Google has a nifty new tool just released to Google Labs today. Google Maps allows you to navigate a map of the United States and Canada, scrolling around, zooming, etc., and offers a panel to search for locations in that area. It is definitely related to Google Local. The navigation is pretty smooth and fast, although the map is currently largely incomplete. It only has the United States and Canada mapped out, and you can't even see any continents other than North America. But it's still in Google Labs, so there will be improvements before it's shipped to the main site. The directions feature is great. It quickly maps out how to get from any given address to another, provides the directions as text, and tells how far and how long it'll take to get there. It's very feature-packed for its first beta release, and will prove to be quite impressive as a finished product. As I have predicted, Google is definitely continuing to focus on local search, and we'll see another local search tool or two in the near future.