Google does it again: now the best mapping tool

http://maps.google.com

The pop-up balloons are highly useful -- they present the right amount of contextual information. And they disappear when you click on the map surface.

The live scrolling is excellent. You can just pan around. A shocking thing to be doing in a web browser interface.

If they could make zooming more continuous, more like the scrolling, that would also be excellent.

Strange search results sometimes. I searched for "London, England" and "United Kingdom", and was directed to various spots in Kansas and Oklahoma which didn't seem to match at all.

Searching for (e.g.) Ainslie St., Chicago, IL, should ideally turn up the notion of a street or path -- not a string of a dozen addresses randomly spread along that street.

Asking for directions does turn up a nice path, though it could be more annotated with route information, milestones, signposts, etc.