Best Internet Maps
We chose Microsoft's Live Maps as the best internet mapping utility for a few reasons. Live Maps' "bird's eye view" provides a nice, detailed aerial photograph of a location from four angles (north, south, east, and west) in many metropolitan locations. The pictures are clear enough to see into backyards. The quality of the "bird's eye view" photographs are far superior to any of the typical aerial photographs offered by the internet mappers.
As nice as "bird's eye view" is, it is not our main criteria. The main reason we chose Live Maps as the best is because of accuracy. Most internet mapping utilities do a good job of pinpointing locations in downtown areas. The further you get outside of major downtowns, the less accurate they become. When you start getting into exurbs and rural areas, all the mapping services do a poor job of finding the exact location. Often, they place a pointer on an approximate location, noting it as such, which can end up being miles from the true location you are searching for in many rural areas.
Despite the shortcomings of finding locations in rural areas, Live Maps does a very good job of finding the exact location of properties surrounding downtown areas and even into the suburbs. Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, and MapQuest all show similarly innaccurate results in suburban areas. This innaccuracy can be a tenth of a mile, sometimes more.
If you are on the road traveling to a place you have never been, you want to have a highly accurate map available to you. Being a tenth-of-a-mile off the true location can make it difficult for you to find where you need to go at times.
Here are a few examples showing how Live Maps is more accurate than the other internet mapping providers. We chose addresses at random. As stated previously, all the mapping services do a good job finding locations in downtown areas. While Live Maps is not accurate 100% of the time, it is more accurate more often than any of the other ones we tested.
Address: 3639 1st Ave. S., Minneapolis, MN
We got this residential address from a news story about the brutal murder of Katricia Daniels and her 10-year-old son, Robert Shepard, by two juveniles who were family friends. We input the address into Live Maps, Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, and MapQuest and verified the exact property location using the Hennepin County property records map. Live Maps pinpointed the exact location. All the other mappers that we tried were off by half-a-block.
True property location from the Hennepin County website:
As you can see, the true property location is the second north of 37th St. E.
Where Live Maps locates the address:
Live Maps puts the pushpin on the exact location of the address sought. None of the other maps we tried got it exactly right. Although they were close, they were not spot-on accurate like Live Maps.
Where Google Maps locates the address:
Where Yahoo Maps locates the address:
Where MapQuest locates the address:
Google, Yahoo, and Mapquest all put the location in the same spot. Yahoo gets it on the correct side of the street. But only Live Maps pinpointed the exact location.
Our next random address is in Tampa, Florida. I randomly picked an address from the Hillsborough County website and mapped it. This, too, is a residential address.
Address: 2118 W. Abdella St., Tampa, FL
True property location from the Hillsborough County website:
Where Live Maps locates the address:
Where Google Maps locates the address:
Where Yahoo Maps locates the address:
Where MapQuest locates the address:
Only Live Maps puts the location indicator on the correct spot. Google, Yahoo, and Mapquest seem to have randomly placed the location at the end of the street. Yahoo and Mapquest appear to indicate the correct side of the street that the property is actually on, but Google Maps does not.
This higher precision of accuracy demonstrated by Live Maps is why we pick it as the best internet map.