As Google Maps continues to roll out new features that competing map services don’t have, web users are rewarding it with big gains in traffic. A recent analyst report says Google is the number one maps site in terms of features and usability, and new Hitwise.com traffic data just shared this week with Search Engine Land shows Google Maps pulling much closer to category leader MapQuest.

In a report issued this week, the boutique investment bank Cowen and Company says Google is the clear leader with the most user-friendly features among the four major mapping sites. “Google Maps has meaningfully expanded its lead in features and functionality over its competitors,” Cowen analysts say in their report.

As for those three competitors, the Cowen report isn’t very kind: “Since our initial survey in July 2007, innovation at MapQuest (AOL) and Yahoo Maps has stagnated. Microsoft Live Search Maps, which is the least popular of the four, ranks a distant second, but has launched a couple unique features over the past two years.”

The report includes a case study using all four mapping sites to get directions using the phrase, [South Orange community center to Yankee Stadium]. The report praises Google Maps for its “unified search box” because it converted the phrase into “Point A to Point B” directions while allowing the user to choose exact start/end points. The three other services, Cowen analysts say, all failed to provide such a user-friendly experience; Yahoo! Maps and Microsoft Live Search Maps were dinged for requiring the user to provide the exact address of the South Orange Community Center. The report’s analysis of MapQuest says “text and display ads clutter MapQuest pages to the point that it is difficult to find where to click to continue the process of getting directions.”

Google Maps also gets credit in the report for providing easy access to street-level photos, public transit directions, and other features:

Since our last report in July 2007, Google has added a number of unique new features, such as My Location, which pinpoints the location of mobile users to within around 500 meters using cell tower triangulation. In addition, Google has dramatically increased its database of street level imagery and public transportation directions; none of the other online maps sites offer ’street view’ or public transportation directions.

What About Market Share?

Innovation and user-friendly features aside, Google Maps remains second behind MapQuest in terms of market share — but is gaining ground quickly, according to new traffic data from Hitwise analyst Heather Hopkins.

The image above shows U.S. market share in the Travel-Maps category. Over the last nine months, Google Maps has seen a traffic increase of about 45%. Hitwise stats show Google currently having just over 32% market share among mapping sites. MapQuest, meanwhile, has fallen from above 50% to 44.4% market share at the moment — that’s down about 15% so far in 2008.

Longer trending of these same numbers can be seen by looking at Hitwise stats published earlier this year. At the start of 2007, Google Maps market share was only about 10%, a distant third behind MapQuest and Yahoo! Maps.

Stepping outside the Maps category to overall U.S. web traffic shows similar numbers:

The image above not only casts a wider net, but also shows combined numbers for Yahoo! Local and Yahoo! Maps, as well as combined numbers for MSN Live Local and Ask City (which uses Microsoft Virtual Earth mapping). Heather Hopkins shares more about these charts on the Hitwise blog today.

We’ve noted on Search Engine Land that two factors likely began to change the traffic trends for map sites: First, when Google stopped linking to MapQuest and Yahoo! Maps; second, when Google Maps began to be featured prominently in Universal Search results.

Cowen and Company expects this trend to continue, and to pave the way for success in mobile search: “Google’s aggressive investment in maps positions the company to achieve a dominant share of search in the mobile Internet.”

The mapping upgrades and improvements are coming so fast now from Google, Microsoft, MapQuest, and Yahoo that it’s difficult to keep track of all the changes. Luckily, the Ask Blog walks us through all the features of the new and improved Ask Maps UK, which includes multi-point routing, walking directions (which are claimed to be unique to Ask), aerial views, and incorporates landmarks, transit, and points of interest.

However, this isn’t a map-centric local search site, like Ask City in the US. A search for local information on the Ask UK Maps site (e.g., London Hotels) will send users to Ask.com search results.

Ask has partnered with IAC sister company EPI, publisher of “The Entertainment Book,” which offers coupons and discounts to local businesses. Entertainment, which has had several false starts with online distribution, is planning to pump 75 percent of its coupons into AskCity. They may also eventually make their way to Ask.com’s SmartAnswers and finally into mobile. Here’s more information including some examples from the Ask Blog.

