Google has once again proven that its products and services are not only the most used worldwide but they are also useful at the most opportune time. Take the case of Google Maps which beats both Yahoo and Bing’s mapping services when Google Maps immediately announced that the SF Bay Bridge will be temporary close during the holiday weekend.
Google Maps has quicky put up an announcement telling its users that the SF Bay Bridge will be close from Sept 4 to Sept 8 and advises users to find other routes to take.
Yahoo on the other hand may have acted on the situation by suggesting alternatively route but did not announced the closure of the bridge. While this may seem ok, some users may have not followed it because Yahoo did not give a reason for giving the alternative route. Hence, users may still end up trying the route towards the SF Bay Bridge only to find out that they can’t use it.
As for Microsoft, the Bing folks may be too busy doing something else that’s why they failed to notice that the Bridge will be closed.
SAN FRANCISCO — Crews working on a seismic retrofit of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge on Saturday found what authorities called a “significant crack” in the eastern span that could keep the California landmark closed beyond a planned holiday weekend shutdown.
During an inspection, workers discovered a problem with a steel link that helps hold up the bridge’s eastern portion, senior bridge engineer Ken Brown told the San Francisco Chronicle. The link — part of a network of eight similar pieces — is about two inches thick and was cracked halfway through.
“The crack is significant enough to have closed the bridge on its own,” Caltrans spokesman Bart Ney said at a news conference Saturday night. “We have to make this repair before we reopen the bridge.”
Ney added “it’s very possible that this could prevent us from opening Tuesday morning,” when the work week resumes and the bridge had been set to reopen.
The 73-year-old bridge connecting Oakland and other East Bay cities with San Francisco was shut down Thursday night so a section of the eastern span could be cut out and replaced with a new double-deck section that will connect the bridge with a short detour. About 260,000 cars and trucks cross trucks and cars cross the bridge every week day.
It was closed to traffic at 8 p.m. Thursday and had been scheduled to reopen by 5 a.m. Tuesday.
Friday was the first time the bridge was closed on a workday since part of it collapsed in a devastating 1989 earthquake.
California transportation workers have used the closure this weekend to conduct a top-to-bottom inspection of the bridge.
The last such inspection was in 2007, and that the crack likely appeared since then. He said he did not believe it was related to the construction project, Ney said.
He said every effort would be made to reopen the bridge on Tuesday morning but warned commuters to stay tuned for updates.
“The bridge will be safer when we open it than when we closed it,” Ney said.
Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Nice post, thanks
Thats why Google is No 1 and nobody is still not in a position to beat Google.
Actually, if you turn on Traffic in Bing, you get the closure information in the directions.
Exactly the same result you get in Google.
The difference here is that Bing does not display traffic information by default. You can call that a UI mistake if you want, but it’s not an example of the MS folks ‘doing something else’ or that they failed to notice the outage.
Google does Bing one better by suggesting that you drag the route to change it, but really they should be suggesting a detour rather than taking you across a closed road.
The difference here is that Bing does not display traffic information by default. You can call that a UI mistake if you want, but it’s not an example of the MS folks ‘doing something else’ or that they failed to notice the outage.