Google Maps Up 135%, MapQuest Now Mortal
While Web 2.0 junkies may talk about Google Maps all the time (and, once in a while, other innovative companies, too), MapQuest remains the untouchable king of online maps. Well, MapQuest is finally un-untouchable (touchable? nonuntouchable? ~untouchable? untouchable-less?), thanks to Google Maps more than doubling its market share over the last year, rocketing past a slipping Yahoo Maps to seize a strong second place.
Google was up 135% in 2007, while MapQuest traffic was flat over the last year. Google’s change in its search results to only show links to Google Maps, and not MapQuest, pushed so much traffic to Google’s own mapping product that it made all the difference in market share. In fact, the change was so quick and dramatic that Google may be up 135%, but it is only up 7% in the last six months (the change occured in March).
Right now, MapQuest owns 50.25% of the market, down 2-4 percentage points in the last twelve months. Google, meanwhile, has 22.2% market share, up from around 10%. Yahoo fell from just under 20% to 13.34%, and Windows Live Maps was mostly flat, finishing up perhaps a small fraction of a percent.
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Jordan McCollum
Greg Sterling
If you made the google map link more prominent on the top left corner in gmail, people would be using it even more. Mind you I’m preaching to the already gmail converted.
Comment by john | January 10, 2008
Uhm, what a myopic, us-centric view. Google Maps has long been #1 worldwide.
Comment by Anton | January 11, 2008
Anton, care to back that up with some statistics?
Comment by Nathan Weinberg | January 11, 2008