Google Maps - Just in time for travel season

MapQuest has been a common orientation and mapping tool for several years now, and although it is a strong tool for American geography, it does work generally well for quickly locating common cities and towns in Canada. Still, it draws a lot of misses and frequently returns erroneous search results that place your query's address in some remote area of Northern Ontario. This alone leaves room for improvement by other mapping wannabes, especially for IM relatd companies with boundless appetites like Google.

Google has a beta product called Google Maps that is worth examining. It provides decent mapping down to the street level, an ability to draw driving directions between distant locations and an interesting toggle between vector illustration maps and satellite images.