We’ve just launched the new site and coverage for India. Check out this list of features:
Street Maps for 9 important Indian cities Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Ahmedabad, and Jaipur and National Road Network of India with roughly 20,000 cities/towns/major localities (as points on the map). Political Map of India with important geographical features that includes national roads connecting around 20,000 Indian cities are on the offer. Highlight is the detailed maps for 9 important Indian cities as mentioned earlier. Within these 9 cities, important places likes monuments, restaurants, hotels are also presented as icons in the maps. Maps of supported cities has been stitched with the national road visually and navigationally.
Location Search – Global (one need not type the city name), context-aware (i.e. ranking of results considers the map view), error-tolerant (corrects the typos, expands the important abbreviations) and flexible solution to find complete or partial address, roads, localities, landmarks and places of general interest.
One can search for geographical things like address, roads, localities, landmarks and places of general interest like monuments, restaurants, hotels etc. for the 9 supported cities. Apart from this one can search for important geographical features and around 20,000 cities/major localities in India. However details for these cities are at much lower level. If an address can only be partly searched, it will drop the unmatched part and return the part result. Search is typo-resistant and tries to expand/abbreviate roads and locality wherever possible.
“Blr” will take you to the city of Bangalore. Short city names like Blr, Hyd etc. are supported
While you are in Bangalore (i.e. the map area of the browser is completely filled by the map of Bangalore), “MG Road” will show the MG road on the map of Bangalore and other MG Road (s) in India as suggestions. Location Search is context aware.
“Indira Naga” will result in suggestions for Indiranagar, Bangalore (fuzzy match) and one can click to go to there.
While you are in Hyderabad, “Bangalore Golf Course” will result in other golf courses as suggestions with the pushpin on the “Bangalore Golf Course, Bangalore” at their exact position on the map.
“Airport, Delhi” will place the pushpin on the “Indira Gandhi International Airport, Gurgaon Road, New Delhi, Delhi” at their exact position on the map.
Address “#643, Janu’s Residency, CMH Road, 100 ft road, blr” will match to “Chinmaya Mission Hospital Road, 100 Feet Road, Indiranagar, Bangalore, Karnataka, India” as a suggestion. It dropped the part of address that it did not understand, expanded the acronyms and found the required road intersection.
While you are in Bangalore, “Begumpet” will result in Begumpet, Hyd. One need not type the city name while searching for localities.
Business Listing (Yellow Pages) Search – This allows us to find businesses listed with us. Click Business tab and specify what (e.g. “Petrol Pump” in first box) and where (e.g. “Indira Nagar” in second box) to get the business listings sorted according to distance from the location of search (i.e. Indira Nagar, Bangalore)
Click the Business tab. Under this one can find businesses by specifying either the name of the business or the category in first text box and address, locality, road or city in second text box. Search will return all business entities ranked/sorted according to the distance from the initial search location. The location of these results on the map (referred to as Geocode) are approximate and we are working on improving the same.
“Petrol Pump” (first text box), “Indira nagar” (second text box) will result in all business entities along with their address, phone number (wherever applicable) etc. ranked/sorted according to the distance from the initial search location (i.e. Petrol Pumps near to Indira Nagar, Bangalore will be shown first and so on).
“Indian Oil” (first text box), “Indira nagar” (second text box) will result in all Indian Oil petrol pumps in Bangalore that are listed with us.
Routing/Driving Directions
- Intra-city visual driving directions
- Intercity integrated routing (detailed driving directions inside the cities having Street Maps and normal driving directions on the National map)
- One-click driving directions
Under this, one can route from a given source to a destination. Source and destination can be specified in multiple ways – by right clicking on the map, or by hovering over the search result icon displayed on the map or by hovering over the pushpins in the collections or by clicking directions link from menu and typing in the required addresses/locality/places/road. Source and destination can be any city/locality/place/landmark in India within 15KM of distance from any road. Clicking Reverse link at the bottom will swap the start and end point and will compute the route. Selecting Shortest Distance radio button will compute the routes for the shortest distance between the two points.
While you are in Hyderabad, From “CMH Road” To “Brigade Road” will result in visual + textual driving directions from “Brigade Road, Bangalore” to “CMH Road, Bangalore”.
While you are in Hyderabad, From “CMH Road, 100 Feet Road” To “Mysore” will result in driving direction from “intersection of CMH Road, Bangalore and 100 Feet Road, Bangalore” to “Mysore” with detailed driving directions within the city of Bangalore (for which we have Street Maps).
Share – User can share (by selecting “Send in e-mail” from “Share” Menu) his various search results, driving directions, collections etc. over email.
Print – User can take print out of the maps, driving directions, search results.
Collections – One can create collections of pushpins, custom drawings on the maps, routing etc. and save it against a Windows Live ID for viewing later or sharing it with others.
Namaste.
