Google Maps Growing in Popularity

Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 by Jordan McCollum

Google Maps Growing in Popularity

According to Hitwise, Google Maps is growing in popularity rapidly. While they have a long way to go to overtake the leader in the maps sector, Google Maps is the only major map site to see an increase in traffic over the last year.

Traffic to map websites, via Hitwise

While MapQuest still dominates the sector with just over half of the traffic, Google Maps is growing, and has captured more than 20% of the traffic.

Hitwise also looked into the sources of this traffic—unsurprisingly, Google is sending much of its map searches to Google Maps through organic, plus box and paid results:

Google sends more of its own traffic to Google Maps than to Mapquest, a change that occurred last March. This can’t really be attributed to an increase in consumers looking for Google Maps. We can measure this through Internet searches. Searches for “google maps” have increased but the term “mapquest” receives nearly 10x the search volume.

The change is that Google is sending more traffic to Google Maps for high volume generic terms and for variations on the MapQuest brand name. Google sent more traffic to Google Maps for searches for “maps” this year compared with the same week last year. The same is true for “driving directions”, “map” and “directions” as well as variations on the MapQuest brand name including “mapquest driving directions” and “map quest”.

Hm . . . do you think MapQuest has filed for trademark protection of bidding on their name?

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7 comments on “Google Maps Growing in Popularity”

Are Search Engines fair Partners? Says:

January 9th, 2008 at 6:57 pm

[...] of revenue share: all by optimizing their own sites to be getting more traffic than other websites. mapquest is the latest victim. wouldn’t it be nice to have a rev-share law that protects the little guys from being divided [...]
Advice Network Says:

January 9th, 2008 at 11:17 pm

Google maps is what I use. I like its intuitive functionality, but mostly I like that I can just enter an address in the search box that is already at the top right of any browser window without going to another page first.
Dilandau Says:

January 10th, 2008 at 8:52 am

No conocía mapquest. Creía que google maps era el primero
Jordan McCollum Says:

January 10th, 2008 at 3:24 pm

MapQuest has been around since 1967 and has been in the online mapping business since 1996. Google Maps is not yet three years old.
» Google Maps Up 135%, MapQuest Now Mortal » InsideGoogle-part of the Blog News Channel Says:

January 10th, 2008 at 9:10 pm

[...] Jordan McCollum Greg [...]
Steven Bradley Says:

January 11th, 2008 at 1:47 pm

I’m actually disappointed in Google Maps. I do use it, but I found the maps from Yahoo, MSN, and Ask all to be better. Google Maps seems to take the longest to load and each of the others offers something Google lacks.

It’s surprising given Google’s early lead over the others.
Mobile guy Says:

March 3rd, 2008 at 9:59 am

maps.yahoo.com still great, but google has more info on the maps.

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