We saw last week that MapQuest was the first to kick off this amazing map revolution in 1996 followed by Yahoo 6 years later, then OpenStreetMap began in 2004. Google started their service in early 2005 and Bing in 2007.
So who is the most popular of these services? It is interesting to note that all of the services are still in operation today with Bing being the only mapping service that has merged with another service (Bing merged with Microsoft's Virtual Earth back in 2009).
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| Of course we do! |
I guess I was a little surprised that there was very little 'free' information on the web that showed the usage statistics of each of The Big 5 mapping services. There are of course many web tracking sites that claim to monitor the usage of third party site but require a fee to access their data. And one has to wonder how reliable their data is?
I was able to find a 'reasonably reliable' website called Quantcast, www.quantcast.com. Quantcast make available a free list that contains the top 1 million U.S. web sites based on estimated traffic by Quantcast. Quantcast claim that Google (the search engine web site) is the most visited site in the U.S. The data unfortunately doesn't say anything about Google Maps. Yahoo (the search engine) comes in at number 3 as the most visited site in the U.S. Bing (the search engine) at number 19 (again the data says nothing about the mapping services of the Yahoo and Bing empires!). MapQuest pops up at number 23 and OpenStreetMap comes in at the 29,075th position.
So what can we read into these rankings by Quantcast? Is Google Maps the most popular multi scale web mapping site due to its search engine site being the number 1 visited site in the U.S? Quantcast estimates that Google Maps receives 50.9 million hits per month in the U.S! When you consider that Google Maps pretty much dominate the mobile market with the iPhone and Android it probably not unrealistic to assume that they are the most likely number 1 choice for users. Google Maps now certainly offers the most value for your buck (so to speak!).
It is very difficult to make any further assumptions about the other four providers. We know that MapQuest is very popular in the U.S. (more so than anywhere else in the world) and has long been the leading online mapping service in the U.S. for many years and Quantcast's stats confirm they are still very much right up there with Google Maps. Perhaps Yahoo is just as popular or even more popular than MapQuest due to its high search engine ranking. Likewise with Bing.
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| Oops, did I just assume something? |
I will continue to research and expand on the popularity of web mapping services throughout this blog. If anyone else can support or knows of any other authoritative statistics or information in relation to the popularity of these online mapping services please let me know!
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Web Trend Map 4. You have to check out this map.The map shows the 300 most influential web sites mapped onto a Tokyo train map!! |
