The new Yahoo! Maps tile engine Galileo is beautiful. Beauty in this case is very readable text labels, color coded neighborhoods, county line markings, icons for things like hospitals, and on regional views, a shaded topographic mapping.

The thing that impresses me most about this release is that you get a lot more information without feeling like you are in information overload. All of the new features are subtle and intuitive drawing from everything people already know from using a paper map. I’m used to the pastel fields of color with an all caps word in the middle that defines it. I’m used to the little blue square with an H in it for hospital.

I’m also impressed at how well they blended the level of detail across zoom levels. Topography would be very hard to past at the fully zoomed in level just as color coding neighborhoods wouldn’t make sense at larger views. That seems pretty obvious, but what I think was trickier are the many levels of zoom between that aren’t obvious about how much detail is needed. So far I think it strikes a great balance.

My last kudos is on the text. it is very readable with a sub-pixel stroke of white to accentuate it. It is also a pretty font. This one change alone makes the map go from functional to designed in my humble opinion.

Now that I have paid homage the lovely, rich simplicity of the map, I hope they do extend their maps even further. When there are icons for hospitals and airports, I’d love to be able to click on them and route to them. In the case of a hospital, I have had the need to find one quickly and it was a real horror. I can at least see where they are, but I would still have to route myself to them or figure out the intersection and enter it myself. I know this isn’t trivially easy to do since putting to many interactive markers would interfere with dragging, but it would still be cool.

This would be especially interesting since the tiles for Yahoo! Maps are in SWF format. You could actual bake in fully interactive elements to the tiles themselves rather than just relying on painted pixels.

While they haven’t put a post up about the new tiles yet on the Y! Local and Maps blog, you should still check it out for lots of other interesting features that are available.