Yahoo! Maps now has satellite imagery
April 12, 2006 5 Comments
About time! I actually use Yahoo! maps more than probably all the rest because I like the interface. Now I can at least take a look at imagery from areas I’m traveling to. The imagery isn’t as detailed as Google’s or ESRI’s in urban areas, but it does seem better in rural Texas where my in-laws live. As with Microsoft, Yahoo! focuses on the continental USA so if you live somewhere else, you usually don’t get as good imagery. That said you can finally use Yahoo! Maps outside the USA for basic mapping (the imagery isn’t good by any means) and it does sound like they are working to improve it.
Update: Philip says in the comments that, “Yahoo has added international support for their maps and geocoder.” meaning that you can now use the geocoder in many countries now. Head over to his blog post to read more.
About James Fee
I use Yahoo Maps a lot too. I like it much better than Mapquest, and Google’s offerings still can’t find my house.
It does look like the imagery is better for rural areas on Yahoo, at least compared to Google local. We have made walking trails on our property, and you can see them on Yahoo – with Google you can’t even zoom close enough to see our house.
May want to look at the maps that ask.com has now.. they have some areas better covered than google maps.
James, the other big news is that Yahoo has added international support for their maps and geocoder.
This is big news for developers outside the U.S. who have addresses but no coordinates. Yahoo Maps lets you add points using latitude/longitude coordinates or an address (unlike Google Maps which requires coordnates.) Now that you can geocode automatically, internationally and with photos… this is going to make Yahoo Maps look a whole lot tastier to developers.
Well done Yahoo!
James maybe I spoke too soon… Yahoo I think teased us a bit, the geocoder does respond to certain cities in other countries, but a few of the address tests I did for Paris, actually turned out to be Paris, Texas (ha! Some geographer I am.)
From looking at their maps it looks like only major roads are there, so the geocoder support is probably limited at best. Hopefully they update soon with some good streets. After all how good is imagery if you can’t find anything!
James, Yahoo got their imagery from USGS quads. A workmate spoke to a company that was doing the work, and they used multispectral satellite data to color the orthoquads.
We looked at the data in an industrial timbered area and the combination of the two data sources produces some funny imagery. Recall that USGS orthos are pretty old, but color satellite imagery can be aquired much more recently. Clearcuts on the satellite data were reddish (because of the soil) but they had big trees on the orthos. The mix is a reddish stand of trees.
I’m wondering what effect that has on suburban areas where there has been tremendous growth between the date of the orthos and the satellite imagery.
Having said that, having the greater detail in rural areas is a definite plus over Google. Yahoo’s problem now is refresh and rendering issues.