11 ms·

What Happened to Google Maps?

464 points by doff 10y ago

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Pyxl101 10y ago
The new maps look clearer and less cluttered and more useful to me. I would guess that the maps were simply designed to follow their primary utility function which is navigation. Old style printed maps had cities on them, because the map didn't know where you were going! You had to find your city or your location on the map. Now the map knows where you're going, so it can show that place extra-clearly while hiding a lot of detail that's not relevant. Roads are relatively more relevant than cities, since you travel along them to get from one place to another: displaying a road shows the user that they have a primary thoroughfare between locations. You might not care about the name of a city if you're just passing through; and the city that is your destination will be specifically shown. My guess is that they display only as many cities as needed to help people orient themselves while looking at the map, to understand what they're seeing. More than that is irrelevant to the primary use-case of navigation. > Google Maps of 2016 has a surplus of roads — but not enough cities. It's also out of balance. So what is the ideal? Balance. The ideal is utility, and the key use-case for Google Maps at that zoom level is driving navigation. The user's going to input their own destination into maps anyway, most of the time, and they'll expect it to appear, so it's no surprise when it does. Google would have data on this: how many users use Google Maps while driving regularly, multiple times on a trip (at that zoom level), while not having a destination entered (and with no destination, obviously no turn-by-turn directions)? Probably not many. Now imagine overlaying your route with current position and destination on the maps - it's going to be easier to scan the new ones. Edit: Navigation is the primary use-case for a map, and I'd guess usage motivated by that purpose dwarfs the rest by an order of magnitude, and so it's a good default.
- teddyh 10y ago
  What you write is true for navigating when driving a car. For those who try to use Google Maps for other purposes, the changes are somewhat less useful.
  - jasonlfunk 10y ago
    For what purposes is it less useful? If you aren't driving a car, you're unlikely to be traveling between cities.
    - teddyh 10y ago
      There are other uses of maps than simply traveling. It can also teach you the relative locations of things.
    - ars 10y ago
      You could be planning a trip - deciding where to stay for example. I personally have found the new google maps very frustrating and slow - I'm constantly zooming in and out. This article finally made me realize what I'm missing, and why I'm having so much trouble with it.
    - brbsix 10y ago
      A week or two ago I was trying to determine what cities were underneath a flight path. It was particularly difficult, whereas it wouldn't have posed a problem prior to these changes.
    - dingaling 10y ago
      Google Maps is used as the tiling layer for many non-navigation web apps: FlightRadar24 for example. Or those "find us" boxes on organisations' websites. In both those examples the map is used for geospatial orientation not navigation.
  - csydas 10y ago
    I'd actually argue the contrary - viewing the map in transit is for the most part useless (not to mention dangerous if you're also the driver), and I'd assume most people rely on the audio cues rather than actually using the map. I would also guess that users would perhaps only look at it either prior to departure to get a general idea of what their route is like or when they're very close to their destination to look for something like parking or other landmarks to help navigate once near the location. (e.g., trying to navigate a new city and dealing with one-way streets)
- mgalka 10y ago
  Agree. I have no doubt the decision was based on lots of data and that Google got it right. And for my part I agree. I would imagine 95% of the people zoomed in around NYC are looking specifically for NYC. Having other, smaller cities labeled on the map only makes it more confusing.
  - leonatan 10y ago
    If they are looking "specifically for NYC", what is so confusing exactly? Also your "95%" seems way off. Also the concernsus here seems that Google has all the data, they know best. This is a very naive look at things.
- hodgesrm 10y ago
  It's not surprising that paper maps often do a better job than Google maps, especially when you consider that people have been optimizing the format for several hundred years. For instance, you can't beat a decent topo map for browsing terrain looking for new places to go. Having a large map with high information density is just the ticket. The place where Google maps really excel is applications that combine a search result of some kind with geographic data. For ordinary navigation, especially if you want geographical context rather than just directions from point A to B, traditional maps still are much better in my opinion.
elmerland 10y ago
I'm surprised the author didn't mention the main difference between paper maps and google maps. That is, google maps is interactive. With a paper map what you see is what you get. You had to cram as much information as it would allow. But this is not the case with google maps. You can zoom in, out, and anywhere in between. You can't compare the two based on the level of information displayed at one fixed zoom level because google maps is 3D whereas traditional paper maps are 2D.
