Maps Done Right

Google‘s services are growing quickly. Very quickly. First it was just a web search engine. Then they added image searching (of course, it still has its kinks). They added newsgroups, news, and price searching, aka Froogle. That wasn’t enough though. They added a free email service (I have 6 invitations sitting around doing nothing for anyone interested) and desktop searching which still doesn’t support Macs, Firefox, or Thunderbird. I’m still leaving out countless other products and services.

Very recently, their new “local” service added things like finding restaurants and other businesses. As I played with it, I noticed something. They had their own maps embedded in those searches. It wasn’t Yahoo Maps or MapQuest based. I personally preferred the former to the latter. My suspicion was well founded as Google is publically beta testing their new Map service. It uses some very new browser tricks (standards based) to make the maps interactive without any heavy Java or endless page loading. My words can’t do it justice, so check it out for yourself.