Gone are the days of having a mapbook in the back seat pocket of your car and getting it out whenever you needed to find directions to where you were going. Also gone are the days of stopping and asking for driving directions as it seems that these days there are much better ways to find a map for your route.

Not only do a lot of cars now have satnav installed where you can just program in your destination and be guided there by a softly spoken voice, but also now, if you don’t have satnav then you can just look up the route in advance on a website like Google maps or mapquest.

If you need driving directions, particularly to anywhere in the US, then all you have to do is type in your start and end points on mapquest or Google maps and it will tell you the route instantly. However, the problem for mapquest is that with Google being the biggest search engine, Google maps is also getting the most use for driving directions. Even more so when Google started putting a map thumbnail using Google maps into relevant searches.

Although Mapquest have been around since before Google even existed, coming up against a giant like this is always going to be a tricky situation. Mapquest are now venturing into the Android market, going head to head with Google maps.

It would be good to find that small players with good products could still compete with the likes of Google but the next few years could be the crunch point for Mapquest.