AOL’s City’s Best, “best of” program unveiled their new site today at www.citysbest.com including the best of food, entertainment and lifestyle venues selected by local editors and writers in 25 metro-markets.  Starting today, City’s Best’s  6,000+ local listings are now searchable on MapQuest through our one-box search, and each listing links to a more in depth page about that location.

AOL’s City’s Best brings another highly relevant source of local content to MapQuest, including places with the best reputation in many popular categories such as Restaurants, Bars, Retail, Movie Theaters,  Hotels, Bakeries, Spas, Pet Shops, Ice Cream Parlors and more. The new City’s Best markets include Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Orlando, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, Tampa Bay, Twin Cities and Washington, DC.

To easily find City’s Best listings on MapQuest, simply type your “City’s Best” search term in the one-box search field and click “Get Map”. Try search terms such as “City’s Best”, “City’s Best, Denver, CO”, and “City’s Best restaurants in Denver”.  Be sure to click on the “More Info” link for a local write-up by City’s Best editors and writers.

City’s Best current lists include the top ten venues by category and market based on the expertise of local editors. Starting today, October 13 through November 30, you can cast your vote for your favorite places at www.citysbest.com. The final “Best of”’ winners based on people’s choice will be announced on December 14. We hope you’ll vote for your favorite places!

Noticed that gas prices are finally going down a bit?  We have too, but it’s still always more expensive than you want it to be when you fill up your full tank.  This is one of the reasons why MapQuest Gas Prices is a tool that will help.

MapQuest Gas Prices shows you the highest and lowest gas prices, helping you find the cheap stations in your area. You can also search for any fuel type like gasoline, diesel or other alternative fuels like biodiesel, CNG, LPG, etc. Once you search, we’ll give you a list of results sorted by cheapest to most expensive. Alternatively, you could sort the results by alphabetical order or by distance (from your search location).

The application also includes a Gas Calculator that lets you compute the cost of your trip given your vehicle mileage, the cost of fuel, and the total trip distance. This tool can be extremely helpful if you want to estimate how much you’ll need to allocate for gas when planning a road trip.

When you use the gas prices site, you’ll notice that it’s tightly linked with the new MapQuest site. So, on your search results, click on any gas station icon on the map and you’ll see links to:

• Get directions to the gas station
• Search for any point of interest near the station

We hope you find this tool to be helpful in managing your fuel expenditure! Stay tuned to the blog for more improvements to MapQuest Gas Prices.

About a month ago we updated Route Planner with some new features and now we have some more updates to announce.  For those of you new to the tool, Route Planner helps you find the most direct route for your trip with multiple destinations.  So if you’ve got a busy day of deliveries or sales appointments planned, we can take your list of destinations and then re-order them to give you the best route.  In other words, no more backtracking!  You can literally save time and money by choosing the ‘Shortest Route’ or ‘Shortest Distance’ option.

As for the recent updates…the first change you’ll notice is Route Planner’s simplified look and feel to the website featuring the New MapQuest brand and style.

This update was not just about looks, though. We also now have a new capability under ‘Directions Options’ that allows you to modify your routes after it’s been optimized.  So now you can re-optimize your route as many times as you want.

Here’s some other useful new features:

• Increased number of destinations – now you can optimize up to 26 stops!
• Suggestions from your recent search history as you type addresses
• Ability to drag & drop stops to reorder your route
• More options to fine-tune your route, including the Avoid option (Avoid Tolls, Highways, etc)

In addition, we wanted to remind you that once you optimize your route, you can ‘Send to’ your GPS (yes, this feature is back!), car or phone.

Since we launched Route Planner in June, we’ve received some great feedback from all of you – we’re so glad that it’s helping so many of you!  Thanks for your continued support – stay tuned to the blog or our Facebook page to know what’s coming next with Route Planner.

If you’ve read our blog recently, you’ll know that we launched a New MapQuest site just a few weeks ago.  We’ve gotten some great feedback already – including suggestions on how we can make it even better.  We’ve taken this feedback and made some changes.  Here’s the most noteworthy:

Full Map View
You asked us for more map and now we have it!  With the recent update, you can now collapse the left pane to view a map that’s as wide as your browser window.  This is a great option for those of you that are visual and like to see as much map as possible.

Zoom via Mouse Scroll
Another common request was the ability to zoom the map via your mouse and now you can!  In other words, next time you’re on MapQuest, hover your mouse over the map and use the scroll wheel of the mouse to zoom in or out.  We like to think of the map as your canvas so it’s great to hear that so many of you want to interact with it!

In addition to these enhancements, we also made some other minor changes to features based on your feedback and fixed a few errors reported by you as well.  As I hope you can see, we really are listening and hope you’ll continue to give us feedback!  We want to hear what you like and what you think we can do better.

For those of you that haven’t checked out the new site yet, I hope you take a second to give it a spin.  It’s available now at new.mapquest.com.