Online Map Sites Chart a Pretty Good Course
By Jill B. Hart
Like other folks who spend a lot of time online, I’m always looking for online resources that help make offline life a bit easier. Online map sites are among my favorite Internet time savers. Just go to a site, type in the address you want to visit and voila! You’re presented with a colorful map that shows exactly how to get there.
Well, at least that’s what they promise.
All too often, the online map sites I’ve used have done a great job of putting me in the right neighborhood, but they miss the mark when it comes to the exact location of the place I want to go.
Sometimes they are off by as much as a block -- which can be very annoying if you’re in an area with limited parking.
For this column I decided to put three online map sites to the test. I visited MapQuest.com, one of the original online map sites, along with MapBlast.com and the mapping service of Microsoft’s Expedia.com
Mapping with MapQuest
MapQuest is pretty ubiquitous on the Web. Lots of sites, including Yahoo, offer their users MapQuest maps. Local interest Web sites -- the kind where you can look up a restaurant review and then get directions to the restaurant -- also use MapQuest’s services.
Several years ago -- back at the dawn of the Internet era -- I needed to find an address in Fairfax County, Va. Being an early adopter, I went to MapQuest and printed out a map supposedly showing the location. After 45 minutes of driving, I discovered that the map had put me in the opposite part of the county from where I needed to be. Since then, I’ve always viewed MapQuest’s maps and directions a bit skeptically.
It may be time to re-evaluate this opinion.
To my surprise, in my tests, MapQuest turned out to be the most accurate of the Internet mapping services.
I used three addresses to check the mapping services. The first is my parent’s home in New Jersey. The second is an address in a newly incorporated community in South Florida. The third is the address of a building in Washington, D.C., where I used to work.
Accurate, More or Less
MapQuest accurately revealed the position of all three addresses. Expedia was a very close second. MapBlast incorrectly identified the Florida address -- positioning the location about a block and a half from its true position -- through it was only off a little bit for the other two addresses.
The Web sites for each service load fairly quickly (this was not always true of MapQuest). Each site offers a form for entering a specific address. MapQuest and MapBlast put this form on their main page. On Expedia, you must click a “maps” tab, then select “find a map” to get to the form.
Once you enter in the address (including state and/or zip), you click a button to start the mapping process. Your Web browser will churn for a bit as the map loads. Maps generally appear rather small -- about the size of a baseball card, but each service has a link which allows you to enlarge the map (though this will cause the map to load more slowly).
The maps are nice and colorful. Parks are shown in green. Lakes are in blue. City streets are in yellow. Various points of interest can be toggled on and off. MapBlast and MapQuest have deals with various companies, such as Starbucks and Denny’s, and you can have locations for these businesses appear on your map as well.
Each site allows you to print maps, though MapBlast and MapQuest give you a great degree of control over how the printed map will appear. Both sites allow you to adjust the size of the map. MapBlast lets you print maps in color, grayscale or black and white. MapQuest offers three styles: bright colors, neutral colors or grayscale.
Mobile Mapping
Both MapQuest and MapBlast allow you to download your map to a Palm or Windows CE-based electronic organizer via AvantGo software. Installation of the software is fairly easy, assuming you’re familiar with how to load software onto your device (clear instructions are provided for first-timers). On my black and white PalmPilot the map appears clear and readable. It should look very nice on a color screen. This feature is very useful for mobile professionals and well worth the effort.
Similar services are also available to users of web-enabled cell phones.
Online mapping has come a long way from the days when MapQuest sent me off in the wrong direction. These sites have become a useful, generally reliable and increasingly indispensable services. So the next time you need to find an address put away the atlas or street map and turn on your computer.
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