The Mossberg Solution takes a look at the online mapping services:
This week, my assistant Katie Boehret and I tested the old reliable, MapQuest, against Google Local, http://maps.google.com, and a new, enhanced version of Yahoo Maps, http://maps.yahoo.com/beta. Yahoo’s new site was just released last week, and it’s still in its “beta,” or test, phase.
As everyone who has used online mapping knows, it has its limitations. The mapping services too rarely spit out the kind of smart, speedy routes a savvy local driver would choose. Their suggested routes are generally more convoluted, and sometimes wrong. But, in most cases, they do get you where you’re going, and thus are a boon to drivers unfamiliar with the area in question.
These newer sites are free, like MapQuest, but they offer some fancy features, like the ability to pan across a map simply by moving your mouse’s cursor, or zooming in or out on a location quickly. Google adds satellite photos of the actual locations, down to the trees in your front yard.
MapQuest looks a little dowdy by comparison to the newcomers, but it works for a lot of folks because it gets people from point A to point B, without any extra fuss. So, we tested these new features from Google and Yahoo to see if they were actually useful, or just a lot of hype that muddied up the direction-retrieval process.
Overall, we concluded that, for the sake of getting where you’re going with the most-thorough directions, MapQuest still does the best job, with the most accurate directions. But Yahoo has a multipoint routing feature that’s valuable. And, for some, the ability to quickly pan a geographic region on Yahoo and Google — with satellite photos on the latter — can familiarize them with the surrounding area and make the drive easier.