Both of these are great reads. The first is from re/code, called Ten Years of Google Maps, From Slashdot to Ground Truth. This is a big picture story, showing the three threads that came together to create the Google Maps we know today:

The grand example for Search by Location was you were supposed to be able to search for coffee shops near Palo Alto. But Taylor remembers that Sun Microsystems put its address at the bottom of every page of its website, and it named its products after coffee (most famously, Java). So that broke the entire example.

“It had zero users per day,” says Taylor, who is now CEO of productivity startup Quip, after a stint as CTO of Facebook.

That original product was made much more accurate by licensing Yellow Pages information, but it wasn’t the dramatic leap forward that people at Google — particularly now-CEO Larry Page — were hoping to make.

So Google sought inspiration and talent from outside. Just before it went public, it made three relatively small acquisitions in 2004: Keyhole, Where2 and Zipdash.

The second is a more personal look at the founding and acquisition of one of those core companies, Where2, called The Untold Story About the Founding of Google Maps.