- orillian 10y ago
  A funny thing about interactive maps while driving. If I'm on my phone and I bring up a road map of the area I'm traveling and I am constantly zooming in and panning the app so that I can see locations around me then the map has failed me. Landmarks are key to any map, but landmarks that fade in and out of focus are not all that useful. I used to be excited by the prospect of being able to bring up a map of my route and being able to see where I was going on my phone mounted to my dash. But as of late, I've been struggling to find the right zoom level that shows enough detail of the area I'm traveling while showing enough of my route. On a number of occasions over the last year I've has to pull over and reorient myself on my map due to a failed pan/zoom attempt. It's funny that this article came out at this time as I've been evaluating ways to mount a larger device (tablet) on my dash as maps on my phone has gotten to be rather cumbersome. I feel that for the most part the details in this article are accurate, that the attempt by google to make the maps load quicker on mobile have compromised critical details available on the maps. One of the key areas where this could be addressed is by loading details based on need. For example if I select a travel route between two locations, load more of the details related to that route and reduce the extras that fall outside my concern. Show me roadways that leave my target route, as well as the cities and towns along my route. Making an attempt to provide me the details I need without my need to interact with them as much as possible would be great.
  - basicplus2 10y ago
    yes I have had a similar experience except needing to zoom in so the Map displays a road name as not all road names are displayed when zoomed out past a certain point.
tomfaulhaber 10y ago
Google is a data company and the data available has changed over the last few years. Maps are both a way to present data and a way to collect data. The new data that Google has comes from Android handsets and from users using Google maps and Waze on Android and non-Android handsets. This data is all about users in motion. At the scale shown in this article, it's almost exclusively people driving. As a result, it makes a lot more sense to focus on the connections over the places they connect. This becomes clearer when you view the roads as more active entities by including congestion and other real-time data. This may not be the best presentation for everyone, but it seems to be the presentation that fits best with Google's current mission and capabilities.
altitudinous 10y ago
Google know more than the author about how Google Maps is used by end users. The author is grading Google Maps based on the number of cities and roads displayed, not how the users use it. Google provide an alternative mapping product, Google Earth, for satisfying curiosity about the planet. Google maps is primarily a navigation tool. They have very distinct use cases.
- kylec 10y ago
  I'm sure Google knows more than the author about their own maps, but please give the author his due: he wrote a successful blog called 41Latitude that did a lot of in-depth analysis of Google Maps's display of information, and later led the Apple Maps team. If he has something to say about information density on maps, I'm inclined to listen.
  - hueving 10y ago
    >and later led the Apple Maps team I'm not sure that puts him in a position to be trusted to criticize google maps. Apple maps has been considered inferior to google maps since its launch. Just because he has ideas about how to pack an overwhelming amount of information onto a map doesn't mean it's a good idea for normal users.
    - Bud 10y ago
      Nice use of the asshole passive voice there. "Has been considered."
    - borski 10y ago
      Apple Maps has actually significantly improved since its launch, and I wish people would give it its due. I, for one, often prefer Apple Maps to Google Maps nowadays.
      - skrause 10y ago
        My main problem with Apple Maps has always been that it just shows too little information on the screen, exactly what the author now criticizes about Google Maps. That doesn't seem to have changes with the current Apple Maps.
jrbapna 10y ago
While the analysis is fine, the conclusion is almost certainly false. At Google's scale, nearly any iteration made on core products is backed by an immense understanding of their end users and a near unlimited supply of user data.
- DanBC 10y ago
  > At Google's scale, nearly any iteration made on core products is backed by an immense understanding of their end users and a near unlimited supply of user data. Which just makes the changes to maps so baffling.
