Perhaps the hottest area out there in search land is maps.. or local, depending on what you want to call it. You’ve got Windows Live Local, Google Local Maps, and Yahoo! Local Maps… gotta love it. And all three teams are innovating at a tremendous pace…. for example, the aerial view on Windows Live Local is amazing… even though it apparently doesn’t go into Canada. But the border crossing looks nice.

Something I’ve tried using maps for is to plot cycling routes. It turns out, most of the mapping packages don’t work very well for this. The customer scenario is simple… given a map, put down a bunch of push-pins (or whatever you want to call them), and calculate a route from one pin to the other. Google Maps doesn’t do this; however, there are some sites like WalkJogRun.net and GMaps Pedometer that do an OK job. However, the routes generated are straight-line from Point A to Point B, but not along the curve of the road. Lame. Windows Live doesn’t do road overlays yet (come on guys, we know you’re working on it… ship it already!) nor does it do multi-point routes. And that leaves Yahoo! Local.

Here are two maps from the ride I did on Sunday, the Daffodil Classic: Planned Route vs the Actual Route. Mark, who was riding with me, and I missed a turn and thought following some guys, one of whom was wearing an Arrogant Bastard Ale jersey, was a good idea. These were actually a pain to make, as I had to put in various intersections vs. double-clicking and making a point. I also used Zillow a few times to find a house address to use as a waypoint. Also, my original version used over 25 points, which is the max for Yahoo for some reason (Live only lets you have 10 on the scratch pad… also lame).

So, here’s a shout out to everyone at Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo working on maps: make it easy to create multi-point routes! Directions to / from one place is fine, but multiple points would make these amazingly useful.

And if you could put the bike trails on the maps as well, that’d be nice too.