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.