Here’s an example:

According to the press release, there will eventually be 150,000 coupons (representing deals at 60,000 local businesses) that will be searchable in AskCity. While Google (see here) and Yahoo (see here) both have coupon offerings, they have not been well marketed to consumers and are not widely known. This despite high consumer interest in and appetite for coupons (which were worth $331.8 billion in 2006 according to CMS, Inc.). More than 79 percent of the US population uses coupons and over 50 percent of Sunday newspapers are purchased for the coupons. Yet despite being around since the beginning of the Internet, there’s no online coupon leader.

However, all this could be quite different by this time next year as more sites start to integrate deals and coupons and build databases of offers that consumers can search (e.g., Judy’s Book, which launched a coupon service of its own in April).

I have more discussion about the Ask-Entertainment deal and online coupons in general on my personal blog Screenwerk.

First Google got embedded maps last month, and now Gary Price reports that Ask City has added an embed map feature that makes it easy to post a map or various local business directly on your web site as an image.

For example, let’s say I want to meet up with a bunch of my friends at a local pizza shop. I can embed a map of those local pizza shops on my blog, have my friends review them and then we can decide.

Here is an example of that in action:

(1) First I locate pizza stores in a local area. As you can see, I added a circle around the area using the drawing tools.

(2) Click the embed link at the top of the page, it looks like this:

(3) Pick a small or medium or large version of the map.

(4) Copy the code from the box.

(5) Embed the code in your blog.

You should see pizza stores in the 10010 area just below this line:

Notice how the embed feature also shows what I have drawn on the map, using the drawing tools.

Gary Price has a lot more detail on this new feature at ResourceShelf.

Postscript: The Ask.com Blog has now posted a summary of this new feature.

Citysearch, one of the more venerable names in local search, has relaunched its site with an updated look and other “new and improved” features, including video. Video is currently available for New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles and has prominent placement at the top of the home page. It’s an ad unit for local businesses (mostly restaurants now) spending more than $800 per month.

The videos are produced by TurnHere, which has developed a network of thousands of local filmmakers in the U.S. and abroad. The videos are typically very effective, run about a minute and don’t “feel” like ads because of their style and local relevance. Here’s an example video and here are other videos from the New York Citysearch site. Here’s one for a plastic surgeon in San Francisco.

Right now there are no additional ads surrounding the local business ads. But this ClickZ article suggests that pre-roll and post-roll may be coming later. (I would be cautious about this if I were Citysearch.)

In addition to video and other graphical and layout changes on the site, Citysearch has improved search and general navigation. The site also now offers recommendations or personalized suggestions based on past search behavior. One of my criticisms of Citysearch in the recent past has been the general clutter and “over-monetization” on search results pages, most of which has been addressed in the new design.

Citysearch provides a substantial amount of the content for Ask City, also owned by IAC. One of the questions after the launch of Ask City had been: what is the relationship of the two brands? The changes and updates make a much stronger case for the independent existence of Citysearch and suggest how the two destinations might co-exist — their user experiences are more differentiated now (especially with the addition of video).

Citysearch, which recently acquired competitor InsiderPages, was one of the pioneers in local search and was around years before the current wave of local destination sites. Recently, however, Citysearch has come under pressure from sites like Yelp and others, which tapped into the new wave of social networking and deeper user-generated content. This needed updating will likely give new lift to Citysearch.

Postscript: I received clarification that the pre- and post-roll ads mentioned in the ClickZ piece aren’t contemplated for the TurnHere content but other editorial video content to roll out later this year on the site.

I also have some different information and address the question of video on local sites generally in a post on my personal blog Screenwerk.

The Ask.com Blog announced a neat new feature that enables you to literally shape your own local search results. You can go to Ask City, locate a location, draw a circle or square in a certain location and then search specifically within that location. Below is a screen cast I put up to explain it a bit better.

VentureBeat is reporting that Citysearch/IAC is the mystery buyer of InsiderPages. A purchase price was not disclosed. The formal announcement will apparently come later today or early tomorrow [now confirmed, see below]. I would guess the purchase price wasn’t more than 2x what the investors put in (TechCrunch guesses $13 million), given that the company was being shopped from a position of weakness. IAC as a buyer is both appropriate and fascinating for many reasons.

