You can get there from here

(As for Google's example of "the surprising omission," well, if you perform a Local Search through the main Google page, results are not presented via Google Maps, but rather through a more conventional, MapQuest-style interface.)

Back at GMaps, and comparable to MapQuest's listing-linked map markers, Google offers numbered "push pins" (complete with unnecessary but stylish drop shadows), which generate popup information balloons on mouseover. (Balloons which do include direct links to the target's website.) A list of query results is arranged down the right of the screen, and if you click on a listing that isn't in the map's frame, the image autoscrolls to bring it front and center.

Google's implementation of driving directions is also impressive. Enter your To and From into the text boxes, and it not only presents a full map with a step-by-step list of navigational instructions, but if you click on any of the waypoints, you'll get a smaller scale map with a closer look at the specific intersection. Google isn't exclusive here. Yahoo Maps, for example, can load a new page with a series of turn-by-turn maps tacked onto the bottom of the screen, but Google wins for refined design - and the lack of screen real estate given over to advertising makes for a much cleaner look.

In my own poking around, I found that, even though my home town of Halifax, Nova Scotia hasn't yet been included in the cartographic end of Google Maps - it seems that I presently live in a sea of blank atlas grids - the driving directions nevertheless gave me a complete turn-by-turn set of directions from my front door to a random address in Los Angeles - with full map services as soon as I crossed into the areas currently charted by the program.

Like the A9 Yellow Pages, Google Maps is a beta, and in addition to uneven coverage above the 49th parallel, there are some other quirks, including the fact that it doesn't always draw the most direct route between two points. (Though this is hardly a unique phenomenon.) At this point both services have a high gee whiz factor, but are, it must be admitted, of debatable practical use.

Do I need to see a picture of a storefront in order to find my way there? Do online maps have any navigational advantages over paper - other than the fact that you don't have to fold them back up when you're done? Still, the beta/new technology aspect of both sites does add some interesting questions about where these ideas might eventually lead.

For example, the previously reviewed photo organizer, Flickr, has already been spun off into -among other things - Mappr, which organizes photos by geographic location.

What if Google Maps results automatically linked to all available area photographs, or could instantly superimpose satellite or aerial imagery in a form similar to some Multimap charts? More entertaining perhaps, but not necessarily more useful. On demand virtual tours of apartments within a given radius, complete with Flickr or A9-style photo collections of the surrounding neighborhoods? Definitely a time-saver, but hardly indispensable.

For either of these services to ever become as central to the web as their host sites are, there probably needs to be some unforeseen evolution or flash of brilliance that puts the information and/or its delivery into an entirely new context. (Who would have thought that in the simple loom were the technological seeds to computers - or that ARPANET would lead to eBay?) But whether or not these new sites ever become essential, they're already entertaining.

A9's Yellow Pages can be found at http://a9.com/optical?a=oyp, with Google Maps at http://maps.google.com.

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