Worth using those maps? (Score 1)

I'm not sure about anyone else, but personally I think that the whole "Maps" bit of the Google Maps/Local/Earth is rather disappointing.

Being a resident of the UK, I've become used to commonly available incredibly high quality mapping courtesy of the Ordnance Survey, and frankly, the basic cartography of the Google database (Roads, railways, and not much else) leaves a lot to be desired.

This is the main reason why given a choice I'll only use Google local to get the postcode I want, then jump to Multimap or Streetmap to get some useable mapping. Also on both of those sites the resolution of the satellite imagery is generally greater (OK, Google has some cities in hi-res, but my whole village appears as a blob. On multimap I can find my hedge). I'm not trying to rubbish Google (dispite becoming rapidly more and more dissilusioned with them), Google Earth is an impressive program, and the availability of a vector mapping database can only be good news, allowing smooth scrolling and panning. However, I don't see why people are going so dewy eyed of this - It's just eye-candy + google brand name, If you want to get anywhere though, I'd choose and OS map (paper or otherwise) over google any day.