I’m gonig to do my best not to sound like a 15-year-old girl, but OMG, check out Google’s new “beta” map software. I’ve been a regular and enthusiastic user of MapQuest for years, but after playing with this gem for about 15 minutes, I’m more or less sold, as soon as Google adds a few must-have features to bring it up to parity with Mapquest.

As I did with Gmail less than a year ago, (can you believe GMail has been public for less than a year?) a bulleted list of stuff I love about Google Maps:

  • Ridiculously fast and responsive! Zooming in and out is quick and efficient. Most amazingly, unlike all other map sites I’ve seen, there are no page reloads at all when you’re panning around a map– you can drag the map up, down, left, and right and more map just keeps appearing under your cursor with no page reload necessary. As I said of some of GMail’s features, there’s some impressive black magic going on to make that work in a web browser. Also, check out what happens when you click the directional arrows in the upper left: the map scrolls smoothly in the direction you indicate, rather than jerking to a new map 1/2 screen in that direction as MapQuest would.
  • Maps as big as your browser! The map isn’t an image in the ordinary sense– when you make your browser window wider or taller, the map expands to use the extra space. The result is that if you’ve got a big screen, you can see amazingly amounts of detail on the map you’re looking at.
  • Big, clear cartography! I never really noticed before, but Mapquest’s maps are awefully cramped. Part of that, I’m sure, was a desire to economize on screen real estate, but still, when you look at them side by side there’s no comparison.
  • Local Search! This appears to be a straightforward incorporation of Google Local, but it’s so much more useful with a good map feature. I can type in my home address, have it map it, and then I click the “Local Search” link at the top and type in “flowers” and it shows me the 10 flower shops closest to the center of the map.
  • Crazy graphical effects! Click on one of the items in a “Local Search” result, and a little text balloon pops up with a name, address, phone number, and links to directions and more information. Even cooler, the balloon has a shadow. Now, I was never a JavaScript expert, but I don’t remember Javascript being good at this sort of image manipulation. Yet they don’t appear to be using Flash or something more exotic, since it loaded by default on my barebones FireFox installation.

    It still has a few kinks to work out: the printing isn’t quite right, and it doesn’t handle misspelled road names as well as MapQuest does. Most importantly, Safari support is still in the works. Still, if I were MapQuest I’d be soiling myself right about now…