like Microsoft's Live Maps, which is holding on to a very distant third fourth place, is fighting an uphill battle, even though it provides a number of features like its Birds Eye View that even Google Maps doesn't have. For a lot of mainstream users, however, having access to the latest features doesn't necessarily translate into a reason to switch away from an established service.

The photos are plotted out using partially transparent yellow circles instead of the standard Google Map pushpin. Click on any circle and a transparent overlay will appear on the map giving you a filmstrip view of the latest photos.

What a fun way to see the what, where, and when surrounding photos uploaded from last night's New Year's Eve celebrations!

These are very welcome changes that really help take advantage of the eye candy that is Street View in Google Maps. There's a whole lot of changes that were made today, all with the long-term fight for map users and their ad-viewing eyeballs in mind we're sure. Today's changes are great, though.

Map search is a heated competition between Google, Microsoft, MapQuest (now with OpenID, by the way) and a handful of other consumer market competitors. That competition goes on in both features like this and in image quality.

Why invest time and resources into making map search interfaces better? Because someday this is expected to be a very commercialized part of search. Once this kind of experience becomes widely available on touch-screen mobile devices, expect to see ads all over and even more innovation come to online mapping.