Old Maps vs. New Maps

Marco Tabini was thinking what I was thinking about Jason Matheson’s test of iOS 6 Maps against Ontario city and town names — that it would be useful to compare the results against iOS 5 with the Google-backed Maps:

As far as I can see, the data supports three conclusions:

  1. Given our set of data, old Maps doesn’t fare that much better than new Maps.

  2. There seems to be a significant difference in the way the two companies approach the task of returning search results, with Google doing whatever it takes to get any result out, while Apple seems to prefer accuracy above all.

  3. In the end, this is not really a particularly useful test insofar as determining the accuracy of Maps. At best, we get to see how good Apple is as at finding things, but with targets as big as whole towns we’re unlikely to unearth any information that is really useful.

★ Saturday, 29 September 2012