Heather Hopkins has recently completed an analysis of traffic to the major map sites, Mapquest, Google, Yahoo.com and Live. Google Maps is continuing to gain market share primarily at the expense of Mapsquest and to a lesser extent Yahoo. Mapquest’s recent strong upgrade seems to have slowed that trend but it remains to be seen whether that will translate to long term market share gains.
Compared to January 2008, Mapquest’s market share has declined 6% to 44.3% while Google Maps market share has increased from 22% to 32%. Yahoo has continued to see moderate share losses over the same period. If the long term trends continue Google could surpass Mapquest market share within the next 6 months. Mapsquest’s upgrade has come none too soon. It will be interesting to see if the new product will provide a defense against Google’s persistent market share gains.
This past 5 weeks Google Maps has had it share of problems that could also be affecting their market share. The blueline upgrade led to a number of problems with their Map routing capability. The move the TeleAtlas has created a fair bit of end user angst and the recent reports of hijackings have discouraged others. These can be overcome and in the past whenever Google sees their market share gains slow down they have pull another traffic builder out of their hats.
This chart views the players as a percentage of overall internet traffic. For reference Google.com receives 6% of all internet traffic whereas Maps recieves .26%. Thus Maps provides 4.3% of the visits of Google.com. A not insignificant and growing number.
Last week saw the introduction of the first Android phone, the G1 handset for T-Mobile. It’s a cool piece of hardware and software that should appeal to many. But is it really an iPhone competitor? And is that why we should care? No and no, but care we should.
Here are sampling of the headlines from major news organizations in the U.S. and UK:
•Google’s Android could smash iPhone’s locked gateway – guardian.co.uk
•Google vs. iPhone: Is Steve Jobs Reliving Past Mistakes? – time.com
•Google Introduces an iPhone Rival Open to Whims – NYTimes.com
•Google takes swipe at Apple’s iPhone – London timesonline.co.uk
Google isn’t competing with the iPhone in this endeavor. They are competing with every manufacture that doesn’t yet offer a full mobile internet experience and for customers that don’t have an iPhone and want that browsing experience on their cell. That means that companies that are not providing that like Microsoft and Nokia are the ones that Google is up against not Apple. As Greg Sterling points out, the smart phones are risk here are those running Windows Mobile, Palm and Symbian phones. Here is a great summary of smart phone market.
The G1 will have a positive affect on mobile browsing in general and on Local in particular. If not now with T-Mobile than going forward. It is a phone that makes search the center of the user experience and that can only bode well for Local and location based. Like the iPhone, websites will not need to be completely rebuilt and users can have a full internet experience with great local search.
From where I sit, phones like the G1 AND the iPhone will drive us towards the fully functional mobile future, not as competitors but as inflexion points in a dynamic market.
Google has formally announced Maps.Google.com/Vote that I covered in mid September.
In addition to offering voting information and polling places (coming October 15) via Maps they are making the maplet available as a widget for your website via a their Gadget creator:
As I mentioned in my earlier post, this type of mash up of deep local data with Maps offers an inkling of type of local data that will be presented on a national scale that we will be seeing over the next 12 to 18 months. It will be exciting times indeed for local.
Google, in upgrading Google Blog search, has created an intriguing potential competitor to Techmeme. The upgraded search provides broad blog coverage, picks up stories quickly and has the potential to project blog content more widely. ReadWriteWeb noted:
The new Google Blogsearch has the potential to reach tens of millions of people and drive insane amounts of traffic.
Whether that is true for local blogs is yet to be seen. There is however a feature that highlights blog by major search terms. This could have an a positive traffic impact for hyperlocal blogs as it emphasizes blogs related to primary geo search phrases:
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