Maps is a really interesting area for looking at the offerings of the large web companies. They offer out their maps API for free and get thousands of users developing and adding maps to their site. These resources developed by developers are fab for me as a user but I simply don’t understand the value they offer for the search giants.
I do have one suggestion for why it’s good that the search engines are offering these APIs out. Perhaps they are trying to capture the future of search. Offering out map APIs for free gives them a huge R&D network. Let’s say they have 1000 developers each using their maps and each spends 3 weeks of late nights working on their cool mashup – that gives them 120,000 hours of free developer time from people near the cutting edge.
Certainly geo-location and local search are important and will be of bigger and bigger importance as time goes on. Being seen as the provider of choice thanks to all the geeks using and exposing your product, and having 1000 applications in test to see which ones take off – that’s actually quite a good idea.
Potentially these big search companies aren’t just having a random altruistic brain fart but are being very canny about capturing a future search channel.
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