Satellite Mapping Showdown: Who’s the King of Asia?

Yesterday, I came across the news that Bing has added 165 TB of data to its satellite maps, and it got me thinking. Google is of course the longtime champ of when it comes to satellite maps, but both Baidu and Bing have been beefing up their maps game of late. Are they ready to challenge Google for Asian satellite map domination? I took a gander at four strategically-chosen locations around Asia to find out.

To test each service (note that I only tested web-based mapping services), I zoomed in as far as I could on the map until the image quality stopped improving. In a few cases, the services would have allowed me to zoom several levels closer, but as that zoom didn’t bring any increase in image fidelity, I didn’t. I don’t own any iOS devices with functional batteries, so unfortunately I wasn’t able to compare any of this with Apple’s new map service.

Location 1: The Big City

I wanted to start with somewhere easy, somewhere everyone would be sure to have pretty good satellite maps. I chose Tokyo; what better place than Asia’s biggest tech hub to start our satellite map showdown?

Google Maps

Bing Maps

Baidu Maps

Apparently Baidu Maps doesn’t do anything outside of China! I didn’t know that, but this was as close as I was able to get to Tokyo, which is pretty lame. Google and Bing look pretty comparable here, though. Google’s is clearly a bit better — compare the definition in the trees in both images, for example — but they’re both high-def enough to be quite useful. Scores:

• Google: A
• Bing: A-
• Baidu: F

Location 2: The Smaller City (China)

OK, that one didn’t go too well for Baidu, so let’s do something a little bit more up its alley — a third tier city in China. I chose Datong, in Shanxi province, for basically no reason whatsoever other than that it fit the bill. Let’s go to the map!