In Russia we have several successful competitors to Google Maps and even a search engine that's actually good. Competing with Google is extremly difficult, but possible

Yandex Maps is much better in Russia than Google Maps. I also found Yandex's image text translation capabilities to be much superior than Google

Yandex is a great example of a company which absolutely squashes Google on technical chops wherever it has tried to compete; and it only has 9000 employees (compared to Google's 120,000).

Not entirely related to this discussion, but one thing I know about Yandex: Their web crawlers are ruthless. They hammer my sites to the point where I need to specifically throttle them based on their "from" header (they seem to ignore 429s - they simply make requests with a different IP).

This is only a problem because I have a few sites that are like "search engines" in that they have basically an infinite number of pages (one for each possible search term), and so they just keep crawling the "related searches" links. It's probably not a problem for most sites, but it's a pain for me.

Google seems to more strategically crawl pages based on search terms that they know are popular, whereas Yandex just crawls every possible link it can find.

All of that said, I'm quite happy to deal with it for the benefit of having another competitor to Google - the more the merrier. Hopefully one day they add some more "smarts" to their crawlers though - starting with respecting 429s across all their IPs, perhaps.

In modern Russia search engine search you. They actually answer their email; if you ask them they'll probably stop.

In what ways is it better? Data wise it seems thinner in most places eg New York, London. Perhaps it depends on where you are looking. Moscow does look richer yes, but outside Russia?

If features, what features?

I don't think it's better outside Russia. But within Russia, the level of detail and the accuracy of data is much better. In Moscow and St Petersburg at least, you can see street level details down to individual buildings easily - I would say it's better than Google in NYC.

I do wonder if Google's poor performance in Russia, and Yandex's poor performance outside Russia are a function of data restrictions. I'm not sure western countries would be as keen to share data with a Russian company, and vice versa.

So did a Dutch one... (For the record: it's TomTom)

Waze was acquired by Google, am not sure that counts.

If Waze couldn't compete against an incumbent Google Maps, why would Google ever have bought it?

I didn't mean from a technological perspective, but from a sustainability one.

These kinds of startups can often compete/outcompete on tech, in fact that's their premise, but they're looking for an ASAP exit, rather than running something sustainably for decades.