Comments: Follow the thin semitransparent blue line
I spent far too much time last night looking at the satellite pictures of places that I know. That is really amazing. Another amazing thing is how thoroughly we become trained by bad interfaces. I was extremely frustrated at first with the inability to recenter the map. I discovered that you can just drag it around by accident. Then I had the joy of watching the same situation play out for Kelly.
Maybe we broke it, I can't get satellite pictures this morning.
I agree with Lee about the user interfaces this. I know from personal experience writing software that's it's not that hard to break apart addresses, yet I always accepted having to tab around the forms on Yahoo! Maps and Mapquest. It's a wonderful feeling on Google to just type on one line 123 anystreet ave, anytown, il and have it find the address.
Part of the suckiness of yahoo! and their ilk is the unwillingness to ever retrive an image that they don't need to. This is why they snidely ask, "Do you mean Clark Drive?" when that is the only Clark that is anywhere near the town in question. Google has said sod that, we are going to have the hardware to make this work right. Instead of using a sucky interface to drive down the image retrieval per ad shown ratio like the rest, Google is counting on their awsomnality to attract eyeballs and relevant ads to drive up click throughs. Cultivating a reputation for integrity is essential because it leads people to trust the ads presented by Google. Because of their reputation, people are less likely to expect to get an attack of popups and spyware when they click on an ad presented by google.
If anything, it doesn't seem to have /enough/ street names for my tastes, especially at the closer zoom levels. This makes it hard for me to just look at the map and figure my way around, forcing me to use the directions feature, of which I am always skeptical. Otherwise, though, I agree. A+ on the UI.