Combine traditional maps with street-level photographs of 24 major American cities (and portions of a dozen others), and you've got A9.com Maps, one of Amazon's three free search products (the others are A9 Search and A9 Yellow Pages). The mapping service is still in its beta-testing phase and there aren't a lot of cities on the coverage list yet, but its innovative photos are a great way to search and find your way.

The company refers to its along-the-street images as Block View technology. A9, a subsidiary of Amazon, employs SUVs equipped with mounted digital cameras and GPS equipment to record the images and document where they are taken. Besides seeing these Block Views, you can also get driving directions from the main screen and create a route map that you can click on to view images along the way. You can also easily find the address for a spot on the map by clicking on a point in the map.

To generate Block View images, enter an address or intersection into the search bar or click somewhere on the displayed map (within a city that's been photographed), and after a period of time—from a few seconds to roughly a minute on average—you'll receive, in the lower right side of the screen, a scrollable filmstrip view of either side of the street. As you hover over each frame, a larger view of that image appears just above. Clicking a check box below the search bar will highlight the streets within a city that have been photographed, so if your search returns no image results, you'll know why.

A search or click on the screen generates two dozen or so images at a time, though only four for each side of the street fit on the screen. Clicking the scroll button on either side of the filmstrip moves you up or down the street. Running your mouse over each strip takes you 50 feet or so down the street per frame. Simultaneously, as you scroll the mouse left or right, the direction you are headed down the street on your virtual tour is also indicated by an arrow on the map to the left. This gives you an idea of your overall surroundings.

At its best, a typed-in search or click on the map will get you an image of a storefront or some other point of interest that you're looking for. Even without a Block View, though, you'll still see a map and will receive a message indicating that no images exist yet for that area. In some cases you'll be told that there are images of a nearby area.

Searching for various points of interest on our little home island of Manhattan produced mixed results. A large part of the city's most traveled areas has been covered; for instance, a general search of Manhattan will center you on Times Square, with a lot of neat images. You'll have less success with more obscure portions of town and the outer boroughs (Brooklyn hasn't been photographed at all yet). Block View images of Miami were spotty, but the entire downtown of San Diego has been captured. Other cities with some Block Views include Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Dallas/Ft. Worth, Denver, Detroit, Fargo (North Dakota), Houston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland (Oregon), Sacramento, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.

As an exercise, we tested A9.com Maps the same way we test all mapping services: We entered the addresses of somewhat obscure New York Revolutionary War historic sites. A9 had no trouble bringing up a MapQuest-generated map of each address or intersection we entered, but it couldn't produce images or details of the sites. Admittedly this was a bit of a stretch for A9, which seems most closely tuned to correspond with a national Yellow Pages database.

To access this latter service, you must click on the Yellow Pages link, after which you'll be prompted to sign in or register if you haven't already done so (your Amazon name and password will work just fine). If you choose to register (something that all the mapping sites except Windows Live Local encourage) you'll have access to a complete Yellow Pages database for the