Eleven months after its first attempt to map Europe, Yandex, the Russian search giant, introduced a debugged and improved version last week, showing a more in-depth map of the continent and enabling users to look for itineraries and route trips.
The improvements have indeed been dramatic since the previous versions if judging by the map of Paris or its surroundings, which I tried personally. Even small streets are now displayed, which was not the case before. Location accuracy seems to match that of Google – for the better or for worse.
Both Yandex and Google often fail to accurately locate my home in Paris, with a mistake of more than 100 meters. (This is probably due to “urban canyons,” as techies say to justify the inability of GPS satellites to locate correctly a target in certain city areas. I must say I like it. At least there will be some incorrect data in my NSA file.)
A charming touch of exoticism is brought by the combination of Latin and Cyrillic characters to name French cities. No doubt the hordes of Russian tourists visiting France will love it, sparing them the necessity to switch to Google maps when visiting Versailles/Версаль or Enghien-les-Bains/Ангьен-ле-Бэн.
Yandex style map of Paris
A drawback of the Yandex-style map of Paris is that it contains few other indications than street names and metro station locations. Google, meanwhile, tells you what you will find in certain locations, from hospitals, to swimming pools, to select hotels.
Yandex’s most useful and technologically advanced feature, Yandex Traffic, which provides real-time data on the traffic situation in Russian cities, is not available in Paris. If only it was because traffic jams did not exist in the French capital!
“We have resolutely decided to go international,” Andrei Strelkov, the head of geoinformatics at Yandex, told the Russian news agency RIA Novosti, referring to his company’s maps development strategy. Unlike Google, which launched globally first and then zoomed in on smaller areas, Yandex has developed its maps the other way around, starting small and building itself up internationally, Strelkov noted.
