14 DAY TRIAL // The life-long battle between Yahoo! and Google is being fought at every level possible, starting with the search engine, advertising platform, email services, and going to the maps they both offer to their users. At the moment, as with most of the other options and services, Google is the Maps leader, but unlike in other domains where it chooses to present old features as new, the Sunnyvale-based company is actually doing a good job when enhancing the browsing through Yahoo! Maps experience.
The latest update to the Maps service puts Yahoo! ahead when it comes to amount of information being presented in a glance. The borders of the neighborhoods have been made clear by coloring each one in a slightly different color, as you can see in the screenshot on the left. 12,000 neighborhoods have been added in 300 cities, so there's a big probability yours will be somewhere in there too. Points of interest such as schools and subways have been marked by orange blob-like squares, giving additional details.
It's a well known fact that Yahoo! is going for a totally different Maps look than Google, and this update differentiates the two even more. The next step will probably deepen the rift between the two approaches, and it's clear where this is going. Yahoo! is trying to amass as much information as possible into its maps, wanting to give users everything at once, while Google is going for the layer version of providing info. When you want to see something, all you need to do is apply the appropriate filter. The problem stands at whether giving too much information is better than giving too little, but really how much is "too much?"
It's praiseworthy that despite the rough times Yahoo! is in right now and amid serious departures of talent, they managed to pull this update through, and even more, to make it this good. Two thumbs up.