- lucb1e 10y ago
  There can be a million things wrong with user testing, and while I am certain they know more about it than me, I think it's a safe bet to say they're not perfect either and may make mistakes in such a complex topic. (Small example of what I mean: many people like the new style because it's prettier, but when I use OSM I get to places a lot faster than people using Google Maps, so they might be asking the wrong question even if they did user testing with a million people. But that's just one example of everything that could go wrong.)
  - jrbapna 10y ago
    Sure, it's possible, however unlikely, that a mistake of this sort fell through the cracks, but I wouldn't place any bets on it
rspeer 10y ago
Gripe: The font used on this blog is so thin it's almost invisible. I dislike this trend.
- developer2 10y ago
  The font is so small I had to zoom in 3 times to 150% get a comfortable size. And then zoomed in one more time to 175% to make the font a little thicker - as you say, due to the light color. The irony made me giggle a little.
- skarap 10y ago
  Font + gray text + pretending that my screen is %70 narrower than it actually is. All very popular trends which leave me puzzled.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- ljk 10y ago
  ironic that the writer is criticizing google map while using unreadable font
- jakub_g 10y ago
  Fully agree. That's why I generally browse internet on mobile in Opera which supports text reflow and force-zoom, contrary to Chrome which only supports the latter.
- Freak_NL 10y ago
  I wouldn't mind too much if the website styling didn't break zooming in the browser. The paragraph width is fixed as a percentage of the viewport, which means zooming in only makes the font bigger, keeping the same narrow column for its contents. On the whole the HTML and CSS on that blog are a mess though. Firefox's Reader View helps here by bypassing the author's styling completely.
notatoad 10y ago
This criticism reminds me a bit of when people criticize Google search results for a query like "insurance" or "shoes" having too many ads. Searching for vague terms is useless, so they just display ads instead. At the zoom level the screenshots are taken at, maps are essentially useless. The most important information they can convey is "there's lots of roads here" or "this region is densely populated". The maps aren't optimized for accuracy, they're displaying a summary. The long island example really struck me - the old map displayed the primary route only, the new map conveys the fact that there are multiple options. If you're stuck in traffic and you pull up the map, you can see there's another decent route and ask the app to provide you with directions on an alternate route. If you're using the old maps, you'd just see the single primary route highlightedand assume you should stick with the route you're on.
drumttocs8 10y ago
Really, just zoom in if you're unhappy with the decluttering setting...
mbrock 10y ago
There's a broad trend of tech companies disrupting traditional industries and then making rookie mistakes and generally not living up to the standards of the tradition. Google, hire cartographers. Amazon, hire librarians and typesetters. Spotify, hire musicologists.
- powera 10y ago
  Why do you think they haven't?
  - mbrock 10y ago
    Well, I assume Google has a big staff of skilled people working on GIS, but I'm curious to know what kind of input they get from people trained in the art of cartographical mapmaking... My hunch is that the tech industry is bad at taking advantage of this kind of traditional trade knowledge, and the essay in question here is an indicator. As for Amazon, the Kindle e-books very often have horrific typesetting that would be laughed out of any traditional book printing shop. And as for Spotify, their catalogue mechanisms and information design are clearly awful from a musicology standpoint.
    - Pyxl101 10y ago
      Does Amazon typeset the physical books they sell in their store? Should they be expected to typeset ebooks that they aren't involved in publishing?
    - ehnto 10y ago
      Something that has become interesting to me recently is the amount of knowledge about maratime weather and sailing that isn't readily accessible in a some kind of neat database, app or website. You actually have to talk to people and wander through museums to find out some of it. It's an example of an industry and body of knowledge that still grows and is passed around outside of the internet. Weather patterns for a particular area, places to anchor and dock, safe passages through reefs. You can't always google the answer and much of it is gleaned from other sailors who used experience and their tools to figure it out. Having grown up pretty much constantly online, with the answer to any question I have being reasonably available with a quick search; that some common information about the world can still be discovered and shared is is really fascinating. It sometimes feels like there isn't much outside of STEM fields left to explore.
