Golden Age of the Geo-Geek

SCIENCE SAYS THE ABILITY TO navigate was developed to enable early humans who stumbled on a bountiful berry bush or well-stocked watering hole to find their way back to it. If so, I would have been top man in my pack, at least when it came to locating a meal that wasn't moving too much.

Some people are blessed with perfect pitch; I have a perfect sense of direction. I can find my way anywhere and back home again. I've never lost my car in a parking lot, never taken an uptown train when I wanted to go downtown, never followed directions to a party in some unfamiliar neighborhood and missed a turn or an exit ramp.

Despite — because of? — that spatial sixth sense, I like maps. And today my fellow geo-geeks and I are living in a golden age; mapping is all over the Internet. It started with stand-alone companies like MapQuest, of course, which offered digital versions of the standard road map but added driving directions. The directions weren't always accurate, but the convenience of getting what amounted to a personalized itinerary over the Web made them a hit, and a popular link added to local search engines.

Then the big search engines began to add features that enriched the content their local search users could turn up. Google got the ball rolling with satellite photos about a year ago; then MSN upped the ante with closer aerial shots for most markets. Last December, MSN added a “bird's-eye view” option in selected areas that gives a 3-D effect to the photos. Useful? Perhaps only to commercial-space realtors who want to display an office building. But attractive enough that I stay on the site much longer than I need to, playing with the levers and knobs.

And that's the marketing virtue of mapping: It's a very sticky application that allows users to dig down to engage with the data. The search engines know this, and they've been layering location-specific information onto their map functions with all their might. Mostly this information comes from other local directory services such as SuperPages.com. But using it in connection with a street or photo map of the neighborhood you're in can be much more compelling than looking it up in a directory, either on or offline.

For example, the new Yahoo! Local Maps beta tells me I've got 254 lawyers practicing in my Chicago neighborhood. (God help me.) I can filter those by category to find eight who specialize in personal-injury lawsuits, and refine that further to find the five to whom users have given five out of five stars. Mousing over the pointer for one of those counselors gives me his business name. Clicking on it gives me his phone number, street address, rating (with an option to add my own vote), and links for travel directions and more info, including nearby bus and “L” stops, local ATMs and a map of restaurants — in case I want to bulk up his billable hours by taking him to lunch.

For business information, most of the mapping services build a bare-bones profile based on third-party data and then invite the business operators to submit information to enhance that profile. The business categories may need to be refined a little; searching for movies in my neighborhood brings up no video rental places but does unearth RadioShack. And the “Italian restaurants” subcategory brings up Johnny O'Hagan's, where they appear to serve a great Irish breakfast but where I don't think I'll be trying the “rottini pasta” anytime soon (especially with that spelling).

True to its orientation toward community and consumer-generated content, Yahoo! also led the way in introducing ratings and reviews to the local businesses on its maps. Searching through Yahoo! Local also brings up a map, but adds information and consumer reviews of local events (Woodstock alum Richie Havens will be at my local folk venue this Friday), restaurants, and other local businesses that users have seen fit to recommend (in my case, a dentist, a bank and a hair salon). Google now offers consumer reviews of businesses, too. And local merchants can buy ads on Google Maps or tack images and preselected logos to their informational pop-up bubbles.

Meanwhile, the competition to add mapping bells and whistles has become a mini arms race among the search engines. The recent relaunch of Ask.com included mapping that can handle multiple stops, offers a choice of driving and walking directions, and goes into animation mode to illustrate the different stages of a trip. Yahoo! just enhanced many of its maps with real-time traffic reports.

Last year, the A9 search engine operated by Amazon began to include block views in its directory listings, giving users a sidewalk feel for many lookups. Windows Live Local upped that ante in February with a beta version that lets you drive around selected downtown blocks in Seattle or San Francisco, getting a 180-degree view through the windshield. It feels a bit like mapping mated with a video game (you can even choose to drive a sports car or racer), and exactly who will use this for anything other than its play value is unclear. But hey, betas are for trying; practical applications come later.

And mapping has become all about third-party applications. The search engines, realizing that outside programmers were combining their map programs with other data to create niche products, offered up their application programming interfaces to developers. The result has been an explosion of map utilities to gladden a geo-geek's heart, from transit maps for just about any major metro system in North America and the United Kingdom to a mash-up plotting the teams, colleges and player hometowns involved in the recent NFL draft.

Here in Chicago, I can check a map of recent crime-incident reports for my neighborhood at ChicagoCrime.org, or look for homes and apartments at HousingMaps.com, which integrates listings from Craigslist. If I want to buy, I can check out property values using a map feature from Zillow.com that lets me hover over an aerial photo of a home I like and click to get an estimated market value.

So who's using all this stuff, other than my fellow nerds? Well, according to online marketing researchers comScore Networks, more than 65 million people in March — a 19% increase from a year ago. They tend to be adults between the ages of 25 and 44, with annual household incomes above $75,000.

And this is one arena where Yahoo! edges out rival Google. ComScore says Yahoo! Maps had almost 20 million unique visitors in March, while Google had 19 million.

But the most popular map site of all? Still MapQuest, with 46.4 million visitors for the month. Even with all the enticements to look elsewhere, it seems most map users keep finding their way back to the old standby.