Heather Hopkins over at the Hitwise Blog wrote a very interesting post on how Google Maps is rapdily closing in on market leader Mapquest. See the Hitwise trend graph below.

• US visits to Maps websites is up 10% year on year and MapQuest is still the leader, receiving more than half of all US visits to Maps websites last week. However, Google Maps is gaining fast.
• A year ago, MapQuest had more than five times (429%) more US visits than Google Maps. Last week, that gap was down to 126%. Google Maps is the #2 Maps website and attracted 22% of visits to Maps websites. Yahoo! Maps and MSN’s Local Live stand 3rd and 4th.
• Traffic to MapQuest has remained flat year on year and is down 20% in the past 6 months. Google Maps traffic is up 135% year on year and is up 7% in the past 6 months. The growth for Google Maps is from traffic from the Google search engine.
• Google sends more of its own traffic to Google Maps than to Mapquest, a change that occurred last March. This can’t really be attributed to an increase in consumers looking for Google Maps. We can measure this through Internet searches. Searches for “google maps” have increased but the term “mapquest” receives nearly 10x the search volume.

**Update – Online Map Provider Marketshare – September 2008

**Update – Google Maps vs. Mapquest April 2009