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According to Yahoo!, "We've really worked hard to make the product as intuitive as possible while building in some major upgrades in the interface, interactivity, and functionality."
[maps.yahoo.com...]
There's and API, too, for developers [developer.yahoo.net...]
Have a go, what do you think of the interface?
<side note>Google USED to be dead on, until the Google local thing. Now, since my street name is also the name of a widget, it abandons the map idea and tries to show me where to buy that widget in my city. Very annoying.</side note>
maps look nice,
couldn't find my residential address at all.
tried several times with my address and instead it shows me the "center of the city"
also, when I do a search there is no immediate feedback so I can't tell that it's doing anything. The search takes 2, 3, sometimes more than 8 seconds before the view changes, during which time I'm wondering "what's happening?"
They'll get lots of multiple-clickers because of that.
So far I like Google Maps better. ;)
The biggest drawback to any local search is that it depends on the underlying data. Yahoo's data -- whether because of the suppliers or the way Y massages it -- just doesn't cut it. Some of what I'm seeing is halfway current, most is about 4 or 5 years out of date (in one instance the restaurant it shows next door to my building has been closed for at least 10 years), and a couple I know never existed in the locations Y says.
Not yet ready for prime time.
Still, they need to get their basic search right. Why would
<city, full state name> come up with different resutls than <city, postal code for state> be sooooo different. Lots of scraper results on the two-letter postal code, good results on full state name.
So, Y maps is great. But, get Y search's city, state results down, too, eh? Be handy in putting up results on the maps, I would think.
This may be a beta problem but when you go to the printable version, the map changes back to the original resolution and looses the details. It becomes useless in most cases.
In New York and New Jersey where streets signs are often missing, the map with the details of the street names around a street are vital.
Yahoo's map have always been superior to google's or map quest. I'd vote for yahoo to continue to use the old system and not try to emulate the inferior mapping systems.
Extremely annoying, inaccurate and obviously intentional. Especially when the initial search shows the map/sat data you're looking for then the 'link to this page' code (when clicked from one's site) brings up unrelated business(es) and a completely different map as the default. I don't particularly mind other businesses displayed left of the map, but when the guy in the space downstairs is the only bubble on the map after it wasn't on the initial search, then it's just worthless to me. Ripe for the picking Yahoo...
I get a blank page in IE6 w/ Flash disabled. Get the old kindergarten map in Opera with plugins disabled though.
In fact, I have never been able to find anything at all on Google Maps.
I think the biggest disadvantage with the Google Maps API is that you can't pass it a street address, you have to get the geo-coords (lat-long) from someone like geocoder.us then you can pass this data to the map.
Yah, that was it. Flash is really slow on my Powerbook so I keep it disabled. Their new interface is pretty slick, but I'll be sticking with Google Maps until they have an AJAX version.
But, I want satellite views because it's a lot cooler.
