Remember that roadside barbecue joint in Texas where you had the ribs that changed your life? Can you remember the address? Did it even have one?

Mapquest and Yahoo Maps are slow. Google Local's maps pop up almost immediately and allow you to click and drag to scroll around without waiting for a new page to load. Google bypasses the traditional bottleneck—building the map on a server and then transferring it—by instead sending your computer several small map "tiles" with instructions for assembly. When you scroll, it sends new tiles rather than a whole new map. Google also released the code behind the site, inspiring users to create dozens of applications with it, including chicagocrime.org, which plots reported crimes.