Ask got rid of the only thing that brought me to their site when they scrapped Jeeves, now they just might have won me back. Their new maps service in my opinion looks nicer than Google Maps, and is certainly better than Yahoo which only supports America. Unfortunately it is currently much slower that either of those, due I suspect to the digg effect.
But in my opinion the best thing about this new tool is that it breaks from the norm of big American Internet companies releasing things starting in the US only. Google has extended its maps to the UK now, so I am happy, but millions of other Europeans whose countries aren’t mapped are not. Ask seems to map most of Western Europe which is a major plus. Unfortunately the addresses and postcodes did not seem to work well in the UK when I tried. The AJAX interface has nice right-click support.
Western Europe:
[Via digg]
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No Dependencies /No Logo » Blog Archive » Ask Maps, Get Maps · March 4, 2006 at 8:31 pm
[...] I was thoroughly enjoyed when reading Splasho’s post about Ask Maps today. Google Maps, Windows Live Local, and what have you, that’s all fine and dandy, but finally here is a mapping service that doesn’t forget about the little place we call Europe. [...]
Splasho » Google Maps in Europe · April 27, 2006 at 3:13 pm
[...] If you haven’t noticed yet, Google Maps (finally) now supports Europe, previously the only parts of the continent covered were the UK and the area around the Winter Olympics. Ask did this a while ago, now I’m waiting for Yahoo to follow on so I can use their GeoCoding API. [...]