Google Maps Europe

Imho this is huge news for the EU market. Local search is now everywhere:

France

Germany

Spain

Italy
...

It is also possible to search in the local language (hl=it etc.) and refine a search with a post/zip code.

This example shows pizzerie in the 20159 Milan area:

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&hl=it&q=pizza+20159+milano+italia&om=1

In this case reviews (in English or Italian) appear as well.

What does not seem to exist yet is a dedicated local subdomain, i.e. maps.google.it / mappe.google.it

Thank you for the info Thomas!

Apparently there is one road leading to Moscow as well.

Yay! We're finally on the map ;)

This is the real deal. Not many new channels are catching it. What google maps have done is simply awesome and a huge potential.

This is HUGE for the market and nobody really gets it. Germanys #1 tech news site is more fascinated about the high resolution sat images than everything else...

Further exploring Google Maps, I noticed that Google Maps results do not seem to be integrated in google.co.uk searches as they are for the US. A search for a pizza in new york returns 3 results under the heading Local results for pizza near New York, NY. Not so for the hungry in London: pizza in london. Yet at the moment, there is a sponsored link for maps.google.co.uk when performing this search.

Country level subdomains appeared today, eg maps.google.it, maps.google.de etc. Non-UK variants also contain what appears to be an interface improvement – the three search types appear as tabs below the search box rather than to the right of the search button. At least Italian help text has also been updated – it refers to Maps rather than Local.

has been there ages.

its very nice except driving directions seem to ignore uk speed limits. Apparantly top speed on the M4 is about 35mph.....

...that's the average speed on the M4.

average speed on the M4 is about 90mph