Multimap World Index

3 Nov 2010 Multimap World Index is an alphabetic list of countries that comes with a map of the world. The list appears to be very comprehensive, but unfortunately the same cannot be said about the maps! 

For instance, choose Bangladesh and all you get is a map showing the country with a handful of major cities. There is no zoom feature, the aerial view adds nothing, and the birds eye view is non-existent. Also, forget about finding directions in Bangladesh. The pull down menu on the Multimap directions page only has 33 countries, and Bangladesh is not one of them.

Instead of listing all the countries in the world, and then providing no more detail than a child's atlas for most of them, Multimap would do far better to just list the countries for which they offer driving directions.

The frustrated traveller might get even more frustrated by multimap.com if they do a Google search for bangladesh driving directions. At the time of writing, the top search result (WillToGo) links you to "driving directions with Microsoft bing maps", but this is just a generic bing maps page. And as bing maps is just another name for Multimap, and we know Multimap doesn't provide directions for Bangladesh!

• In passing, note that Google Maps does give directions within Bangladesh.

In summary, the Multimap World Index is a very disappointing feature that promises much more than it delivers. As Bill Gates, now the owner of Multimap, is doing a lot to hep third world countries these days, the least he could do is to enable people to get around them more easily!