It's incredible how Google can get so many people to work for them for no pay. Would you similarly contribute to closed-source proprietary software if given the opportunity?

Google Maps still does poorly in small towns, as far as I've seen. Not that you can really expect any better. The data in my hometown has clearly never been ground-checked (or even sanity checked by a remote employee), it's all clearly culled from webcrawelers and corrections by locals. There are businesses marked that haven't existed in a decade or more, and businesses that have existed for a decade aren't on the map. Yet another good reason to have a decent website as a small business I guess, when it's potentially the primary source of data for mapping/"local" services.

Well, they only re-drive most places every few years (Toronto seems to have 1-2 year gaps), so their own image sources won't necessarily have that data yet. Although, you'd think that local business listings would also be a data source and would probably be up-to-date. Do they scrape retailers' sites to learn about store locations? Guess not but would have assumed so.

Just wait for the self-driving car tests to ramp up. I think one of Google's early deployments will be a fleet of self-driving cars equipped to take streetview photos - this should enable something like weekly redrives of cities.

Keeping up with starbucks opening/closing stores would be impossible without the distributed power of their users, they pop everywhere, move regularly and aren't really critical for mapping. Luckily in SF you can't throw a stone without hitting a coffee shop, and of course, people here only use starbucks to meet people for craigslist transactions, no self respecting hipster would ever go in one.