PhantomGremlin 10y ago
There's much more wrong with Google maps on the desktop than what the article mentions. My biggest gripe is contrast, rather the lack thereof. Zooming in and out doesn't help. There's a lack of contrast at all levels! And the algorithm for displaying place names sucks. You'll see certain names at one level, zoom in and they disappear, zoom in some more and they finally reappear. Paper maps are unquestionably more ergonomic (but much less convenient) than Google maps. But it's not just Google. I find other online maps equally bad. It's quite sad that a paper Rand McNally map is so much better at actually presenting the geography of an area. Perhaps other posters here are right, it seems like Google maps is designed for point-to-point navigation, nothing more.
jasonkester 10y ago
The difference between today's Google maps and the authors 1960 paper map is easy to understand when you stop to think about how those maps are used. The paper map was used to navigate from place to place. That never happens with a google map. Sure, you navigate with them, but by telling Google where you want to go and letting them draw a line on your map. You don't need all that extra information if your phone is navigating you from place to place. You just need something clean that you can glance at to get a sense of where you are. So that's what they've designed their maps to give you.
sz4kerto 10y ago
Look at Here maps. It is a much better designed map, from a cartography perspective.
- sccxy 10y ago
  I would also recommend Here Maps. Offline usage is best for travelling.
- Nux 10y ago
  +1 HERE maps, excellent app/service.
panic 10y ago
I'm confused by the replies saying that more dense labels would somehow harm usability for driving or navigation. When you're driving, you know where you're going, the map knows where you're going, and it's easy to see the route you need to take. When you're not on a route, denser labels help you to orient yourself with the map and to know when to zoom into a particular location. That said, I also think the focus on paper maps is misplaced. Old-style road maps had to answer the question, "how do I get there from here?" New-style digital maps don't need to answer that question any more! Questions new-style maps need to answer include: * I know the name of a place or street; where should I zoom in to see more things around that place or street? * I need to go to a (gas station / rest stop / hospital); where's the closest one? * How would I get home from where I am? * I'm in an unfamiliar place and would like to go "downtown" (where there are restaurants and things to do); where is "downtown"? * Where is my car right now? Roads help you to orient yourself with the map, but they aren't as fundamentally important to digital maps as they were to old-style road maps. The visual space of the map might be better spent helping answer questions like these.
- Gustomaximus 10y ago
  For driving Google Maps getting quite bad. See this screenshoot: http://imgur.com/uPO8QJh http://imgur.com/uPO8QJh This kind of crowded display is fairly common now. I use Here Maps now which is much better + I like supporting a second option to avoid one service getting 2 monopolistic. My theory of why google maps is getting worse is there must be designers dedicated to this that need to constantly look for 'new' things to add even if its to the detriment as they can hardly say its all good now and twiddle their thumbs. Maybe that's unfair but I've seen this effect on other digital products first hand.
  - chris_wot 10y ago
    There are also one too many buttons when you choose a route. If I want to drive, then I type in the address, select it, press a button to activate it, then press a similar button to start the route. Why is that last button needed?
tuukkah 10y ago
With open-source tools and services for OSM data from Mapzen and Mapbox, you can make your own map styles: light or heavy in detail, highlighting cities, highways or footpaths.
hueving 10y ago
The comparison to a paper map is stupid. A paper map is severely limited in that you can't zoom in on it so it has to be packed with enough information to hopefully be useful. An interactive map only needs to give you enough context to know what to zoom in on. If I'm using a touch interface that overloads me with information in one screen, it's a bad interface. It's like claiming that the new york times should display the entire full front page of the newspaper on a mobile device so you can read several articles without scrolling or loading more content because that's what you used to be able to do with the real paper.
