Inside Ask Maps

The new Maps product we launched last week has had a fantastic response from our users, the press, and the blogosphere . This has turned out to be both a good and bad thing for Maps. We are getting unprecedented traffic to it (way above my projections, at least), but that is slowing it down. We even got a feel of the "Digg effect ". Luckily, our engineering team has already figured out several optimizations and improvements that we plan on implementing over the next couple of weeks that is going to improve the speed of maps significantly.

Also there seem to be a lot of people comparing our aerial imagery with our competitors. We believe our partners at GlobeXplorer have the most comprehensive and rich set of satellite and aerial imagery in the United States, and as some of you have noticed, in western Europe (check out this awesome view of The Louvre for all of you Da Vinci Code fans).

So far, we have only tapped into their most recent imagery in 12 major markets in the US. Over the next couple of weeks we will update this across the board, so you will be seeing major enhancements all across the country as they build out their cache (another speed improvement).

Thank you again for all of the great suggestions and feedback (and of course for using our product). Please send over any other comments to us and we'll make our Maps product even better for the next round!

Andy Yang
Product Manager, Ask Maps