In February, we compared maps of Sochi's Olympic venues from Google Maps and OpenStreetMap, the massively crowdsourced world map created by volunteers. OSM's maps easily swept the medals, with far more detail of the Olympic park and ski areas. But as the World Cup starts today in Brazil, the tables have turned.

Part of the reason for that may have to do with data availability, says Sophia Lin, a product manager with Google Maps. "The data in Sochi was a lot more spread out, it was all over the place, and that made it harder to get permission to use it with the rights we need to show it to our users," Lin said. "In Brazil we had a bit more luck."

"It's been a very focused effort for us," said Manik Gupta, a group product manager for Google Maps. "We want the fans who go to Brazil to have the best experience possible." Gupta says Google has focused its efforts in Brazil on mobile phone users, beefing up Street View for the areas around the stadiums, for example, and adding traffic and transit info for all the host cities.

They've also done a few things to console those of us stuck at home without tickets. As we reported last week, Google mapped the 12 World Cup stadiums with Street View cameras to give you a virtual view from inside. They've also created 3-D views for several of the host cities, including Natal, below (or check out the interactive version).

All this work shows in the regular old desktop version of Google Maps, too. If you zoom in all the way you can see things like restrooms, elevators, handicap access and VIP areas for the stadiums (at least in some browsers—for me, these details were visible in Firefox and in Safari on my iPhone, but not in Chrome or Safari on my laptop). Also, there's little detail in Google Maps for the brand new Arena de São Paulo, where the opening match between Brazil and Croatia takes place later today (the team was unable to get inside due to construction).

On OSM, in contrast, the World Cup stadiums are mostly big blank ovals, as you can see in the gallery of side-by-side images above.

For the neighborhoods around the stadiums, Google also seems to have an edge, at least as far as I could tell playing around for an hour or so on Geofabrik's great Map Compare tool. (Hint: if you do this, first search for the stadium in either OSM or Google Maps and cut and paste the latitude and longitude numbers from the url into Map Compare, which doesn't have its own search function). In several places, the Google maps appeared to include more details than OSM and fared better in a few reality checks using satellite images.

The OSM maps often look more detailed at first glance, but some of this is due to a higher-contrast color scheme that makes things like building footprints stand out more. Also, in Google Maps you often have to zoom in more to reveal extra detail, which is arguably preferable because it keeps smaller scale maps from getting too cluttered.

It's not clear why OSM maps of World Cup venues would be less detailed than the maps of Sochi, says Steve Coast, who founded OSM in 2004, and now works at Telenav, a company building navigation maps and services based on OSM. "OSM does this organically, it's not like there's a top down effort to go map a specific place," Coast said. "There are so many factors that go into it, from how much time people have to go mapping, to internet availability and whether maps are already available from your government."

Coast predicts the OSM maps will evolve over the course of the Cup. "Whenever there's a large event, whether it's a sporting event, or an election, or an earthquake, they tend to get better fairly quickly." We'll check periodically during the World Cup to look for improvements.

As OSM matures from display maps to navigation tools (like the recently released Scout app), Coast says it will be increasingly important to anticipate big events and how they'll impact people's ability to get around. In the U.S., for example, Telenav monitors Department of Transportation websites for information about road closures and construction tied to projects like the recent construction on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge or events like the Super Bowl. "We track those and make sure the maps reflect in advance what's going to happen," he said.

In Brazil, Google has already been there and done that.