- Bud 10y ago
  Not stupid at all, actually. The paper map is hand-tuned and shows a great deal of thought and care about precisely what to show, how to show it, and where to show it. There are many lessons that digital maps can learn from hand-crafted maps.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
donretag 10y ago
"The primary route across Long Island — Interstate 495" Off-topic, but as a native NYCer, we would never call it that. It's the LIE. I once had a woman ask me in the parking lot of a Walgreens how to get on the 278. I was puzzled for a second, then I realized she was talking about the BQE. Living out in California now, I miss the days of calling highways by name.
iamflimflam1 10y ago
I suspect that these changes are dues to the switch from bitmap tiles to vectors.
- FatalLogic 10y ago
  Do you mean they're focusing more effort on reducing the complexity of the maps, to save bandwidth, because vectors derive much larger bandwidth savings from reduced complexity than bitmaps would?
- Doctor_Fegg 10y ago
  There might be something in that, yes. Obviously I don't know the details of Google's internal tech, but certainly that's true of the OSM equivalents: Mapnik (produces raster tiles) is much better at label placement than Mapbox GL (renders vector tiles).
- lucb1e 10y ago
  Right, giving away too many labels at once would make it too easy for people to copy the map data. By requiring much higher zoom levels, people would have to do many more requests to grab everything. Not applicable at the zoom scale used in the article, but on higher zoom levels this is certainly a factor.
ulkesh 10y ago
"What Happened to Google Maps?" or "How to say 'more roads and less labels' in 20 different ways".
powera 10y ago
It's probably already been said, but comparing Google Maps to a paper map is stupid. The paper map has to have lots of cities on it, because there's no other way to find where exactly the specific suburb is if it's not on the map. In Google Maps, you can zoom in, you can search, you can have a link for direction sent to you, ... The author may claim "less is just less", but apart from "printing a map before knowing where I'm going", I can't think of a situation where the "improved" map would be at all useful.
x0054 10y ago
So I am not crazy after all! The other day I was driving in Palm Springs, and I was using Google Maps. I literally had to zoom in until the road I was on almost completely field the screen before it would show me the name of the road or the roads around it. They did something to their display algorithm where you now have to zoom almost entirely into an area to see anything about the area, very inconvenient.
- stinos 10y ago
  So I am not crazy after all! He, came here to post the same thing. Since the last 2 or 3 years I had the impression GM went worse (for what I do with it, not even mobile) after every update made to it, and sometimes also slower and more CPU hungry. To the point I stopped using it and went looking for alternatives.
- Numberwang 10y ago
  Finally I have an explanation to why GMaps have been annoying me so much. Especially driving country roads and having to zoom in to kite level in order to see the medium sized villages is ridiculous. Anyone know if Bing Maps is better?
  - idop 10y ago
    I've been trying to form a habit of using OpenStreetMap recently (though not because of the article's subject), you could give it a try.
    - lucb1e 10y ago
      I use: - OpenStreetMap / OsmAnd for general use (about 75% of the time); - Google Maps for traffic info, street view and businesses (about 20% of the time); and - Bing Maps for areal imagery (about 5-10% of the time). Google Maps is always extremely slow, but their business listings are very comprehensive due to their extensive marketing, and traffic info and street view are also expensive things open source cannot really rival. Bing Maps runs at the speed of light when zooming and panning around the map. So much better than Google Maps, but the map's quality is not great so I just use it for areal imagery (another thing OSM does not have). OpenStreetMap is as fast as Bing Maps and its map quality is better than both google and microsoft if you disregard business listings (at least in western Europe and the middle of nowhere[1]). [1] https://twitter.com/lucb1e/status/522491538912604160 https://twitter.com/lucb1e/status/522491538912604160
rrockstar 10y ago
The way I use Google Maps a lot is for discovery. I look at the map of New York to see cities around it. When I look at a more zoomed in level of the city I want to see different boroughs and major roads. More zoomed in you want to discover shops and businesses. The bareness of the current Google Maps makes it very unsuitable for these functions. For example, even at full zoom level it only shows a few (<5%) of the shops and bars at the city center where i live. If i want to get a feel for a city (where are the most restaurants, where are the shopping centres, etc) the maps are really bad for that unless i go searching for the specific terms in the search bar. But that is the down side of the search bar: you never finf something you didn't know you were looking for.
ekr 10y ago
I've only ever been using Google Maps for the sattelite imagery, street view, and routin. For those things, Google Maps is still great. OpenStreetMap is what I use for orienting, find cycling paths, trails etc. So I'm not too bothered by this change. What I don't understand is why hasn't anybody taken the Google Maps routing and use it in OSM apps? Might not be legal, but similar non-commercial projects it should be fine.
