Systeme D

19 April 2005

Google Maps: let's all give up and go home

So Google Maps UK launched this week, surprisingly soon after the US version.

Obviously it's great. True, there is some stuff about Google Maps which has been overhyped: prerendering the map tiles is staggeringly obvious and anyone who wasn't already doing it must be functionally braindead; and implementing it all in HTML+Ajax gets geek points, but I doubt it gives much of a userbase advantage over doing it in Flash.

But no matter. Google is all about usability, and Google Maps is the most usable map site yet, by a very long chalk.

I'd be concerned if I were Multimap. I'd be very worried if I were Streetmap. I'd be watching with interest if I were Ordnance Survey (as Ed MacGillavry notes). But here's why, as an apprentice webmapper, I'm not weeping into my coffee quite yet.

  • The content is Google. There's no actual editorial or selection going on here, nor any integration of content into the maps over and above superimposed icons. For example, we're going to do exciting stuff at Waterscape to show live holiday availability on the map.
  • The content isn't Google. It's Yell.com. When Google manages to retrofit geocoding to the web, then I'll get worried.
  • The maps are probably the clearest streetmaps on the web... which is great if you're walking around a city. OS Landranger and Explorer are still untouchable for the remaining 80% of the UK land mass.

Incidentally, you can search for 'prostitutes in Inverness' (or wherever), or the 'biggest ever Conservative in Downing Street, Westminster', or a company 'using web applications very badly' in any number of places. If only you could extract the URLs, I think we'd have a successor to Widdecombe of the Week.

Comments

The big failing seems to be that it can't cope with inconsistent British addresses, at all. Although it could give me address for lots of places in London it couldn't find any routes between them because it couldn't map them to any roads.

Although prerendering the map tiles is staggeringly obvious for this sort of application it does limit you in other respects, there's a lot fo map servers out there which provide wms services and render regions as requested from vector or other source data.

There's an evil part of me that wants to pre-render spaial index nodes as svg, and use client side xsl and xslt to do the required transforming. A pint to any one who writes an xslt file that will translate British National Grid source coordinates into wgs84 long lats.

Posted by Duncan MacGregor on 20.4.05 01:49

Sure, I can see why people generate map images serverside in many cases. But not for consumer-focused streetmaps. I suspect it's because GIS is, for some reason, viewed as an arcane science that can only be solved by liberal application of ArcGIS/ArcIMS/ArcWELDING/whatever... rather than just 'lat' and 'long' columns in your database table.

Posted by Richard on 21.4.05 10:32

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