It's All Geek to Me!

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June 25, 2005

Idle games with mapping services

Some of the major providers of mapping and directions services on the Web today are Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, MapQuest and MSN MapPoint (especially after it acquired the pioneers of LineDrive™, MapBlast. Of these, I find myself using Google Maps, MSN MapPoint and Yahoo! Maps the most. Of course, in recent times, Google Maps has managed to hog most of the attention because of its excellent user interface. For the kind of geek like me, who spent his childhood poring over atlases trying to beat his friends in placename games, it lets him idly glide over vast landmasses with a responsive user interface that fully stretches the capabilities of modern browsers. However, in terms of raw mapping capability, I respect MSN MapPoint a lot more. It is after all made by the same company that backs the preëminent TerraServer. (I do note that Google Maps gets to say it is perpetually in beta.)

[For your convenience and ease of comparison, all links after this line open in new windows.]

Let's say you get sick of the cold in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska and want desperately to drive all the way to Miami, Florida. This route pretty much approximates the furthest you can travel between any two points in the United States. You could get a set of fairly comprehensive directions from MSN MapPoint, which tell you that you'd be driving for almost 90 hours, or nearly 4 straight days of driving.

You would think Google Maps lets you find directions between the same two points. Nothing too hairy -- they are both in the United States and lie on the contiguous North American landmass (I am not going to be pathological and choose a point in say, Hawaii.) Wrong! Perhaps it is because the route travels through Canada. So let's try a route from Bellingham, WA to Miami, FL, something Google Maps spits back at you after some thought. Let's change Bellingham, WA to Edmonton, AB. Voila, it works! So it's not the lack of Canadian highway data that prevents a route's being calculated from Prudhoe Bay, AK to Miami, FL.

If you want to see the true power of MSN MapPoint, try a route from Prudhoe Bay, AK to Villahermosa, Mexico, which approximates the furthest you can travel between any two points in North America. MapPoint casually informs you that you have almost 102 hours, or more than 4 straight days of driving ahead of you. To locate Villahermosa, Mexico, I used the Find a Place tab on MSN MapPoint to paste in a free-form North American place name. From our experience so far, I don't think we need to key in these addresses into Google Maps to guess that it cannot generate this route, but let's confirm our suspicions.

At this point, the Slashdot crowd would say Google is adhering to its motto of being not evil and protecting the remote environmental preserves of Alaska by not providing directions for people to drive through them. Of course, in contrast, Microsoft is getting ready to take over North America, nay, the world, with its comprehensive mapping and routing solution. In reply to this, I have only one piece of wisdom that I also picked up from Slashdot, "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." MSN MapPoint sometimes likes to give you the scenic route. Until it was fixed recently, the quickest route between two cities in Norway used to cross 7 countries and take almost 48 hours. After they fixed the route, it takes only 11 hours. Before taking over the world, MSN MapPoint definitely has to root out other similar routing gems that may exist in its database.

Google Maps and MSN MapPoint each have their shortcomings, but I am going to thank my good fortune they are not as bad as some other maps out there. Here's a gem Karolina discovered: go to this listing of mattress retailers in New York, NY and click on the map link for Dial a Mattress at 991 Third Avenue, New York, NY. Waterbed, anyone?

Update: I ran into another fairly big boo-boo by Google Maps: their apparent confusion between Belgium and The Netherlands. In case they correct it later, here's a screen capture I made. The weirdest thing is that the problem fixes itself if you increase the zoom by a couple of levels.

Posted by Vishy at June 25, 2005 01:09 AM

Comments

Posted by: Punya at June 28, 2005 04:13 AM