Cynicism aside, this is very true. I've used a done of different mapping libraries, and the actual map display part is Google's weakest part- leaflet.js and ModestMaps are much faster, particularly on mobile devices.
But on the flip side, I've never found a provider capable of geocoding as well as Google- especially with response times that allow you to make a typeahead address searcher. Google's Styled Map Tiles are still ahead of anyone else's offerings.
Even when you have a concrete latitude/longitude point, Google returns street addresses a lot more often than alternatives, such as Bing. And you're right about the response time, in comparison Bing is extremely slow.
Unfortunately after getting passed the free tier, it gets kind of expensive.
I have been happily using Yahoo's geocoding service, with google coded as a backup service. My application doesn't require speed, so I don't know how it stacks up against google in that regard. I have run into a couple of cases where yahoo's street data was not as fresh as google's.
Maybe (ok, not maybe) I'm getting too philosophical about such decisions these days, but Google is, at it's heart, an ad company that happens to be really good at tech. Nokia is a tech company that is really good at tech. My choice is Nokia - they're just a closer match to the view I have of myself.
I think Google is a tech company that happens to be really good at ads (which is uses to fund all of its tech). Google didn't set out to sell advertising, it was just a way that they could continue solving big problems.
For example, I don't think Google is spending big dollars on automated cars to advance its advertising business.
Their business model is undoubtedly ads. But I think that's slightly different from saying they are an ad company. As far as I can tell, the primary reason that Google exists is for clever technical people to do new geeky stuff. They need a way to fund that geeky stuff and that's where ads come in, but the ads and the revenue aren't where their real passion seems to be. If they could simply sit back and watch the $$ rolling in through ads without ever doing another bit of innovation, I doubt they would do it.
This is quite different from the vast majority of companies. BP, for example, don't exist because their peope are passionate about drilling oil - it's because drilling oil is a very good way of making money. Even companies like MicroSoft exist (and pretty much always existed) primarily as a money-making business. Sure they attract lots of nerds, but the money driven the company's choices of where to deploy those nerds.
Google is a data company. Their best work is all around capturing, processing, and doing useful things with large amounts of data. This also happens to make them really good at doing targeted advertisements too.
From my understanding you only get charged when accessing the map API server side. If you use the JS API in the client's browser the requests don't count against your quota. Google even suggests that your script can pass the information back to your server to be stored. Therefore, you can scale your user base without incurring high costs.
That's not true. The number of client API loads are counted, but the number of map tiles loaded by that client is not. i.e. you are charged per page load, irrespective of the user activity on that page.
Use of the Google Geocoding API is subject to a query limit of 2,500 geolocation requests per day
if you're using the server endpoint, which perhaps checks what server the request is coming from- I have no idea. The JS, client-side version definitely requires a key.
It's 50c per 1000 requests. So if you were building a semi-popular website or iPhone app with 10K requests/day it would be $150 a month. In what bizarro world is that mostly free ?
Exactly, you are receiving a valuable service which is best in class for what it does. If you are using it at commercial levels then paying for it makes sense. If your business has enough traffic to fall into the paid tier and you can't afford $5 per 10K requests then something is probably wrong with your business model.
I can't help but feel this is an attempt to calm people from switching to mapbox (http://mapbox.com/) and OSM. The price is now on par but unless they improve their JavaScript API I can't find a compelling reason to go back to Google Maps.
This is marketed to (potential and current) API users, not iOS users. They have been getting some competition after their move to charge for API usage.
It looks nice, but it breaks default browser navigation standards. The space bar doesn't paginate, and scrolling to the end of the page doesn't stop scrolling, but forces me back to the top of the page. This is happening in Safari, can't attest to other browsers, but I found it distracting.
True, but if you're a business that needs this kind of data for your product, it's almost certainly cheaper to pay Google than to either develop it in-house or make contributing to OpenStreetMap part of your business. Personally, I'd rather build things than pay someone else for what they built, especially if the thing is interesting or "fun"; but reality confronts most of us. Smarter to pay for the wheel than reinvent your own (or waiting for someone else to do it, for free) ... at least, that's the assumption I'm operating on.
It was that IF I was going to spend money on a mapping API I would rather use it to improve an open platform. Especially for something as key as mapping.
But on the flip side, I've never found a provider capable of geocoding as well as Google- especially with response times that allow you to make a typeahead address searcher. Google's Styled Map Tiles are still ahead of anyone else's offerings.