www.whereis.com.au, an initiative of Sensis (the new name for Pacific Access/Yellow Pages) has been the place for online Australian street directories since its launch.

One of the problems with this kind of service over other directories is the amount of zooming in and out, as well as panning around that a user has to undertake to navigate from point A to point B on the road.

Whereis has recently taken a huge step forward by including a navigation feature in the site. You enter your start point and destination, and Whereis plots the map and joins the two points together.

This problem alone does not overcome the issue of having to pan multiple maps to make a trip simple in the same way you would turn pages in a directory. The really amazing thing about this technology is that it clearly describes the journey, with instructions on left and right at which intersections, and a breakdown of journey distance and traveling time.

In our “road test” last month, we found the system to be effective. Local knowledge was able to plot a slightly “quicker” trip, but overall, we were very impressed.

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