MapQuest still exists | Hacker News Reader

MapQuest still exists

washingtonpost.com

40 pointsaltern857 comments

Google is the "always online" company. So MapQuest should be the anti-Google: make a good, free offline maps app. All of the ones I've tried (on Android, at least) either had too little detail or a cumbersome user interface. But all of them were promoted to me directly by word-of-mouth. Make a great one, and people will spread it around. Become the fanatic's map app. The MapQuest brand could have the perfect retro-niche appeal for this.

Have you tried OsmAnd? Rather nice, free / open data, offline.

OsmAnd is pretty good, but it's freemium. You only get 10 dowbloads.

It is not freemium! It is open source and uses open data!

BTW: The deployment in google play is freemium but there are other storages without that restriction

It's open source and open data, but at least on Android it ain't free. (And I'm OK with that)

I guess I could build it myself from source and side load it? I'd rather just pay them the $6. It's a nice app.

Have you tried HERE maps?

HERE maps are very nice, they are Nokia/Microsoft and app is very polished on Android. Only thing is Google Maps have slightly better routing options.

Reviving MapQuest seems about as likely to me as AOL reviving it's dialup business. The simple fact is that the quality bar has risen to the point where maps have become a pay to play space with serious table stakes. You can't just buy a bundle of 3rd party data, slap a nice UI on it and call it a day anymore. Maybe MapQuest could do something unique with merging it's brand name with OSM but even that seems like a pretty faint possibility.

I have no doubt they could manage to remain profitable for some ungodly amount of time by relying on pure inertia from their legacy customers. But trying to find meaningful ways to grow the brand seems like throwing good money after bad.

If google keeps loading their interface down with widgets and geegaws that I can't get rid of, and keeps screwing up their route line that now sometimes can and sometimes can't be sensibly dragged around, then at some point one of my frustration visits to mapquest will see me not returning.

You can try bing maps. I'm basically done with google maps for good. My impression is it's no long a map service but show me the nearest Chili's Grill & Bar on my smart phone service.

Thanks, I think you just gave me my new map.

The map itself is fairly clean. It had a little trouble figuring out that Northsouth and Eastwest, mytown, mystate was an intersection on a map site (WTF?) and not a search for businesses with Northsouth in the name, but when I gave it blvd to Northsouth and figured it out.

The routing line on directions was nicely moveable.

And, duckduckgo has a bang code for it, !bm.

I'm there.

After spending 10 minutes trying to find where Google moved their menu so I could print directions, (I completely missed the hamburger menu blended into the text box) I gave up used MapQuest instead.

Instead of focusing on the quality of their map data, MapQuest can just compete by not ruining their UX.

Agreed. Google keeps ruining maps with needless UI changes. I still occasionally drop down to Classic because some feature I use is hard to find or hasn't been ported yet.

example?

I'm pretty sure the person you drop down for street view was missing for a few weeks. I can't remember if street view was accessible in other ways.

I was looking for the short url last week. It used to be near the top-right under something like "URL." Now, it's in the bottom-right, under the gear, then "share or embed map."

I was looking for satellite view for awhile, until I realized they renamed it to "Earth."

I just assumed they no longer offered a printable page with directions. When messing around for this comment I found it under "Details" after you look up driving directions.

In classic mode, you can do street view half of the screen, and map/earth view the other half of the screen. This is amazing if you are travelling to a new area and want to learn map quickly (as you see street view and map view at the same time, in as much detail).

The new street view hides the map in bottom corner, it now is a small thumbnail travesty with no way to to make it larger. And the thumbnail map cannot be made into satellite/earth view.

neat!

I thought Classic had finally been removed for good?

When I went to get directions a few weeks back and they told me that

a) I couldn't use Classic anymore, and

b) the new UI only had a drop-down for arrival time with half-hour increments, instead of letting me type a precise time (trains often arrive a couple minutes after the hour), and

c) they removed the option for getting public transit directions at all (that had been there and working in Classic for years),

I said three strikes and you're out and switched to Yahoo.

You can still get to it by going to https://maps.google.com/lochp

I"m glad I'm not the only one. I couldn't find where the print option went a couple of days ago and was feeling kind of embarrassed. After less than a minute of looking around without finding it, I just headed over to Bing maps and got it done.

I find the Google apps have the most complicated and confusing UIs of all the apps I use.

It's gotten worse over the years. I think it's because project managers want to say "I want to leave my imprint on this app, let's change the UI around". Repeat a few times, and you move away from optimum if optimum had already been done.

Google's UX took a big turn for the worse about 2-3 years ago, IMO. Not so much in terms of the design language (I rather like Material Design) but just the little bits of actual user interaction polish within their apps. Looks began to trump function and interfaces were often too visually simplified to the point where discover-ability of functionality took a huge nose-dive.

As a for-example, the new Google Maps for Android (7.x+) is much prettier than the old one but much more painful to use (still) in that it often makes you do 3+ button presses for things that used to be 1 button press, which is kind of a big deal for an app that people will often interact with (hopefully in some sort of dash mount) while driving.

Amen. And I could almost stand the more-button-presses thing if it weren't so slow. Now my typical interaction trying to search Google Maps goes like:

    * Open the app.
    * Wait for it to load.
    * See the details of directions from hours ago.
    * Hit back.
    * Wait for it to render.
    * Press back and wait again.
    * Hit back a couple more times.
    * Get frustrated that I'm still seeing old directions.
    * Hit back twice more.
    * Suddenly I am out of the app.
    * Launch it again.
    * Wait.
    * Finally enter my search.

The server-side stuff, like the actual directions, is still amazing. But the UX design just doesn't seem to be driven by actual use.