- Doctor_Fegg 10y ago
  There's a lot of effort right now going into making OSM itself better for car navigation. (Take a look at the OSRM changelog: pretty much every feature in the last 6 months seems to be targeted to this use case.) And I'd say OSM is already better than Google for cycling and walking routing.
ableal 10y ago
The "Google, where did I leave my keys?" joke is getting closer to feature status, and that's probably what's going on with Google Maps. Anecdatum: last month I was driving out for a weekend in some rural bungalows a few miles outside a small city (Elvas, Portugal). The address was a bit vague, the place name too common, so much so that I had GPS coords stowed away in a message pic (don't ask ;-). So, when I pop out Google Maps in the old faithful iPad2 (which happens to be the 3G version, and therefore GPS chipped, good for navigation), and zoom in the area ... amidst thin local roads and lots of blank space, there's the place name and the days we're staying there. Turns out the Gmail app in that iPad was also used to send or review the emails with the reservations. Even in my 'desktop' I've been noticing Google Maps marking out city places which seem small compared to other landmarks, but where I often go or mention in emails. (Thanks, I do know where I left my keys today, I'm good.)
- JetSpiegel 10y ago
  Never thought I'd see Elvas mentioned on HN, now I've seen everything.
sabujp 10y ago
Comparing google maps to here maps at the same zoom level (on desktop, not on mobile) here maps has more info. It's like google maps has completely given up on the desktop.
ZeroGravitas 10y ago
The conclusion seems to undermine the whole piece. If the changes were made to help mobile uses then great, I almost always use it on mobile, and apparently so do the majority of users. He poses the question of which map you'd want when lost. A mobile phone with Google Maps is clearly the right answer.
jalami 10y ago
I noticed the same thing a few months ago. I live in a larger city, largest in our county, but we don't exist on the map unless you really zoom. A small town right next-door that's a lot more affluent shows up even when zoomed out to the tristate region. My guess was Google is stepping up their advertisement business for cities. That or people just find whitespace aesthetically pleasing and Google designers went kind of crazy with it.
lemiffe 10y ago
"Less is just less. And that's certainly the case here." Not sure I agree, in my opinion most of us use search & destinations nowadays, even in offline mode. The only reason I look at a map is to gauge distance between me and my destination.
- kuschku 10y ago
  Almost no one I know uses directions – all look at the map, see "3 intersections north, then right, then the 2nd on the left" and drive/bike/walk like that. I certainly do And for this use case Google maps is getting pretty useless
  - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
    Oh we all know that person that just follows the printed directions blindly. They get off the route, they're helpless. And they can't get there a 2nd time without the directions again, because they never paid attention to where they were actually going.
SeanDav 10y ago
Google really won't care about any comments here, they are all about the data. So simply stop using Google maps. Tell your family to stop using Google maps. Tell all your friends to stop using Google maps. Blog about not using Google Maps. Find alternatives, there are several mentioned in these comments for starters. When/if Google start seeing a reduction in their map use, only then will they start paying attention.
wtbob 10y ago
Great article, but man it reads oddly with JavaScript turned off. Huge masses of text repeated, scrolling weirdly broken. It's almost a proof of its own point …
agumonkey 10y ago
The Google part happened in Maps. It was a mapping product, and now it's a geographical fronted to search. The v2 was all about services on a cute (and sluggish) rendering substrate. It's now usable these days, still way slower than OSM or bing. I miss the old presentation but alas ... ps: I recently discovered the 'my timelime' feature. Surprising to say the least.
london888 10y ago
Anyone done a comparison with Apple Maps?
