Thursday, July 2. 2009

MapQuest Adds July 4 Events to its Maps

In the spirit of the upcoming July 4th Independence Day events, MapQuest has added another icon on its maps - it's a startburst firework. Clicking on it shows July 4th celebrations from When.com, which is not all that complete. The icon joins the other regular ones (some hotel chains), grocery stores, bars, pharmacies...

Adding road closures related to those would be a nice addition!

via LA Times

Friday, June 26. 2009

MapQuest "input error" fixed in a few hours

This is just not the type of story you hear about much. In Clarksburg, Maryland if you ask for directions to the High School from MapQuest or some GPSs you don't end up there, but rather at a private street. But, unlike other private citizens and journalists, instead of contacting Tele Atlas or NAVTEQ about a data error, the local TV station contacted MapQuest and AAA. The response from MapQuest:

ABC 7 contacted MapQuest and AAA. MapQuest said they had pin-pointed the problem and would have it fixed in a few hours, citing a simple data input error. Now, maybe the folks who live along the road can have some peace.

I found the high school using MapQuest's search tool here. The track and football field convince me this is a school. Using the address given in the article from ABC7 I seem to get the centroid (I think) of the town, suggesting to me that MapQuest could not geocode the address and thus defaulted to the centroid. MapQuest's address for the high school is River Hill High School 12101 Clarksville Pike, Clarksville, MD 21029 while the article cites 2250 Wims Road. I had the same results with Google.

- News Channel 8

Thursday, June 18. 2009

Best Maps of Tehran? User Generated

Brady Forrest at O'Reilly Radar studies the map portal's maps of the area and concludes:

"Looking at the images below [ Yahoo, Mapquest, Google, and Bing] it becomes very clear that user-generated maps win in hard to reach places."

Flickr has even swapped out Yahoo Maps in favor OSM (something they've done before).

Monday, June 15. 2009

MapQuest wants you to know...

This from MapQuest:

Today, MapQuest released the new MapQuest 4 Mobile for iPhone application. This free application represents a leap forward in how people interact with maps, directions and local search on their iPhones. MapQuest 4 Mobile for iPhone includes one-tap category search, easy options for creating and following routes (multi-point and full-screen landscape view) and integration with MapQuest.com. Businesses also benefit with an option for placing branded icons in the app.

More at the MapQuest blog.

Friday, May 8. 2009

Online Mapping Slowing Canada/US Traffic

Why is the Lewiston-Queenston bridge so busy and slow and nearby ones have no waiting and no lines? NITTEC Executive Director Tom George thinks it has to do with online mapping.

We call that the 'Google Phenomenon' because they will take that map from Mapquest or Google and follow it it doesn't matter how long they have to sit when directly adjacent to them is another facility where they can drive directly across the border. People go ahead and follow that right into that bridge even though there's other bridges with 0 or 30 minutes or less.

- WGRZ Buffalo

Wednesday, April 15. 2009

Update: Google Maps (Finally) Tops Mapquest

Update: Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land notes that Hitwise looks further at the data and notes that while Google Maps has the edge in traffic, MapQuest still has the edge in engagement. That is, folks stay longer at MapQuest (almost 11 minutes to 7.5 at Google Maps). Could it be folks find their answers more directly at Google Maps? Or are more familiar with it and thus more efficient? I for one am slower using MapQuest since I use it far less.

--- original post 4/14/09 ----------
Blumenthals has the stats and graph from Hitwise. Over the weekend Google Maps hit 39.38% of the travel maps category and MapQuest took just 39.14%. Whew, now that that's settled, back to work...

via @NAVTEQ via Twitter