I agree with you insofar that "inventions" seem to imply that they invented the concept of Search Engines and Mapping Software from scratch, which is obviously

I agree with you insofar that "inventions" seem to imply that they invented the concept of Search Engines and Mapping Software from scratch, which is obviously not true (both existed for a long time before Google entered the market) but in both cases Google managed to offer a superior service for free (for the end user at least). I wouldn't call them inventions, but they're better implementations of an existing concept. Compare Google maps to the mapping and GPS services of yore, you'd have to pay a fortune to get the same feature set. I remember when you had to pay to add regions to your GPS and then pay again to update them later. The word "disruption" is quite a buzzword these days but in this case Google truly disrupted both these markets. Everybody had to play catch-up after that. I remember how all other search engines started copying Google's slick interface when they realized they were losing badly.