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April 19, 2006
A Deep Dive into the Mechanics of MapQuest
The current New Yorker has an interesting (and lengthy) piece looking under the hood of how MapQuest and its mapping ilk have changed navigation and cartography. In particular, I was fascinated by the discussion of why mapping software gives such screwy directions sometimes:There are features that we associate with maps or navigation which have little bearing on the kind of road directions favored by MapQuest and OnStar. Traditional visual landmarks--flagpole, river bend, stone church--are hardly recognized. And a road that traverses water (i.e., a bridge) is no different from one that cuts through a golf course or a drug-free school zone if the speed limit is the same. This is why the Throgs Neck looks more reasonable to an algorithm, even if to a driver that extra water crossing may mean another toll and greater potential for bottleneck traffic.With MapQuest, you can either look at a map, presented in a manner that makes your route the center of the world, or you can get an itinerary. But, since MapQuest's directions are derived from looking at a route on a map, the advice it gives is based mostly on map reality, not driver reality. Traditionally, verbal directions capture the experience of driving on the road, much as the McNally Photo-Auto Guide did; MapQuest captures that of plotting the route, from a God's-eye view. This is why, for instance, MapQuest will identify a short stretch of road--an off-ramp, a connector--that to the traveller would normally be negligible (without mentioning that you should keep the river or the graveyard on your right). Whether a segment is 0.1 or two thousand miles long, it is given equal billing. This sometimes has a ludicrous effect. For example, Google's directions for leaving Spokane, Washington: "Head north from N. Lincoln St., go 33 feet. Turn left at W. Main Ave., go 0.1 mi. Turn left at W. Spokane Falls Blvd., go 127 feet." Certainly, once someone following this kind of itinerary loses his way he has no idea where he is, because he has no sense of how the directions he's following fit into the larger picture.
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this is where we come in--think about users, not markets.