Search is of course entirely useless, worse than useless, if you don't know in advance what you are looking for. Needless to say, search is not an adequate substitute for intelligent design and proper levels of detail on maps.
Doesn't seem too bad.
Of course, you DO have SOME idea of what you're looking for and that's where Google maps can help infinitely better than any paper map.
I use OpenStreetMap for this use case so I can only answer for them, and they seem to do a great job at it. If I am looking for the general shopping area, or office areas, or anything like that, I can zoom and pan through a city and find it very quickly. That Google doesn't show labels anymore makes it completely useless (and I've run into that a few times).