Did Google Maps's "consistency" help it climb to #1 in maps?

http://www.41latitude.com/post/1059847167/consistency

by j053003 • 16 years ago

38 27 16 years ago

41latitude.com

vladk• 16 years ago

For me, and many I know it was speed. Scroll speed, zoom speed, search speed. Even today GMaps wins in that category.

I barely ever use satellite view for anything but casual amusement.

boundlessdreamz• 16 years ago

yeah.. never used satellite view except for "shit, i can se e my house on google maps!" type of amusement.

Also before Google and Google Earth, online maps for many countries were not very good. Those with the data was not very interested in creating online maps.

Speed and ease of use is what made maps a killer product for me

andrewvc• 16 years ago

Satellite view's actually really useful for mountain biking. You can see a good number of trails on it (though sometimes its out of date).

ghurlman• 16 years ago

It's there that Bing really wins out for me... Bing's "bird's eye" view is perfect for checking out locations before you go for visual cues.

adriand• 16 years ago

V3 of the Google Maps API is blindingly fast. Unbelievable how much they've sped up since V2 , and V2 was already fast.

csmeder2• 16 years ago

Really? Is the author too young to remember that Google maps was the first company to not do maps horribly?

Before google maps, online maps were an insult to the user. You would get a 200px by 200px image of a crappy map surrounded by 10 ads that flashed at you. If you wanted to scroll to the right you had to click an arrow. It would then take about 30 seconds for the map and adds to reload.

Google did maps right, and eventually yahoo and map quest followed, but by the time they did it was too late everyone was using google maps and had no reason to switch.

jacquesm• 16 years ago

> Is the author too young to remember that Google maps was the first company to not do maps horribly?

I don't know... but it was actually an acquisition:

http://androidelectronics.com/tag/where-2-tech/

barry82• 16 years ago

Really? Is the author too young to remember that Google maps was the first company to not do maps horribly?

Consistency is one of the reasons why the maps are no longer horrible.

metamemetics• 16 years ago

User interface is far more important. The majority of use cases were people looking for directions to places in non-satellite view.

Google maps was the first one where you could simply drag a fullscreen map around with your mouse and zoom with mouse wheel.

I suspect it wasn't until after this user interface enhancement that people even bothered exploring satellite views much.

streetlight• 16 years ago

2nd sentence: What I’m about to tell you is probably not the real reason why Google Maps is the “Number 1” mapping service on the web (in terms of site traffic)—but I do believe that it’s one of the reasons why.

Me thinks you assumed too much.

andreyf• 16 years ago

It's not that surprising. Maps that refreshed the page when you needed to move X miles south got tons of ad revenue, and JavaScript was still considered a "simple scripting language" by most.

ihatedigg• 16 years ago

Google did maps right, and eventually yahoo and map quest followed, but by the time they did it was too late everyone was using google maps and had no reason to switch.

Actually as soon as February 2009, MapQuest was still #1 in maps: http://gislounge.com/mapquest-still-number-one/

(Google Maps was released in early 2005.)

cstuder• 16 years ago

The author updated the article with a special message for us: He basically appologizes that somebody submitted his blog post with a misleading title to Hacker News and emphasized again, that consistency isn't the reason that Google Maps is still #1 on the market.

csmeder2• 16 years ago

Okay, now I feel bad. I skimmed the article and posted a reaction. I am wrong for doing that. (Honestly, it was probably a reaction to how much I hated pre 2005 online mapping software and not the article. I guess it is such a strong hate that to this day it gets a reaction out of me...)

Sam_Odio• 16 years ago

Based on the first paragraph, it seems the author already realizes this, but he needs to claim less and show more. His argument:

1. The most popular mapping site also has the most consistent satellite/street maps. 2. The inverse is true with the least popular mapping sites. 3. Because there's correlation, there's causation.

barredo2• 16 years ago

Remember he is not saying consistency is the only feature that make GoogleMaps #1

alextgordon• 16 years ago

Honestly, I doubt it's got anything to do with it.

The reason Google Maps is #1 is that, at the time, it was far better than anything else. And nobody has offered an equally compelling leap since.

To move masses, you need equally massive advancements in usefulness (also, marketing).

barredo2• 16 years ago

You are not wrong.

gojomo• 16 years ago

Love the attention to detail and animated visual aids; don't buy the thesis at all.

I don't expect feature labels to remain identical between views; the background intensity and purposes of the views are so different it makes sense to change their labeling. For example, there's less room for text if people are looking at the photographic detail between roads. (This also explains why some of Google's competitors move the road labels over roads on satellite views: it is reasonable to assume that people switched to satellite view to see non-road details, which you wouldn't want to obscure with labels.)

I also don't rapidly toggle between map and satellite views, and tend to look at the satellite views at a greater zoom than the map views.

Once you drop the idea such consistency is optimal, the causality could be the reverse: because the other services are behind in usership, they're being more innovative in optimizing satellite labeling.

kqueue• 16 years ago

I bet you most of the users did not notice this difference. What they noticed probably is speed, and the fact that you can scroll and move around the map without clicking the side arrows (mapquest style).

mryall• 16 years ago

I don't really agree with the author's proposal, although it is well explained. As many others pointed out, Google's usability was (and maybe still is) much better than the others.

Another big point in Google's favour is how their maps look. Back when Google Maps came out, the other maps were bitmapped and horrible to look at on the screen and in print. The quality of Google's maps is much more like what you see in a proper street directory. And they've made it look that good at every zoom level. Quite amazing.

I've never used Bing Maps, so it was interesting to learn in this article that they've improved the design of their default map view recently. It looks good. If the appearance of Google's maps was some part of their success, we should see Bing's market share rise in the future if they can convincingly beat Google in this area.

contextfree• 16 years ago

Bing Maps does a lot of cool stuff but always feels perpetually in beta to me (and not in the way that Gmail used to always be in beta). The end-to-end UX is never quite all there.

knorby• 16 years ago

Looking through all the comparisons, Google Maps is also the only non-ugly one.

closedloop• 16 years ago

Hate to be contrarian, but I actually agree with the author. It's often a collection of little things like this that puts one site over another.

protomyth• 16 years ago

I would actually like to see one of them have an updated ariel view of some rural areas. Something in the last 5 years would be nice.

aneth• 16 years ago

Google maps won because they provide accurate directions and maps in a really simple, clean, fast interface. Competing products have caught up quite a bit, but I still cant bring myself to go to mapquest because of how much it used to suck.

I don't think most people switch to satellite view, or care if those views are consistent.

slmichalk• 16 years ago

I use google maps because it has the most usability IMHO.

Did Google Maps's "consistency" help it climb to #1 in maps?

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