If you've played with the new Google Maps, this is exactly wrong. I find the new maps actually encourages exploration. Everytime you click on the map, new stuff appears, along with photos on the bottom.

It's like web surfing or hunting through Wikipedia. Each click changes the map and exposes you to more stuff. What's true is that a search will spotlight the things most relevant to you ("coffee"), but that means the highly related coffee joints by you, your friends, zagat, are slightly bigger on the map, it does not eliminate the other coffee joints, just visually ranks them differently (smaller, or just a small dot)

Compared to the old google maps, where a search for coffee would return hundreds of little red dots that you'd have to click on before you could even see what they were, the new maps is far better because it shows more information up front, and clicking the lower ranked stuff is done better,

I've spent hours just exploring stuff on the new maps, finding places I never knew about by clicking new stuff as it appears on the map.