Yahoo! Maps was a free online mapping portal provided by

Yahoo! Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Mana ...

Functionality included local weather powered by

The Weather Channel The Weather Channel (TWC) is an American pay television channel owned by Weather Group, LLC, a subsidiary of Allen Media Group. The channel's headquarters are in Atlanta, Georgia. Launched on May 2, 1982, the channel broadcasts weather foreca ...

, printing maps, and local reviews powered by

Yelp Yelp Inc. is an American company that develops the Yelp.com website and the Yelp mobile app, which publish crowd-sourced reviews about businesses. It also operates Yelp Guest Manager, a table reservation service. It is headquartered in San F ...

. It shut down on June 30, 2015. For a time in 2019, Yahoo! Maps could be accessed in the United States on https://search.yahoo.com/, albeit powered by

Here WeGo HERE WeGo is a web mapping and navigation service, operated by HERE Technologies and originally developed by Nokia. In 2013, HERE Technologies released this web mapping application for Windows Phone and the World Wide Web as a revamped versi ...

. However, that is no longer possible.

Map data

The street network and other vector data Yahoo! Maps used later on was from

HERE Here is an adverb that means "in, on, or at this place". It may also refer to: Software * Here Technologies, a mapping company * Here WeGo (formerly Here Maps), a mobile app and map website by Here Television * Here TV (formerly "here!"), a ...

, and includes a number of public data sources. Detailed street network data is currently available for the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and most European countries. Country borders, cities, and water bodies are mapped for the rest of the world. Low-resolution satellite imagery is available worldwide. 1–2 meter resolution is available for most of the contiguous United States and select cities worldwide.

History

Yahoo! Maps originally launched circa 1998. The data was provided by Vicinity Corporation. A new

Adobe Flash Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash and FutureSplash) is a multimedia software platform used for production of animations, rich web applications, desktop applications, mobile apps, mobile games, and embedded web browser video players. Flash ...

-based version called Yahoo! Local Maps was released in Beta in November 2005. In April 2006, aerial and satellite views were added. On May 16, 2007, Yahoo! released a new map style designed by the cartography compan
Cartifact
Data and imagery were also supplied by Cartifact, including shaded relief showing land surface features and land cover coloring indicating major environmental zones. At some point before May 2007 maps of India were added to http://in.search.yahoo.com which is a non Flash interface to Yahoo Maps. In addition to reasonably detailed Indian coverage (not available through http://search.yahoo.com), the site also allows a user to browse/search Yahoo!. In May 2010, Yahoo! reached a deal with

Nokia Nokia Corporation (natively Nokia Oyj, referred to as Nokia) is a Finnish multinational telecommunications, information technology, and consumer electronics corporation, established in 1865. Nokia's main headquarters are in Espoo, Finland, i ...

whereby Nokia's mapping service (later known as

Here Here is an adverb that means "in, on, or at this place". It may also refer to: Software * Here Technologies, a mapping company * Here WeGo (formerly Here Maps), a mobile app and map website by Here Television * Here TV (formerly "here!"), a ...

) would power Yahoo! Maps. This came into effect in October 2011. In 2014, a mobile site for Yahoo! Maps was released. On June 4, 2015, Yahoo! announced that Yahoo! Maps would be shut down, along with

Yahoo! Pipes Yahoo! Pipes was a web application from Yahoo! that provided a graphical user interface for building data mashups that aggregate web feeds, web pages, and other services; creating Web-based apps from various sources; and publishing those apps. ...

, at the end of the month.

Functions

The main Yahoo! Maps site offered street maps and driving directions for the United States and Canada. It had the following notable features: * Address Book: Registered Yahoo! users can store a list of commonly used street addresses, making it unnecessary to type them in again. A recently entered address can be quickly recalled by selecting one from a

drop-down list A drop-down list (abbreviated drop-down, or DDL; also known as a drop-down menu, drop menu, pull-down list, picklist) is a graphical control element, similar to a list box, that allows the user to choose one value from a list. When a drop-dow ...

. * Live Traffic: Traffic incident markers and current highway conditions can be viewed on the map. * Find On The Map: A local search by business name or category can be typed into the "Find On The Map" box to locate it in the current map view. A list of clickable point of interest categories is also available. The results can be further refined by user rating, or related category. *Driving Directions: Driving directions can be displayed on a map or in printable form, with optional turn-by-turn maps, or as simple text. Links to driving directions can be e-mailed, and text directions sent to mobile phones. Multi-point driving directions: Multiple addresses can be entered and manually reordered for complex driving directions. * Draggable maps: The map view can be manipulated by dragging it with the mouse or tapping the arrow keys. Zoom level can be controlled via the mouse scroll wheel, "Page Up"/"Page Down" keys, or the map's zoom bar. * Widgets: A number of widgets over the map include a navigator widget, map type (map, satellite & hybrid) controller and a zoom level control. * Satellite Imagery: Labelled (hybrid) and unlabelled satellite imagery is available worldwide. * Overview map: Collapsible overview map provides context, with draggable grey area controlling the main map view. * International Coverage: Outside the US and Canada, Yahoo! Maps Beta can recognize city, province, and country names, and provide a small-scale map or satellite views. * Right click to set waypoint: an origin, destination, or midpoint can be set by right-clicking on the desired location on the map. * Draggable markers: Any marker can be dragged to the 'Get Map' text entry area to add that location to a route.

Developer API

Until December 2011, developers could embed Yahoo! Maps into their own web pages (to create a

mashup Mashup may refer to: * Mashup (culture), the rearrangement of spliced parts of musical pieces as part of a subculture * Mashup (education), combining various forms of data and media by a teacher or student in an instructional setting * Mashup (m ...

) through th
Yahoo! Maps Developer APIs
The Yahoo! Maps APIs came in three basic flavors: * Th

which used the

platform. Three variations, allowing the developer to write in

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, of ...

ActionScript ActionScript is an object-oriented programming language originally developed by Macromedia Inc. (later acquired by Adobe). It is influenced by HyperTalk, the scripting language for HyperCard. It is now an implementation of ECMAScript (meaning ...

, or

Adobe Flex Apache Flex, formerly Adobe Flex, is a software development kit (SDK) for the development and deployment of cross-platform rich web applications based on the Adobe Flash Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash and FutureSplash) is a multimedia ...

1.5, were available. * Th
Ajax API
for interactive maps that use capabilities inherent in web browsers, without using the Flash plug-in.

Ajax Ajax may refer to: Greek mythology and tragedy * Ajax the Great, a Greek mythological hero, son of King Telamon and Periboea * Ajax the Lesser, a Greek mythological hero, son of Oileus, the king of Locris * ''Ajax'' (play), by the ancient Gree ...

applications are written in

. * Th
"Simple" API
basically an XML data format, an extension of GeoRSS, for displaying point of interest data on top of Yahoo!'s main map site. The Flash and Ajax APIs also supported display of GeoRSS formatted data. Yahoo! offered a number of low-level APIs to support maps, for

geocoding Address geocoding, or simply geocoding, is the process of taking a text-based description of a location, such as an address or the name of a place, and returning geographic coordinates, frequently latitude/longitude pair, to identify a locatio ...

, getting a map image, searching for a local business, or retrieving traffic information. Some other Yahoo! services, such as

Flickr Flickr ( ; ) is an American image hosting and video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was a popular way for amateur and profession ...

and

Upcoming.org Upcoming (formerly Upcoming.org) is a social event calendar website that launched in 2003, founded by Andy Baio. Features Upcoming combines features of an event calendar and a social networking site. Primarily, the site is a searchable, brows ...

, have their content available through web services, with interesting potential for mashups.

References

External links