MapmyIndia Online Maps 3.0 is here!

We had announced a preview of the next version of our maps portal just before the dawn of 2011. An upgrade was released a month later. Since then we have worked on a bunch of new features and making search even simpler. And today, we are rolling it out to our users everywhere. Go to https://maps.mapmyindia.com and see it live in action.

Read on to learn about the interesting things we have done for this major release –

A new theme on maps – The map has been completely restyled to ensure more readability. You can see more places on the map for every zoom level, important places have larger fonts, icons for certain category types in higher zoom levels, and the colors on the map now blend in with each other and are light on the eyes.
Improved and detailed ‘Show on Map’ – A list of categories and sub-categories that cover almost everything that you will ever need to find on a map. Just pick a map view based on zoom level and bounds, and start exploring. You can select multiple categories to see and we will combine the results based on distance from the center of the map.
eLocation – MapmyIndia is all for making location search simpler. Now we are sure you do really enjoy typing, but if we tell you you could save some keystroke effort by entering T52FTC in the search box and be shown the map of Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, wouldn’t you say “neat”? So that is exactly what we have done.Places across India now have an eLocation ID – a six-digit alphanumeric that is basically an abbreviation for the place name in layman tongue. But it is smarter than that. eLocation provides you an alternate search method. Type in the eLocation, and we do the translation from an alphanumeric to a physical place with a well-formed name. eLocation is still a new concept and we will be exposing its full functionality over time. I encourage you to try it out by searching for restaurants around Juhu, Mumbai. You will see the eLocation IDs of the restaurants we find.
User Added Places – We know there still are places (and forever will be) that are not a part of our map data. And we know you love to add your own stuff to the map to make it even more useful. And we are always grateful for your contributions. We encourage you to search for the place that you are looking for before you add. If it’s not there, just find the best location for the place by zooming in the map as high as you must, right-click on that precise spot, and select ‘Add a place’ from the context menu. Thereafter the process is fairly straightforward with just a few form fields that you must fill. The added place will start appearing in search results once we have approved it.
MapmyIndia Explore and POI pages – There is only so much that you can see on Maps. And it’s always good to have some order. So we decided to break your favorite places down to dedicated pages. In the process we created a whole new product, MapmyIndia Explore, a directory of pages maintaining the order of State -> City -> Point of Interest. Discovering places now gets a lot more organized and comprehensive. Explore will see a lot of content addition over the next few months and soon you will find everything you wanted to know about a place here. Also Maps and Explore are closely bound together. A local search on Maps will show you links to place pages of the respective POIs and similarly a large map view in Explore will take you back to Maps. Explore additionally gives you distances between any two points in India and optional directions.
History – We now maintain a list of searches you do in a session on Maps. You can go back to any search by selecting one of the past searches. You should discontinue using the browser “back” button and use our own now.
Feedback – We love hearing from you. So much that we have included feedback for almost every activity you do on Maps. Not happy with something? Just click the ‘Something wrong here’ link and we will ask you for any issues you are facing while using search on Maps. You can always send us any general comments by clicking on the ‘feedback’ button in the bottom left of the page. We welcome both happy brickbats and bouquets.