I can't say what you saw, but there is no hamburger button and just a printer button now. Regardless, it seems odd one would look for a print button on a page itself and not just print with the browser's print options.

My god the pain with Google maps just never ends. Ever since they announced the new interface it's been broken.

I imagine the wireframing process for the UI went something like this:

"What's the list of features we need to support?"

"Here it is"

"Okay, let's randomly scatter all of them all over the screen and bury the most used/useful things 2 or three levels deep in various menus. Reversing actions should require the user to go to different interface areas and we should clutter the interface with local photos that nobody is interested in since we already offer streetview. But let's make streetview hard to use, even though it was a solved interface problem before."

"Is that all?"

"No, let's go live before key functionality is active, like multiple-stop route planning, let's make it use webGL and make it a little crashy, and let's make sure that features that people use literally every day, like toll avoidance, won't remember being set ever and we'll bury it 2 levels deep in a different hamburger menu than the one that's always there and only shows up some of the time."

"Brilliant!"

I wasted a few minutes the other day searching for a spreadsheet in Google "Drive"...because by default only "Docs" are selected and for whatever reason that refers only to "Word" style documents now, not spreadsheets. Especially confusing since people still call it Google Docs, so when you open it and it just says "Docs" you're just thinking, "yes, I'm on Google Docs" not "I'm viewing only Word style documents". Terrible.

I'm so relieved to learn it's not just me. Google has spent years building a magic search box that finds everything I want. I have no idea why they decided one day that spreadsheets were so thoroughly not documents that they would only sully the search on docs.google.com.

Isn't that because you went to docs.google.com instead of drive.google.com?

I really don't understand why they have docs, sheets etc. as different google services, with their own domains. Maybe they just want to mirror the mobile apps, but even there, why do I need to download 3 distinct apps?

Wow, you're right. It didn't even occur to me that the domain would have any effect whatsoever.

Still confusingly, when you do select Sheets, the domain is still docs.google.com (as is the URL for the sheet itself).

the real question here is, what was the reason for printing directions? I think I also used MapQuest the last time I printed directions, 7 or 8 years ago? My phone just tells me when i need to turn now....

Battery and out-of-network areas. Last time we did a road trip (around Arizona) we had to think very carefully about when we would plot the next part of the route on Google Maps because there were long stretches where we had no internet connection. Next time I'm going to take along some print outs as backups.

Offline/poor cell coverage, battery...

My phone isn't 8x11.

tablet? :-)

Cellular data for a tablet (or mobile hotspot) is upwards of $20/mo for many people. I would venture that the majority of tablets in existence are WiFi only devices and not useful on the highway.

Directions for friends/parents/other people who don't all have smartphones.

In my case, I was just trying to get a simple copy of the map image. Since the map is made up of a grid of smaller images (and besides, google intercepts the right click), I can't just right click and save as. So, I would just go to the print version to get access to the map as a single image I can right click on.

I just visited another google map page and even after this discussion, I still don't see where I can get to the printer-friendly page. Does it even exist anymore?

Slightly off topic but if you're annoyed with the new Google Maps you can still use the classic version at https://maps.google.com/lochp.

I find this hard to believe:

"Though MapQuest still has the second-highest share of the domestic market in online mapping, about 25 percent"

I worked at two companies in the last 3 years that both used MapQuest a lot. Both companies had fleets of drivers (one had about 200 trucks and the other had about 500). The first was pretty low tech and just distributed MapQuest printouts to drivers that had to go somewhere. The other was quite a bit more technically sound and had a pretty cool dispatching and routing system. All the maps were rendered using MapQuest. I was pretty surprised but in both cases it seems that these companies started doing things that way before Google Maps took off and they just stuck with what worked for them.

I know its anecdotal but I think it could point to something. The first company was in central Florida and the second was in NYC. They were also in completely different industries.

Fair enough - perhaps the "Legacy" domestic market is bigger than I would imagine/believe.

But, I can say this - MapQuest doesn't have much of an international presence. I just typed, "10 Anson Road, Singapore" (and then "10 Anson Road, Singapore, Singapore" just for safe measure) - It showed me a map of Norwalk, CT.

So, even if I wanted to try it - pretty much out of luck.

That makes me wonder if the stat about 25% was referring to a specific market. Like the US or something.

Yes, the US - "domestic"

Anyone know what mesh lounge chair that is in the picture?

Self reply since answer found on Reddit: A Kimble Office Fit

I've been using their API just last week.

As far as I know, this is the only free service for driving distances that can be used with maps other than Google's.

open street map?

Yeah, mentioning MapQuest without regards to their OSM efforts seems like a bit of an omission. Intentional or no?

http://open.mapquest.co.uk/

Openstreetmap doesn't provide driving distances or routing itself. Project OSRM uses Openstreetmap data to provide this service: http://project-osrm.org/

There are many projects[1] and services[2] using OSM data for route planning. As your sibling comment mentions, Mapquest Open is among them.

[1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Routing#Developers

[2] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Routing/online_routers#Ro...

I don't disagree. mayneack indicated that he/she thought OSM provided an API for driving distances (they don't).

The services from GraphHopper are free too and the core router is even open source too. (It is based on OpenStreetMap)

I currently work for a bureaucracy that requires that all trips to be mapped ONLY on MapQuest, in order to turn it in to be compensated for the travel. I haven't figured out why. (It's a state bureaucracy, logic isn't their strong suit. They still pay for long distance phone calls, and have to document all long distance phone calls.)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that they can maybe also replace TomTom with location tracking services from Verizon - probably yielding a ridiculously comprehensive tracking for North America (subject to ToC, I'm not a lawyer).

opened the website.

what the fuck am I doing in florida (I'm in Boston)?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com