Close to the launch of MapmyIndia ShowNearby for your phone, we have applied the concept of ‘location based service‘ to Maps today in the form of map layers. You have been using the regular map-directions-local searches for a while now. It is time you see stuff “around” you.
We are inclined to believe every search that happens on MapmyIndia Maps has a local context. You are more likely to search for places of interest near you, in your locality, region, city or state, with decreasing order of preference. We also understood that maps have to be more than just searching for locations. And thus we are introducing two new kinds of searches on Maps -
- Deals : We have aggregated daily deals and offers from partners and packaged them as a layer. Just select deals from the search dropdown, and enter your location to see deals in a radius of 50 km around you. The search works very much as a local search on Maps – you can see deal merchant locations on the map and get driving directions to these businesses that are offering discounts. Find the deal that you are interested in and which is also practical by virtue of being in your neighborhood, and buy the deal by clicking through to the respective partner’s website. All the necessary information about deals in displayed in Maps including time left to buy the deal. MapmyIndia has partnered with Snapdeal and Mydala to aggregate deals.
- Movies : You can also search for movies playing near you on MapmyIndia Maps. Enter the name of the movie to see where all it is playing around you, or just enter a location to see all movies listed by titles grouped by theaters. You get the show times for the current day and you can also buy movie tickets by clicking on the respective show time. Booking transactions are carried out on BookmyShow‘s website.
The functionality of layers is best experienced by setting your default locations. Just create a MapmyIndia account, set your locations as home, office or just about anything and as many locations as you want to set. Every time you return to Maps, just login and keep switching between your locations with a single click to avoid typing in your address every time you want to search.
These two layers will offer our users a richer searching experience on Maps. Eventually it’s all about your location, your geographical space and things happening in that space.
We have also introduced widgets for bloggers, developers and website administrators to integrate MapmyIndia Maps in their own online properties. You can use the maps widget to embed an interactive draggable-zoomable map of your business or location on your website, the directions widget to provide your users step-by-step driving directions to your place, the local search widget for your website users to search for useful places around your location, and the full search widget to replicate the entire set of searches available on MapmyIndia Maps.
We have had users add spots to Maps for a while now. Starting today, you can also edit spots on Maps. All the millions of spots in the MapmyIndia database are open for users to enrich with useful attribute information. MapmyIndia is not into the business listing side of things as such, but at the same time we aim to provide our users the most updated information about places available on Maps. You will find an “edit” link next to every spot search that you do on Maps as well as on the respective Explore page. Since we want some credibility associated with the editors, we will have users create a MapmyIndia account before they can edit any spots. You can submit your changes, and we will approve them and you will be informed when the changes start reflecting in search. This is an ambitious new feature and we hope to gain a lot of useful information from our users.
We will be launching new layers over the next few months. Stay tuned and stay in touch on Facebook.
Nitin Sagar
Product Manager
Some say good things come in small packages. Well, we sort of agree. A 3.2 is an incremental change from 3.0, but it is a quantum jump in the value bundled in the Maps product release. Click your way to MapmyIndia Maps and read on to see what has changed in the 3.2 release.
You are used to getting driving directions from just about every online maps provider out there. And we certainly claim to provide superior results over others given no one use the component of landmarks in directions like we do. Over and above that, today MapmyIndia Maps has added another ace up its sleeve by introducing ‘places along the route’ in driving directions. Now when you search for driving directions, you also get a list of ATMs, Hotels, Restaurants, Petrol Pumps, Attractions and Hospitals that fall on the way. You can print this information and carry it along when you travel. These are truly simple things that make a lot of difference to the way you use maps !!
We have also made adding your own places even simpler and introduced the concept of Spots. Just right-click on the map to add a place, drag the marker around on the map to ensure you have got the right location, enter the name and last level address detail and you are done! We have made adding more information like category, website(s) etc. optional. The idea is to make adding a place a one minute affair for our users. Also, we have renamed the concept of eLocation to Spot. Every place on the MapmyIndia Map is a spot. When a user adds a place, it becomes a unique point. The long term intent is to make MapmyIndia Maps the default search for places. Since all it takes now is a six-digit alphanumeric to find a place and get directions to it or find other useful places nearby. A Spot is a permanent presence of a user or a business on the map that (s)he can claim to be his/her own.
Auto-suggest is another addition to this release. A feature that was long desirable, the auto-fill functionality helps you find the best match for the location or point of interest that you are searching as you type. This assisted search will reduce your typing time and we intend to increase the engagement on the site by letting users find the “exact” place before you hit the search button.
Oh and we also have a Facebook page where we wish to interact with our users on a regular basis. We want to hear from you. Like us!
Give us your feedback on this release in comments here or on Maps.
