Google Maps Beta goes live at http://maps.google.com/. The site offers up data supplied by Tele Atlas and credits indicate Navteq is involved as well. Given that Google also recently bought Keyhole I suspect we'll see imagery incorporated into the fold down the road as well. The maps are very appealing and you'll be blown away by the speed.
At first glance, the service seems pretty fast and the maps are very appealing. I would like to see a typical zoom icon so I could draw a rectangle rather than constantly changing my zoom factor and panning around - this is really annoying to me! Simply dragging a cursor on the map results in a speedy pan function... very cool! Jumping to a locale is pretty easy though by simply keying in a place name.. ie. Seattle. The resulting maps are very colorful and remind me more of a typical European style product rather than the boring "stick" maps where roads are displayed as single line entities... I like this much better!
Searching on a place name like Seattle, Pike Place yields a number of hits that appear as little red icons showing more information. I have to assume that these are paid spots as all the items I received seemed to be restaurants. Hits reveal address, weblink, and optional driving directions. MAp searches can be conducted by searching based on a place name, address, or business name. As a test I tried a search on business name "Lizardtech" .. no hits. Looking up the address. 1008 Western Avenue, Seattle also yielded no hits. This is Lizardtech's coporate HQ in Seattle, WA.
All in all, very nice.. and it's awesome to see that the data and functionality is available for Canada as well... usually the data stops at 49 degrees North!
