Directions from my house to San Francisco: go to Salt Lake City and take a left (42 instructions).

Directions from my house to Los Angeles: go just keep going west (38 instructions).

Click on the map and drag it around (or use your arrow keys). Use the zoom slider (or use the “+” and “-“ keys). Make your window bigger and smaller. This feels like a desktop application. Google has long kept their interface nice and simple. Starting with Gmail, then with Google Suggest, and now with Google Maps, Google has shown that it can also offer a rich user interface over the web. Using Javascript, a page can phone home for more data on-the-fly without forcing a page reload. It can also listen for keystrokes and window resizing. All this while preserving the page’s usability, including the its clean design and bookmark-ability.

It’s no wonder my Google stock has doubled.