Google Maps' Aussie traffic goes gangbusters through Street View

by Alex Zaharov-Reutt

Tuesday, 23 September 2008

Page 1 of 2 ! The digital mapping battle in Australia isn’t just being fought between the Telstra Sensis WhereIs service and Navteq, but also the gargantuan Google, whose Google Maps service received a massive traffic boost in August after the controversial Street View service was launched down under. After launching locally in February 2007, Google Maps started giving the Sensis Whereis site a run for its money, eventually overtaking it in September 2007, with 1.412 million visits, compared with 1.3 million for WhereIs. Over the next 10 months, Google Maps has continued outpacing WhereIs, sometimes by only a few tens of thousands of visits, and other times by a few hundred thousand, according to data collected by Nielsen’s “NetView” ratings. These figures are listed in Nielsen’s “Trend Report”, using its “Home and Work Panel” to collect the data. While July 2008 saw 1.840 million visits for Google Maps and 1.454 million for WhereIs, the introduction in August of Google’s controversial Australian “Street View” service, which allows Internet users to go ogle at the street view of the vast majority of streets, homes and buildings in Australia, traffic has boomed. Nielsen’s latest figures for August show that 3.270 million users visited Google Maps, with WhereIs dropping to 1.132 million users. Of course, nationwide and even global publicity of Google’s Street View addition to Google Maps would certainly have helped boost the figures enormously, especially as Internet users scrambled to not only check out the view of their own homes and offices, but those of friends, family and all manner of other locations. Naturally, the Whereis.com.au website isn’t the only place that Sensis WhereIs maps are used – most of the GPS satellite navigation devices in Australia use WhereIs mapping data, with global competitor Navteq also providing maps to a smaller number of GPS satnav makers in Australia, and to all Nokia phones able to run the Nokia Maps 2.0 software. Sensis have also launched the WhereIs Navigator application for Window Mobile smartphones, soon to come to the Nokia S60 Symbian Platform. Delivered in partnership with Garmin’s navigation software, the service is designed to offer smartphone users an on-phone turn-by-turn navigation service, competing with standalone GPS devices as Nokia’s own GPS on-phone nav capabilities. But when it comes to searching for maps on the Internet, Google Maps has taken a clear lead, with a number of companies using the Google Maps APIs to embed maps and Street View imagery on their websites. However having an API available to website owners isn’t unique to Google, as WhereIs also offers this feature. So, why is Google Maps winning the traffic war with WhereIs? Continued on page 2. << First page <   1 2 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

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