Using Yahoo Maps for Satellite Images and Street Location
Yahoo maps is another useful free service available online that is part of the Yahoo web portal. Due to the tremendous web presence of Google and its free mapping service many does not think of using Yahoo maps, while some are not aware of Yahoo mapping solution. But it can be a handy tool if you want a map, driving directions. Yahoo map also has satellite view like any other popular mapping service online. But what I like about this map is the response time of the mapping server; I find that if you send query for a particular map in Yahoo server the response time is relatively much faster than the other free online mapping sites.
Why Yahoo Maps-Internet is full of free services. Yet designing and developing a mapping solution covering the entire world takes. That is why there are only a few mapping solution available online. And it is not possible for all the mapping solution to provide details of every location of the planet, because each of the mapping service gathers their mapping images and data from different sources. So, if you do not find any location or address in your preferred mapping site then you can try it out another mapping site like Yahoo maps.
Let take a look at what are the free services you can get from Yahoo Maps
- Map
- Driving directions
- Live Traffic report
- Embedding Yahoo map to your site
- Satellite View
- Local search for Business
How to Map an Address in Yahoo maps
At first enter the Yahoo Maps site: maps.yahoo.com. on the left top side you will see “Get maps and Directions”, just below it type the address, city , state and zip code of your place that you want to get a map. And then click on the “Go” button. Alternatively you can put an address and city name only and then click on “Go”.
For example you want the city map of Los Angeles, then in the Yahoo Map just type “los angeles” and then click “Go” button. If you only know the zip code of any place in USA or Canada then just put the zip code to find which place it belongs to. For a clear view of the map left click on the point “A” of the map and select “zoom in to this point”. To see the satellite view of that particular position, click on the “satellite” tab on the top-right of your map.
Saving Yahoo Maps
To save Yahoo Maps you must login with your yahoo email id. After login in you yahoo mail, open the yahoo map and then map your location as described in the above paragraph. Just beside your address bar click on the grey arrow, pointing downward, and then in the recent location list you will find save option click it. Or you can just click on the add location and fill the necessary data to save it. Whenever you want to see your saved map just click on the downward arrow adjacent to the end of the address bar in “get map and directions” option-all the saved location will appear in front of you.
Printing Maps
To take print out of your Yahoo maps, you will see the print option on the upper left corner of your map window(right panel).click on the print button to take the print of your current map of the map window.
Embedding Interactive Map on a website
Yahoo allows its users to embed their maps into their personal web sites. To add an interactive map in your site you need to have an API key. Getting an API for Yahoo maps is easy a free. Once you have to API, you will get some XML code to embed it in your site to show interactive maps to yours user. Remember that API has a request limit; per day you cannot send more than 50,000 users to use your map. To learn more about how to get an API and embed a Map on a site: Yahoo API
Driving Directions
To find driving directions you can take a look at this article: yahoo driving directions
Finding Longitude and Latitude of a Location
If you have a longitude and latitude information of a place, but you don’t know the exact name of that location. Then you can simply enter the longitude, then press the space bar and then put the latitude data in the address bar and then click “go” to see the map and name of that location in your map window. On the other hand, you may find the long-lat info of any location in the URL of the map in the form of “long” and “lat”. The alternate way to find long-lat of a map is to right click on the map and then select “drive from here”. You will see the longitude and latitude info in the address bar of the right panel. Remember that the North and East latitudes are positive and the rest two are negative. To center your map at a given long-lat in your computer, at first type lat. followed by long. And put a comma in between them
How Yahoo Collect Data for their Mapping Service?
From a number of sources Yahoo collect data to present it in their maps. They get images from Navteq and the live traffic stats from TrafficCast.