Nitin Sagar
Product Manager
Following up closely on the launch of Online Maps v3.1, we have released an update to both Maps and Explore today. This is an important web release partly because of some feature additions and primarily because of the tons of under-the-hood changes we have done to the platform. Read on for details on the components added/changed/updated in this release -
- House numbers and more details everywhere – We have added two new zoom levels (on the higher side) to the MapmyIndia Map in this release. And with that we have brought house numbers in 18 cities (as of now) – New Delhi, Gurgaon, Faridabad, Noida, Greater Noida, Ghaziabad, Mumbai, Navi Mumbai, Thane, Kalyan, Pune, Pimpri Chinchwad, Chandigarh, Mohali, Panchkula, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai. Check it out right away – see the map of Kormangla, Bangalore and zoom in to the last level. You will see building numbers quite obtrusively on the map. It just got a whole lot more convenient to add your house on the map, share your location with friends and family with last-mile precise directions. Another addition to the map is building footprints for the cities of Delhi and Mumbai. Take the map of M Block Market in Greater Kailash 2 for example. Zoom in to the last level and you will see house numbers associated with buildings.
House Numbers on MapmyIndia Maps
Also now as you go zooming in deeper into the map you will see icons representing certain categories popping up at designated zoom levels. Makes for a prettier and richer map.
- More Useful Restaurant data – MapmyIndia Maps now has its restaurant information pumped up by Zomato. The integration includes showing restaurant timings, cuisine, and cost of meal for two directly in your search and links to view the menu and photos on Zomato’s website (see Olive Bar and Kitchen in Delhi). Throw in the regular directions to these restaurants and this really is the only gastro search you now need to use!
Zomato in MapmyIndia Maps
- Details for Points of Interests – You can now see phone numbers and PIN codes whenever you search for a particular business on MapmyIndia Maps. For example PVR Saket in Delhi. We continue gathering more and more details for all the millions of Points of Interests we have in our database and we encourage users to give feedback on searches to improve the quality of data.
- Comprehensive Show on Map and Search Nearby feature – Finding Points of Interest around a location is a commonly used feature. We had limited results to ten on a given map view on searches like hotels around gateway of India. Now you see ten results on the map and in the list on the left pane, but you also see other search results represented as small dots. This gives you an idea of the depth of information available in a “spatial” context. The same logic applies to Search Nearby feature as well. Also we now show you up to thousand results around a location sorted by radial distance.
- Local Search on Explore – MapmyIndia Explore, the big directory of States, Cities, Attractions and other things in India now adds the local search dimension. Keeping the principle of making it easier for you to discover things, Local Search on MapmyIndia Explore has city guides (see Kochi, Kerala). Local Search has eleven broad categories (like Eat & Drink, Travel, Shopping, Entertainment, Utilities, Tourism etc.) for you to search from along with over hundred sub-categories. You will be surprised to find places you didn’t think existed.
- More options on local search results – Whenever you do a nearby search, like coffee near Andheri, Mumbai, you get a number of results. Each of those results in itself is a location and must be able to reproduce the usual behaviour associated with a location on MapmyIndia Maps. So now when you hover with your mouse on the results you find three (self-explanatory) options – directions, search nearby and share. With this the entire search on MapmyIndia Maps is streamlined and users can expect consistent functionality across the different types of searches they can do.
Search options on Local Search Results
More exciting things happening on MapmyIndia Maps over the next few months including more data partnerships and interesting features. Stay tuned. And as always, we welcome your feedback and suggestions.
Nitin Sagar
Product Manager
We had announced a preview of the next version of our maps portal just before the dawn of 2011. An upgrade was released a month later. Since then we have worked on a bunch of new features and making search even simpler. And today, we are rolling it out to our users everywhere. Go to http://maps.mapmyindia.com and see it live in action.
Read on to learn about the interesting things we have done for this major release -
- A new theme on maps – The map has been completely restyled to ensure more readability. You can see more places on the map for every zoom level, important places have larger fonts, icons for certain category types in higher zoom levels, and the colors on the map now blend in with each other and are light on the eyes.
- Improved and detailed ‘Show on Map’ – A list of categories and sub-categories that cover almost everything that you will ever need to find on a map. Just pick a map view based on zoom level and bounds, and start exploring. You can select multiple categories to see and we will combine the results based on distance from the center of the map.
- eLocation – MapmyIndia is all for making location search simpler. Now we are sure you do really enjoy typing, but if we tell you you could save some keystroke effort by entering T52FTC in the search box and be shown the map of Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, wouldn’t you say “neat”? So that is exactly what we have done.Places across India now have an eLocation ID – a six-digit alphanumeric that is basically an abbreviation for the place name in layman tongue. But it is smarter than that. eLocation provides you an alternate search method. Type in the eLocation, and we do the translation from an alphanumeric to a physical place with a well-formed name. eLocation is still a new concept and we will be exposing its full functionality over time. I encourage you to try it out by searching for restaurants around Juhu, Mumbai. You will see the eLocation IDs of the restaurants we find.
