Yahoo has launched YahooMaps for India. The application has just gone live. I spent 15 minutes of my Sunday morning tinkering with it and I am impressed. The application works well, the maps are superior in readability as compared to MapmyIndia (India’s best online mapping application); the maps also seem to be reasonable well populated with data about local facilities and businesses (at least for the bigger Indian cities)
Its basic layout and design is similar to what has become a standard for most online mapping applications. The interface is ajaxified and the tiled maps were downloading fairly fast on my 256 kbps broadband connection. You can search by specifying the street, locality, city or state. You can also search for local utilities (or businesses) like hotels, cinema halls, police stations etc. You can zoom into the map by double clicking, though the zooming interaction is flaky and unintuitive (I think, zooming is best done on GoogleMaps). There is a collapsible window that shows the map inset. And you can chose from three views- map, satellite or a hybrid of both.
Something interesting to note is that the mapping data seems to be sourced from CE Info Systems, the parent company of MapmyIndia. This would mean that MapmyIndia is not shying away from selling its data to a global giant like Yahoo, which could be its biggest competitors in the coming days (for online maps). This makes perfect sense because CEI is much more than just MapmyIndia. It is a GIS pioneer and is the single largest repository of digital spatial data in India. This also brings home the point that reliable mapping data is the single biggest barrier to entry in this space (in India). (I must add that this inference is purely based on what I see on YahooMaps. I’d probably write to MapmyIndia to get a confirmation on this) The satellite data seems to be sourced from I-Cubed.
Update on 6/4/07: I have received a confirmation from MapmyIndia about their deal with Yahoo; other deals are forthcoming in the near future as well.
The readability of Yahoo’s maps is much better than MapmyIndia’s own maps. And the mapping data seems to be fairly well populated, specially for metros. I searched for Green Park, in New Delhi, where my office is located. I could locate many restaurants, hotels, movie halls etc in its vicinity. Just to cross check, I also searched randomly for two smaller cities – Allahabad in UP (my hometown) and Indore in MP (one of my cousin stays there). The basic maps that come up are good, though searching for hotels, restaurants etc in these cities did not throw up anything meaningful. Something that is missing is the ability to embed the map into your blog or website, which is possible with MapmyIndia, and which can be very useful for virality.
Overall, the application looks great for a start. And when you see this in continuation of the mashups sites for Indian cities, that Yahoo launched sometime back, you can discern the efforts Yahoo is making to become a mainstream internet portal for India (Watch out- Rediff, Indiatimes, Sify). It does not take a soothsayer to predict that the YahooMaps site will soon get integrated into the mashup sites (might already have been done, for I haven’t checked).
Other mapping applications covered on Webyantra –
– MapmyIndia rocks Indian Web2.0 with GoogleMap type digitised mapping
– MapmyIndia adds killer feature…embedding map snippets into blogs, websites
– OnYoMo….making life better in Delhi & Bangalore
– Mapunity…a social development focused GIS solution
Thanks, Amit Ranjan for the good review. Embed blog is on it’s way. We are trying to make sure it is useful to the blogging community in more than one ways. I am sure you will be happy when it comes out. We d love to hear your suggestions on this one.
Shivku,
Glad to know the embeds are coming…it makes the application so much more compelling and viral as well.
amit
So does this mean that Yahoo has beatedn GoogleMaps in India as far as mapping applications are concerned?
K
Ok … this is cool … BUT
Isn’t online-mapping the same as “direction finding” for most of the people?
I for one, lost interest in 2 minutes once I found out there is no direct interface to get directions.
Cool that Yahoo is launching this … but given that you can already get directions on MapMyIndia … this “review” on your blog is extremely premature … and the comparisions to MapMyIndia unfair!
Great application add on. Fluid and suprisingly not using Flash (or is it?). Also any of you guys know if this is available via their Yahoo maps API? I just checked and didn’t seem so.
-nav
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I think Google is already ahead in the race …. I used local.google.com for delhi 1-2 months back.
The only thing is they have not created a separate domain for india like yahooguyz did. (http://in.maps.yahoo.com/)
You can visit delhi @ local.google.com here –> http://local.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=delhi&layer=&ie=UTF8&z=13&om=1&iwloc=addr
Yahoo and mapmyindia both sucks. Most of the information on smaller towns are outdated,wrong or confusing. Come on, I am not going to use this to find out map between important cities like Mumbai to Pune or find hotels in Pune on a map !!! I found some famous towns like kanchipuram being anchored (when searched the anchor goes to a different city) some 100 KMS away. The highways in some towns are named incorrectly like highway was repeated (2 highways run parallel with same number) when i last searched. Plus there is no zoom. When you cant see more than important towns, its NOT ALL a zoomed image. After being a regular user of yahoo maps (usa) and mapquest, this is zillion light years away.
Shame on yahoo to buy a digitized map and fix it up with quick dirty work just to enter this maps market early. Its just a glorified scanned road map !!!
*that was highway 4.
goa
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Axim um analysis, he online Hence the simulated bank stuff ge money why the services be made!
Does yahoo have an API for Yahoo maps India???
@soniya I was trying to figure out same thing.