I’ve posted more on this on my personal blog.

Postscript: It’s now confirmed, press release below:

WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. – (March 1st, 2007) – Citysearch, an operating business of IAC (NASDAQ: IACI), today announced that it has agreed to acquire Insider Pages, a leading reviews-based local search company located in Redwood City, California. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Insider Pages helps people find the best local businesses through recommendations from their friends, community, and expert reviewers. The site has more than 600,000 merchant reviews on local businesses in 30 markets across the U.S., and 2 million monthly unique users (comScore Media Metrix, January 2007). Through the acquisition, Citysearch will offer consumers over 1 million user reviews and local market directory information across more than 500 business categories – from restaurants and spas to plumbers and lawyers.

“User reviews empower consumers to make informed decisions about where to spend their time and money, and our local merchants tell us that they are more likely to acquire a customer when user reviews are included as part of their online listing,” said Peter Horan, Chief Executive Officer of IAC Media & Advertising. “Through this acquisition, Citysearch will strengthen our breadth of user-generated content across numerous business categories nationwide. Competitively, no company online or offline offers the depth of content in local markets as Citysearch does, making us the most useful and valuable way for merchants to connect with customers, and for consumers to find exactly what they’re looking for. “

“Our valued user community has been extremely important in creating a new online culture of sharing rich and relevant information on local businesses nationwide. By joining forces with Citysearch, we will be able to work together to improve how consumers find local businesses,” said Mitch Galbraith, CEO of Insider Pages.

When the acquisition is complete, Insider Pages will retain its distinct brand identity and positioning in the market, strengthening and complementing Citysearch’s growing local reach. Insider Pages will move its current operations and team to Citysearch’s San Francisco office

Barry Diller keeps talking about Ask as the “glue” of his empire and more specifically about the importance of local. Ask and the new AskCity are thus in the hot seat. ClickZ has a piece today about the forthcoming introduction of financial and real estate data into AskCity.

The site quotes Diller from an investor call:

“If you’ve road-tested Ask City, you’ve seen how special it is. The way the information is lined up inside the site is quite powerful. That’s the way it’s going to be all the way through,

Barry Diller is putting a lot of pressure on Ask. He keeps talking about Ask’s role in IAC’s overall operation and local in particular. When he acquired Ask for almost $2 billion Diller immediately touted Ask’s ability to knit together his disparate online empire into a more coherent whole. He also started talking about how IAC would own local, with several local brands.

Now with the introduction of Ask City, which replaces Ask Local, the search engine has taken a bolder step to create a compelling local product.

Danny Sullivan and I got a demo last week, which was impressive. At the level of functionality and usability the new Ask City is a dramatic improvement over the former Ask Local. It brings more horsepower but also some greater complexity for users. Ask Local was a very basic presentation of Citysearch data beside an associated map – simple and potentially effective for a business name lookup but not as helpful for a category search.

The new Ask City combines data and content from a range of IAC sites and third-party sources, including Citysearch, Ticketmaster, Evite, Trip Advisor, Yelp, InsiderPages, Judysbook and a number of other sites. It’s broadly organized into four content areas: business listings (i.e., yellow pages), events, movies and maps & directions.

While there a couple of novel features, mostly having to do with mapping, it’s the packaging of the features and content into a holistic proposition that makes this a very nice offering. Despite a number of flaws it deserves to be considered in the top tier of local search sites out of the gate.

There are many things to like about the new Ask City and a number of problems or flaws. I go into those in more detail in a longer post on my blog.

According to comScore data, Ask currently owns just under 3% of local search vs. 5.8% for Ask’s overall search market share in October. The new Ask City, by itself, is unlikely to boost Ask’s general search market share. But in combination with other innovations it may help Ask gain some share over the long term. (The local search market is much less established than general search and more competitive.)

One of the interesting questions here is: what will be the relationship between Ask City and Citysearch going forward? It may be that, like cars from the same maker for different market segments, they won’t bump into each other. But they certainly could be competitive; consumers are unlikely to use both sites.

There’s no advertising on the site now but that will come in the not-too-distant future.