- User Added Places – We know there still are places (and forever will be) that are not a part of our map data. And we know you love to add your own stuff to the map to make it even more useful. And we are always grateful for your contributions. We encourage you to search for the place that you are looking for before you add. If it’s not there, just find the best location for the place by zooming in the map as high as you must, right-click on that precise spot, and select ‘Add a place’ from the context menu. Thereafter the process is fairly straightforward with just a few form fields that you must fill. The added place will start appearing in search results once we have approved it.
- MapmyIndia Explore and POI pages – There is only so much that you can see on Maps. And it’s always good to have some order. So we decided to break your favorite places down to dedicated pages. In the process we created a whole new product, MapmyIndia Explore, a directory of pages maintaining the order of State -> City -> Point of Interest. Discovering places now gets a lot more organized and comprehensive. Explore will see a lot of content addition over the next few months and soon you will find everything you wanted to know about a place here. Also Maps and Explore are closely bound together. A local search on Maps will show you links to place pages of the respective POIs and similarly a large map view in Explore will take you back to Maps. Explore additionally gives you distances between any two points in India and optional directions.
- History – We now maintain a list of searches you do in a session on Maps. You can go back to any search by selecting one of the past searches. You should discontinue using the browser “back” button and use our own now.
- Feedback – We love hearing from you. So much that we have included feedback for almost every activity you do on Maps. Not happy with something? Just click the ‘Something wrong here’ link and we will ask you for any issues you are facing while using search on Maps. You can always send us any general comments by clicking on the ‘feedback’ button in the bottom left of the page. We welcome both happy brickbats and bouquets.
We hope you will enjoy going to places with discovery and navigation assistance from MapmyIndia Maps.
Nitin Sagar
Product Manager
A little over a month after the launch of our completely overhauled maps portal, we are pleased to announce the release of an upgrade to the online search product today. Go to http://next.mapmyindia.com and see the following new features we have added -
- Show Points of Interest in the current map view – as shown in the image, this is a list of most searched-for categories on maps. Now all you have to do is pan and zoom-in to the location you want to discover from a local perspective, and click any of the 32 (so far) types of businesses to get an icon-assisted listing of your search. Simple and intuitive.
- Right-click on Map - there is only so much information we can display embedded into the map. A keen user needs to go deeper into the map layers and find out the most useful information.
We have made it easier to get precise location and direction information by enabling a right-click search anywhere on the map. If you know your street, it is not too difficult to find your apartment or building on the map now. We strongly recommend playing around with this feature to our users and discover the wealth of geographical information layered on the map. - Print and Share Maps and Directions - we know when you travel you don’t wish to spend time on the Internet searching for maps and directions while on the road. When you spend time researching your travel routes and other things, now all you have to do is take a simple printout of your location-based searches at MapmyIndia or just send yourself or your friends an email that can stay on your smart phone as you travel.
And while you are at it, you can embed maps in your travel blog or website or tweet about what you are searching for or (for those who swear by MapmyIndia) like us on Facebook!
We will continue releasing new features on MapmyIndia Maps and if you have any suggestions or want to partner with us for data or product, please drop us a message.
Nitin Sagar
Product Manager
Hello and Happy New Year everyone.
2011 is slated to be a very exciting year for MapmyIndia. And we usher into it by releasing the preview of our next generation Maps, Driving Directions and Local Search portal.
A lot of you gave us useful feedback and we analyzed search patterns both in terms of information users were looking for and the ways they searched. The next version has incorporated much of this analysis which eventually comes down to one thing – make search simple and intuitive. We decided to get away with all those multiple options to find location based information and replaced it with one universal search box..
..a form that handles all your natural language queries like -
- sector 18, noida
- map of shimla
- maurya sheraton, delhi
- ATM around maurya sheraton, new delhi
- petrol pumps in cp, new delhi
- fast food restaurant in juhu, mumbai
- hotels in manali
- delhi to agra
- saket, delhi to juhu, mumbai
- from new delhi railway station to janakpuri, new delhi
- driving directions from agra to jaipur
..and such.
Also every time you search for a location say A, you can now directly look for points of interest around A using the ‘Browse Places Around Here‘ section
We will be rolling out more features over the next month as part of the beta launch. Catch a sneak peek here http://maps.mapmyindia.com/next and try the free form search now.
Leave us comments, suggestions or any other feedback about the release.
Nitin SagarProduct Manager
