I've never liked sites that start the user off on a crowded country-wide Google Maps view. It seems like such a clumsy way to display data. One, I don't want or need to find every pizza place in the US, so why show it to me? and 2. it's overwhelming and a pain in the ass to have to zoom into my location.
Google Maps embeds are fine as a way to put things on a map for searches inside a specific, narrowly defined location. But they're not so good as the first thing you'd see.
I'd ditch the giant US map and redesign to put more emphasis on the zip/city search box -- maybe get a fix on the user's location by IP and automatically pop up popular pizza places nearby.
Also, a bug: I was able to share my favorite pizza place over and over again ... so really easy to game the system.
Google Maps embeds are fine as a way to put things on a map for searches inside a specific, narrowly defined location. But they're not so good as the first thing you'd see.
I'd ditch the giant US map and redesign to put more emphasis on the zip/city search box -- maybe get a fix on the user's location by IP and automatically pop up popular pizza places nearby.
Also, a bug: I was able to share my favorite pizza place over and over again ... so really easy to game the system.