Re: @JetSetJim - I remember streetmap...
Sigh, I knew I should have written the rest of this in my post, but I was in a hurry, so, unsurprisingly, people came out with the same tired old "why shouldn't google prioritise its own products" and "I can't buy ASDA products in Tescos" nonsense which, as usual, completely misses the point.
Imagine you come up with *the best* online mapping service ever. It's fast, it's accurate, it shows everything down to the nearest pillar box, it's the most wonderful map in the whole world.
What do you think your chances of getting it to the first place on the most widely used search engine in the world? What do you think your chances are of it immediately showing your map at the top of a search page? Even if loads of people link to it, will it ever come above Google's Map? What do you think?
So you're always going to be forced into second place by a product which is second rate to yours because *Google* holds the keys and most people aren't going to bother looking below the first result which is presented to them and clicking on that.
Google claim to "do no evil" and say that they rank sites according to popularity and how useful they are, but when they exploit their power to prioritise themselves no matter how good any other product will be then they are abusing a monopoly position.
What they *should* do, just as Microsoft was forced to do with browser choice, is, when someone searches for "map", take them to a page which shows them *all* the online mapping services and then let the *consumer* decide which one they want.