- macintux 10y ago
  Out of curiosity, I took the final comparison and re-created it (roughly) in desktop Apple Maps. http://imgur.com/5CvnHn8 http://imgur.com/5CvnHn8
london888 10y ago
Most use cases the user will have their location and destination marked with route - so they don't need all the detail at that zoom level.
AJRF 10y ago
I think what Google is doing makes sense given smartphone adoption and the fact the maps are use for fundamentally different functions now. You don't need a hulking great map with loads of detail at a high level to get from point A to point B, you now just use your smartphone for that. I assume Google spotted a trend of people searching place names as opposed to picking points between two separate locations. So how does that change the function of the map? Well, we no longer need to have the zoomed out overload of detail, if we need more information about a place we are visiting, we type in the city name, or address, then zoom in close to see the detail we need. The article kind of skimps over the point that we can interact with those maps now.
- Tempest1981 10y ago
  Why can't the map serve multiple functions? I guess I wasn't overloaded by the detail.
  - AJRF 10y ago
    I would guess that placing labels on a map has some cost. Not doing this(especially over 3G, 4G, EDGE) might have some gain in loading time. If you need that fine-grain detail zoom in? Not saying I advocate this approach, but thought I would try give you an answer :)
cwmma 10y ago
I suspect part of the idea is that you will use the search to find cities instead of finding them visually based on their names on the map. The issue with large cities that are near other large cities being omitted from maps is 'The Baltimore Phenomenon' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartographic_generalization#The_Baltimore_Phenomenon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartographic_generalization#Th...
a3_nm 10y ago
I think that OpenStreetMap has a bit more information that Google Maps at the same zoom level. To compare on New York: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=9/40.5263/-73.8556 https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=9/40.5263/-73.8556 https://www.google.fr/maps/@40.5487361,-73.9399427,9z https://www.google.fr/maps/@40.5487361,-73.9399427,9z (Edit: as the child comments correctly point out, this is only the default OSM rendering style.)
- maxerickson 10y ago
  Keep in mind that the tiles shown by default on the OpenStreetMap website are just an example rendering. Anyone can take the OpenStreetMap data and use it to render a map with different cartographic choices. There's even several other example renderings that can be easily accessed on the website, for example https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=9/40.5253/-74.2003&layers=C https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=9/40.5253/-74.2003&layers...
- ris 10y ago
  The default rendering for OSM might do, many other renderings are available (including your own if you like).
- lucb1e 10y ago
  It has a lot more info indeed and I love it. But then here come the users, looking for eye candy over functionality (I've heard this from two people): "ugh that is so ugly look at all this clutter"
adwf 10y ago
It's the speed/lag that really annoys me nowadays. If I pan across the map or zoom in, I know I'm waiting a good 5-6 seconds before the new tiles will be loaded. And that's on desktop, not mobile. It's so irritating I've just about abandoned google.
flyinghamster 10y ago
I've noticed the disappearing detail from Google Maps as well, and I find it really annoying - especially when perusing a rural area and having to zoom in to ridiculous levels to see town names. Another thing I'd like to see is making the "avoid tolls" setting easier to get to. Northern Illinois is toll road central, and I-355 in particular is a huge ripoff when you pay cash. Since I don't need any of the tollways for commuting, I can't justify getting an I-Pass.
- brokenmachine 10y ago
  Yes! I hate that!! It doesn't even remember the setting, you have to hit the three dots for menu before you search, choose "Route Options", then tick "Avoid tolls", then hit OK. EVERY TIME. And if you forget to go through this and start navigation, there's no way to change it, you have to hit back, then do the above. Why not have a way to change route options from the navigation screen??
