Yahoo! Maps finally comes to India! And a real big void has now started filling up. Till now, the only major company that had an India offering was Google Maps. And then there’s MapMyIndia.com, which had a Code Warrior among it’s core team. Well, now you can add another one to the list – Yahoo! India Maps.
The first thing that you’ll notice is that it loads WAY faster than Google Maps. Similar to it, it offers three views – Map, Satellite and Hybrid (which is a combination of the earlier two). The searches, the correction, and the loading times are pretty quick. You WILL notice one thing though – the detail is much lesser right now in satellite view. Yahoo! does plan to shift to a higher resolution soon. Also, businesses and other features aren’t that numerous, and the map mostly consists of mosques and temples right now, but it’s getting there. Most localities I tried out found a match.
Yahoo! India Maps has started recently, so don’t expect any fireworks or much comparison right now, but I’m pretty sure that given time, it’ll be a much better product than Google Maps. Last heard, it was given 10-km detours for a 10 minute walk down the road in Australia for certain routes. MSN Maps is even better – in Netherlands it was showing some routes which had hundreds of kilometers of detour.