Denver based Map Quest introduced MapQuest Vibe over a month ago, I decided not to write about it right away, because I wanted to try it out for a while in order to share my own insights about this new service. Before I start yapping about how good this thing is, first I want to tell you what MapQuest Vibe is all about.
You all know that at MapQuest you will find maps and directions, they have been creating digital maps for more than fifteen years, since then they have been making navigation easier for people all around the world. But now things have changed, now companies have to meet market needs, requirements, and demands. The market is now demanding better products, and more complete services, so your typical “maps and directions” website isn’t going to cut it anymore, now there’s a need for local search, and that’s where Map Quest Vibe comes in.
Finding the best place is sometimes hard. Let’s say you are trying to find the best restaurant in your area, when you start searching for reviews and ratings about restaurants near your location, you will usually find a bunch of places with similar reviews, and with similar ratings, so in order to find out which restaurant is really the best, you will first have to read thousands of reviews before making a choice.
Mapquest has always helped me save time, their accurate driving directions service has made my life ten times better. Now they are trying to help users save even more time, now you won’t have to read one thousand reviews before making up your mind, MapQuest Vibe tells you right away which place is really the best, the cool thing about MQ Vibe is that it is a lot more specific than the other reviews and ratings sites, instead of telling you which are the best places in the whole city, it will sort them out by neighborhood, so if you find a great place it will usually be very near your location, exactly when you need it the most, right? In our example it would be finding the right restaurant at the right time, finding it when you need it the most is crucial, because that’s when you’ll be hungry as hell.
Mapquest is able to provide this kind of data, because they have been gathering this type of information for more than fifteen years, after all this is one of the oldest online mapping sites in the world, the Mapquest labs team knows exactly where people are going, when they are going, and even why they are going to certain places, having dinner is pretty obvious though. LOL!
MapQuest Vibe saves you a lot of time by getting rid of the necessity of going through a bunch of reviews and ratings that usually take hours to read, instead it provides instant rankings of places by neighborhood, and city wide as well, it will tell you which is the best place near your location, so if you are looking for the best Chinese restaurant you will be able to find it right away, if you are looking for the best shopping center you will be able to find it too, if you are looking for the best gym in town you will also find it, if you are looking for the best bars, hotels, etc, you will find them as well. According to Map Quest the rankings are based on “key” criteria within the context of a local neighborhood, this key criteria comes from their more than fifteen years in the game gathering information, and then analyzing that information in order to give you these results. According to Map Quest, MQ Vibe is the shortcut to becoming a “local” in any place.
VibeRank is a new algorithm created by the MapQuest Labs team, this new algorithm is what creates or better yet generates the new “local knowledge” system. The VibeRank algorithm uses many different signals in its formula in order to rank the best places, there are social signals, searches in Map Quest, and cartographic data. According to Mapquest they already profile more than 50.000 neighborhoods, 50.000 hotspots, and 27.000 cities in the USA, reaching 98% of the population.
Exploring places has always been quick and easy thanks to MapQuest, but now it’s even quicker and easier than it was before, simply visit mqvibe.com and check out the neighborhood pages of the site, there you will find everything that a neighborhood has to offer, restaurants, services, attractions, and much more, the cool thing is that everything will be ranked in clear order, the rankings and scores of the places that are listed are influenced by users, if users vote up places they like, they will move up, if users vote down places that they don’t like, they will move down in the rankings.
When you are at Mapquest Vibe you can zoom in the map to see hotspots in specific neighborhoods, hotspots are the places that people like to visit the most in that specific area. You can also zoom out to see which neighborhoods make up the whole city, zooming out will make things easier for you when you are trying to figure which places to visit.
My take on Mapquest Vibe, I love it! As I’ve said before, Mapquest helps people save time, MQ Vibe has already helped me save hundreds of hours, now I don’t have to read a bunch of reviews, I have always trusted Map Quest so I trust the information that they are dishing out at mqvibe.
Watch MQVIBE’s Introduction Video
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