Hacker News Reader

Comment by rmc | Hacker News Reader

They aren't doing this because they want to hurt TomTom & Navteq. They are doing this because they are suffering from OpenStreetMap, who charges many orders of magnitude less than Google Maps even with this price drop.

View on HN

The problem with open street maps is that it so much worse than google maps. Orders of magnitude worse. I love the concept and in theory that concept is unbeatable (who else but those living in the area have the most intricate knowledge of roads, paths, etc?). But as of now, it is simply not comparable. Many features missing, and the data is very incomplete (many streets missing, missing buildings and street numbers, parks, POIs, ...).

In some areas. In some areas OSM is way better than Google Maps.

Google Maps is relatively consistent level of quality across a country (some countries are much better mapped than others in GM), whereas in OSM one part of a city might be well mapped, and another part poorly mapped.

OSM better than GM:

Sarajevo: http://tools.geofabrik.de/mc/?mt0=mapnik&mt1=googlemap&#... POIs within Dublin: http://tools.geofabrik.de/mc/?mt0=mapnik&mt1=googlemap&#...

Yes, I know there are areas/countries which are poorly mapped in Google Maps (as your example of Srajevo clearly shows). But generally I've found OSM much worse than Google Maps.

Regarding Dublin - your link has missing POI info, don't know why. Here's a screenshot directly from google maps page: http://cl.ly/1H2r0X2I1U2O3F0j0X2U

You can add the missing items or fix those that are incorrect. Best to start in your own neighborhood. Give it a try, i did.

But OSM can get better, and better faster. I toyed with it just a bit and fixed a few things myself. Google maps? I filed a bug or two, then two years later they closed it as not applicable.

With a sufficient critical mass now in or transitioning to OSM, it's trivial that OSM will get better. If Apple are going to contribute to OSM(which is likely based on their shared project history) then it's expected to increase in quality quickly.

However, even without their contribution, OSM is already at a level of maturity to compete with the bulk of GM implementations. It seems that most people just need basic location services.

Google offers map maker (http://www.google.com/mapmaker) in many countries, so you can modify existing maps or add new data.

I find Google (much) better at address lookup and searching for commercial establishments, but most of the places I've lived/visited have better OSM data in a number of other ways. Google is particularly bad if you're a pedestrian: it seems to be missing a lot of non-auto paths, especially things like urban staircases in hilly cities.

Google (much) better at address lookup

There are 2 problems here: (a) OSM's doesn't have as much house numbering data (that'll improve with time) and (b) addressing → lat/long is pretty freaking hard. If you limit yourself to one country and one address system, it's much easier. Otherwise things get messy fast.

But there are also plenty of applications where Google's higher quality doesn't offer a significant advantage.

At my last job I started to negotiate with Google about their (old) new maps pricing. They kept pointing to features that made no difference for our application. We needed Ok maps and decent forward and reverse geocoding. We were in their free tier, but needeed to find a solution for when we outgrew it, because their pricing was way way too high for our business model.

I left that company, bust if nothing else, this new pricing will further delay the day that they consider replacing Google maps. For new projects though, I'd probably skip google maps altogether, or at least use them in such a way that the client-side code would be totally provider independent.

Many orders of magnitude? What are they charging? 1 cent per 1 million maps?

OpenStreetMaps is free but you've to host it yourself.

There are several free OSM tile servers too, so you don't even need to host yourself. MapQuest's is probably the most generous: you can use it completely free, even in paid apps and webapps. They just request that you let them know in advance if you plan to distribute an app where you anticipate very high usage (currently defined as >4,000 tiles/second). http://developer.mapquest.com/web/products/open/map

Just looked it up and realized that MapQuest went on board with OpenStreetMap back in 2010. I never knew that, props to MapQuest!

Wow, didn't know that, thanks!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com