Google does India
I am not sure how long this has been around, but I just saw google with tons of better India data. Zoom in and you know what I am talking about. It is still not searchable ( Geocodable, to be precise). But my guess is, it is coming very very soon.
Google has done a brilliant job with the look and feel of the map. It just somehow seems to blend and merge with the US maps. That translates into a seamless user experience. Kudos!
Boundaries are all over the place in Jammu and Kashmir. But I guess, we dont know what is J&K and what is not, ourselves.
Many of their National highways are broken. But, that I guess is a data issue more than Google’s.
Though they have all the railway stations in place (with a cute little icon), I dont think they understand the importance of railways in India. Or to be specific, Mumbai subarban is way more important than a random road that runs across colaba. In the future, I think India driving directions have to purposefully consider connecting places also on public means of transport. People in India go to places. They dont necessarily drive up there. Right now, this translates to making railway stations and possibly the lines prominent on the map. Atleast in selected cities and suburbs.
I love the way they are using gradients of a selected few colours rather than using hundreds of colours.
They also have the one ways spot on. They have an unintrusive arrow that gives a feeling of which way is one way. Lovely!
And a last mention at the choices of icons for places of Interest. Actually, I have no words.
Rock on! Google.
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The hybrid version seems to have some bugs, if i change to hybrid mode and then zoom in, the road names are lost.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&ie=UTF8&om=1&z=18&ll=13.000768,77.619261&spn=0.003413,0.004967&t=h
But it is probably the most useful online bangalore map that i have seen so far.
The one way arrow is similar to what is used in yahoo maps for US.
The icons for places seems to be similar to what they usually have in Indian map books.Maybe the data provider provided those ?
I had not thought about this . But yes, any useful India maps will need to help users with public transport also.
It might be a good idea to even somehow integrate suggest the best means of transport to reach a given place at a given time of day/week. For example if you are going to MG road on Saturday evening, it might be better to take an auto or 2-wheeler to avoid parking problems. I think social networks will need to be involved to get that kind of data for all places.
For public transport ,it might be a good idea to involve the public transport agencies also.
Hope to see even better India maps coming up
-Thejas
Anonymous
20 Dec 06 at 12:36 PM
I thought Google ‘did’ Yahoo, not India
Kesava Mallela
20 Dec 06 at 2:04 PM
I totally like Theju’s idea of weaving social networking into maps for driving directions. I’ve thought about public transport, afterall it was only natural to think so because I don’t drive to anywhere
Suraj
5 Jan 07 at 4:08 AM
Have you seen the new India search engine http://www.ByIndia.com they added all the cool features of popular products like MySpace, YouTube, Ebay, Craigslist, etc. all for free to use and specifically for India. Anyone else try this yet?
ByIndia.com First to Blend Search, Social Network, Video Sharing and Auctions Into One Seamless Product for Indian Internet Users.
tpraja
26 Jan 07 at 5:12 AM