Google's lead in mapping will help in visual search (GOOGL, AAPL, GOOG)

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Apple Maps, perhaps the most oft-derided Apple product, still lags significantly behind Google’s Maps product, according to an in-depth analysis of the two mapping systems by cartographer Justin O’Beirne.

As is the case for most Google products, Google’s lead is based on its excessive-by-comparison data sets. Google started driving its Street View vehicles to capture street images in 2007 and started extracting data from it in 2008. Apple Maps vans didn’t even get on the road until 2015, giving Google a lead of about 7 years on mapping data collection. This lead shows in the mapping products of the two companies; Google Maps has lots of detailed information from satellite and street view imagery, like where the main doors or steps of a building are, and augments that information with other data, like the name of the business and the type of business it is. Apple Maps, on the other hand, lacks the detailed building footprints of Google Maps.

This lead is important for Google today, not only because of overall usage, but also because data collection for products like Google Maps and the other products it will support is a virtuous cycle; the more data a company has, the better they can make their product, the more information they can get to further improve their product, so on and so forth. This is particularly crucial for Google and problematic for Apple now because mapping technologies will directly impact the ability of these companies to compete in emerging digital spaces: visual search and connected cars.

Both visual search and connected cars rely on contextual location information to be useful. As visual search becomes a more oft-used mode of digital interaction for consumers, the ability to surface contextual information in a visual search will determine which software succeeds in this nascent space. And for connected cars, the ability of a mapping system to automate simple tasks — like dropping a passenger off where the door of the building is instead of at the exact mapped address location — will determine which platforms are most relied on by consumers. Google has a strong leg up in both of these spaces, and it may be difficult for Apple to catch up.

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