[jccalhoun]

That's what I thought at first but if you search for a country then drag it around, it will change its size as you get closer to or further away from the equator so it takes the distortion into account. So maybe pointing out the distortion in the Mercator projection is part of the point?

[dtparr]

Yeah, I took that as the whole point. You can overlay one country on another to see how they relate despite being at wildly varying latitudes on this projection. E.g pull Greenland down to India.