The awareness of geographic information has surely increased recently. Easy accessible mapping APIs made embedding maps on any kind of website a common sport these days. Good, geographic information is essential and should easily be available for everybody.
Though on some sites I can’t help but get the impression that a map is just there because some webmaster may thought “Hey, everybody has a Google Map, we need one too!”.
Besides being a good example of how the result may look like when the screen designer is missing, I wonder why they put the search box above the little Google Map. What would you as user expect of a map within the Austria section of an Austrian newspaper’s web portal? An Austria related map, right? Meaning that I can search there for Austrian addresses, places and maybe routing or some other type of geographic information.
I can’t.
Since Google isn’t offering any of this information for Austria, this map search is, from my point of view, completely useless and misleading. Unless you know the trick of putting “, Austria” at the end of every search term you’ll only be able to find “Wien” or “Vienna” in the map (the Austrian capital, btw).
Basically a map is a fairly good method to support and illustrate articles on a news portal. But please dear webmaster, before doing so, define the aim and purpose of the shown geographic information.