I've explored Ingress in two places: Manhattan and rural New Hampshire. At least for leveling purposes, it was trivial to walk around Manhattan and interact with portals. How might one find portals in a less dense part of the world? At the moment, I'm limited to dragging the Ingress Intel Map around likely areas, but this is pretty inefficient and requires I zoom very far in to see unclaimed portals.
Discovering portals in rural areas
ingress
Best Answer
You can improve your odds on the Intel map slightly (and I agree that it's still a pain) by zooming in enough with the map's controls to show the portals that you want and then zooming out with your browser (eg this would be Ctrl-minus in Firefox) to make everything smaller.