The Best Google Maps Alternatives You Should Try !

     Today we will talk about five of the best Google Maps alternatives you should try ,, Google Maps is good let's just get that out of the way first Google's ever updating ever improving navigation is popular and robust enough to have more or less brought on the death of the paper map and it feels like it's getting more and more accessible by the day but there are still reasons why you wouldn't want to or can't use Google Maps some countries like China run a pretty tight ship when it comes to regulation making Google Maps over there as good as useless or maybe you just don't want Google algorithms profiting off your data whatever your reasons we won't pry it and instead treat you to five of the best map apps that aren't prefaced with Google .

Top 4 Google Maps Alternatives .

1- Here We Go if a consortium of BMW Audi and Mercedes were willing to cough up three billion dollars to not give for this app there must be something good about it right here supports over 200 countries and provides all basic features like navigation places to visit and detailed routes as well as giving you up-to-date info and prices on all public transport links around your area calculating them for you here are offers current route conditions using different information like police reports cameras Twitter feeds construction sites speed cameras and other data to keep you informed and provide a faster route if required its offline map support is also amazing with the ability to archive a whole continent .

2- To get step-by-step navigation even while offline that BackCountry Navigator found yourself in the middle of lord knows where perhaps on a mountainside or a dense forest in the Canadian wilderness Google Maps won't be much help because it doesn't detail the topography at the land like that country does designed with hikers and outdoorsy types in mind this map uses GPS waypoints and allows you to do such manual things like enter the longitude and latitude coordinates of your location it's a crucial companion when you're out in nature relying on the highly detailed topography maps from various established sources like UST Oppo open cycle maps and even nautical maps from the NOAA RNC should you get shipwrecked .

3- WAZE is a community driven map service that is fast to navigate and very intuitive it's highly interactive system which lets you warn other drivers of changes in traffic speed canvas hasn't install one on the roads who's so popular that Google bought the company in 2013 it's telling that for years on waves continues to exist as a separate entity from Google Maps you can get information about the cheapest gas stations near you under construction sites accidents speed cameras police and other information that is updated by millions of other ways users you can even track other ways users and your friends locations in real time bear in mind that it's designed more for drivers and pedestrians .

3- Looking to get around a city now for me Navin II is a feature-rich maps and navigation service that is serving over 85 countries it offers all the basic features such as turn-by-turn navigation bookmarking nearest locations and search and satellite views it provides alerts like speed limits traffic speed cameras construction sites slowdowns are much more well this gets even better with the community driven updates and other nav new users navi also partners with Foursquare TripAdvisor and what three words to provide customized searches its other features include Google Street View EGA indicator automatic routing HD maps and full offline navigation support though our favorite has to be the driver scoring which rates you're driving based on the movements and GPS sensors in your phone .

4- MapQuest is another great Google Maps alternative especially if you use public transportation commuting it will let you compare your local transportation services for your route like uber or car to go and also book cars right in the app it also provides quick updates about all local transportation options near you if you like walk into different places it will show you how many calories you will burn to which is a nice perk its advanced features include automatically routing real-time traffic conditions ETA the ability to detect cameras accidents construction sites slowdowns location sharing weather reports and roadside assistance it also has some basic features of Google Maps like turn-by-turn navigation bookmarking less route satellite view and nearby locations to visit etc conclusion most of the above-mentioned apps focus on providing the most up-to-date information about your local area perhaps even better than the great G maps itself so what do you think have you tried any of these ?!

Blekko ,, a new kind of socially search engine

     New search engine Blekko is a full search engine indexing the entire web their goal is to compete with the big guys with Google being in yahoo but they have some really some really interesting features and their approach is unique which I think gives them possible chance in a very competitive space .

Blekko is a search engine that focuses on blocking spam and low-quality content sites the site has a smaller library of websites that it searches compared to other search engines in order to filter for only quality search results let's say we want to search for scholarships when you finish your search Blekko will display your results below you can sort your results by date or relevance and choose a different search option .

what makes Blekko different than the other search engines ?

The first thing you know about Blekko is that their idea is that when you search that you will want to refine your search maybe vertically into a certain group or of sites or type of sites and refine it in other ways as well and let's give some visual example so if you did a search for dell and we see is her relatively normal standard very familiar-looking search results for dell this is 1 to 20 of 156,000 websites it's automatically sorted by relevance if you'd like I can do a sort by date by using what they call it the saj tag this is one of the built in ones and this is now a reformat of the results by date and the date is they grabbed this family get the metadata around the content that they're indexing to try to figure out the date that it is um that it's been published but there are other types of / tags as well and i can use summer all of them so i can just go do a search for dell and then add a / type news and get news results from a variety of sites .

It's a really easy way to get past a lot of the spam and get directly to the results you want and I think that heavy search users might really like this Blanco also is very transparent with how they rank websites and they'll show you all the data that they have so let's say I do a search for TechCrunch and the top result is techcrunch com which is great I can click on SEO and I can see some of the data behind a techcrunch that bloody uses to index it so they show 782 thousand in bound links they show distribution by the links by state country as additional data the domain is techcrunch com his last crawled 14 hours ago it was first seen by them 114 days ago .

we've got a feature called / tags and a tag is away for you to tell blekko to basically in the sites you want and out the ones you don't so you could put a slash tag on a query like I could do a query like Scoble / blogs and actually just search blogs I could say Scoble / date just search the web sorted by date for mentions of of you how could you do / goble but get rid of all the mentions of Alex Kobo who's my brother you know i think we probably could make a tag to do that that would yeah we have slashed aggregation as well so and that's what it's all about it's about searching the web you want so like when I do a health query I don't like to get results from non-health sites I don't like to see demand media results in my health queries I don't want eat how calm in there when i'm doing a health Corey can I want trusted health articles written by actual positions people with you know MD after their name and so when I put / health on a health query i'm basically restricting the web down to this trusted set of sources and for some queries that's really important yeah it seems to me the world today is that some things about the world that are different from when Google started up when we have real-time information Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn and Google Buzz Twitter now it's streaming down my screen on tweetdeck right in live time mm-hmm we have location you know we have a lot of data around located .