The article discussing this on Search Engine Land can be found here. Is this Google being evil? No, it’s just them being a business. Why should they drive traffic / give implicit approval to another company when they have their own solution? (not forgetting that the data in their own solution varies depending on whether it comes from NAVTEQ or TeleAtlas). Looking at Google trends you can see how far ahead Mapquest is above the other 2 in terms of search volume on Google, so it makes perfect sense for Google to just offer their own mapping solution for local searches performed on their search engine.