Maps of China

I'm traveling to China tomorrow to attend WWW 2008. I've been looking at the coverage the major players have in terms of maps for Beijing and found them to be terribly poor. Google and Microsoft both show something like this:

And Yahoo appears to be even worse.

But fear not, Mapquest is here to save the day.

It is interesting to see at what point data matters more than the quality of the interface. 

Comments

[Luis]

Microsoft's maps for China are available through http://ditu.live.com. However, if you don't speak Chinese, you will find them as useful as the first image.

[Uldis Bojars]

Had the same experience re. finding locations in China on Google Maps or Google Earth. Makes one wish that someone posted the longitude and latitude of the hotel and conference venue on the website.

Are you giving a presentation at WWW'08?

I am also traveling to China tomorrow (less than 6 hours until start of the journey) to attend WWW'08. See you at the conference! :)

[Andrew Hitchcock]

Google also has Chinese maps: http://ditu.google.cn/ but they are really slow from the US. I wonder why neither Live nor Google have Chinese information on their US sites… perhaps some export restriction?

Also, it is interesting that the map tiles from Google aren't hosted on a Google branded domain:

http://servicetile.mapabc.com/googlechina/maptile?v=cn1&hl=zh-CN&x=103&y=50&zoom=10&s=Galileo

[Economist]

Google owns MapABC. Google's brand in China is also not as strong as it is in the West.

Note also that Mapquest has even less brand awareness, being a Web 1.0 company owned by AOL.