Search Engine Tigers

A couple of weeks ago I, and every other columnist for Search Engine Land was asked to write a local or mobile article for their special series of ‘Local Search Week‘ and ‘Mobile Search Week‘. I had an idea as to what to write, and did the initial investigation, but just didn’t have the time to write anything up, so instead of it being over there, it’s now over here.I decided to take a look at the various mapping systems out there, and see if they really were all created equally. I did a number of direction requests, and compared the results. For most of the searches the directions were fairly similar, with the ‘Whitehouse to Disneyland’ trip providing the biggest differences, with Yahoo taking a northerly route to start, while MSN & Google headed South. However, at the end of the trip, Yahoo & Google went the same way, while MSN went their own route. (The order in the image below is Yahoo, Google, MSN).

So what about timing? Obviously the title of this post gives you an idea of how those results came out. For virtually every trip that I put into all Yahoo, Google, MSN & Mapquest, Yahoo came back with the fastest time to the destination. The only divergence from that pattern was the Whitehouse to Disneyland trip, where MSN beat Yahoo into second place. N.B. MSN could not find a route from Anchorage, AK to Miami, FL.

So, if you’re going to travel from Anchorage to Miami, Yahoo will save you 4 hours over mapquest (while traveling only 67 fewer miles), even traveling from Scotland to the South of England will save you 2 hours over Google maps, despite traveling 2 more miles…

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