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googleisking 10y ago
Google Maps, like several other google products (like Groups, even Search), has seen a constant degrade in user experience since 2005 or so. Maybe people forgot, but google maps was /blazing fast/ in the beginning. Nowdays, it brings my browser down to a crawl even before the images are shown. Maybe people are just stuck with this "google is the best" mentality, but this has stopped being universally true since many years. Use OpenStreetMap. It's data is way superior. It's _your_ data. Cannot strett this enough. Want a fancy browser? Nokia maps have always been incredibly sleek to use: https://maps.here.com/ Heck, even bing maps are /so much faster/. The imagery is also higher quality in several regions. Google has still the lead with street view, but for the actual maps I really encourage you to look for alternatives. They've destroyed their interface as far I'm concerned.
- nud 10y ago
  OpenSteetMap is very difficult to compare to Google Maps as it uses pre-rendered raster map images at fixed resolutions, rather than a dynamic vector-based approach. For me at least, this makes it far slower to load in non-cached areas, and the lack of precise zooming is super annoying.
  - lucb1e 10y ago
    For me Google Maps is slower than OpenStreetMap anywhere in the world, cache or no cache. Might have something to do with not using Chrome, where Google makes their websites work the best of course. What do you mean by "the lack of precise zooming is super annoying"? In my experience, zooming in Bing Maps and OpenStreetMap are very fast, and only in Google Maps you're waiting ten seconds for the region to load and browser to respond before you can zoom further.
    - nud 10y ago
      On Google Maps, your zoom factor is any real number within a range. On Open Street View, you are stuck using one of several predefined zoom levels (integers 1-20). To test out, try modifying the "10" in both of the links below: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7058316,-74.2581905,10z https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7058316,-74.2581905,10z https://maps.here.com/?map=40.71455,-74.00714,10,normal&x=ep https://maps.here.com/?map=40.71455,-74.00714,10,normal&x=ep
sztanko 10y ago
Optimal placement of labels is an NP-hard problem[1]. Since google maps transferred to vector and label placement is now done on the (mobile) client, I am not surprised by what happened. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_label_placement https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_label_placement
- maxerickson 10y ago
  It would be cheap to transmit pre-calculated hints for various display situations.
sztanko 10y ago
Optimal placement of labels is an NP-hard problem[1]. Since google maps transferred to vector and label placement is now done on the (mobile) client, I am not surprised by what happened. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_label_placement https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_label_placement
lucb1e 10y ago
I've been noticing this but could never quite put my finger on what it was. This is exactly it. On google maps I can never find what I want. I thought it was because I've been using OpenStreetMap, and had gotten used to a different display style. Seeing a place once in OSM anywhere in the world, and zooming out from it to continent view, I can almost always find it again later. On Google Maps I always got lost. Now I finally get what the problem is.
darkhorn 10y ago
Satellite imagery for close zoom levels aren't loaded for Turkey! https://productforums.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/maps/Ixm4C6hviZQ;context-place=topicsearchin/maps/category$3Afirefox https://productforums.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/maps/Ixm4C6...
- kuschku 10y ago
  And in Germany they haven’t been updated since 2004. Google’s products are shit outside of the US, more at 11 It’s nothing new, it’s been like this for quite a while.
xgbi 10y ago
What if they simply don't want people to print the map and rather use google maps to actually perform the guidance?
praestigiare 10y ago
When using a map for navigation at a glance, with a route overlaid on the map, I do not need to know the names of the streets, but I do need to see that there are three cross streets before my turn.
jccalhoun 10y ago
I've had the frustrating experience of looking on google maps and seeing a town I was looking for not be labeled at a zoom level where I could see where it was in relationship to other towns. But I wonder if part of this is about google trying to funnel users into using maps in a particular way. Is this their attempt to get users to search more and scrutinize maps less? Are they trying to make online interactive maps a different experience than paper maps?
DanHulton 10y ago
Is it just me, or is that site unreadable? Chrome 50, Windows 10, and the font is about the thinnest I've ever seen.
- cr3ative 10y ago
  Chrome/Win 10 and I had serious trouble making the site readable; zooming to 175% just about worked. Default rendering: http://i.imgur.com/uhbRcsR.png http://i.imgur.com/uhbRcsR.png
- gefh 10y ago
  Not just you. My irony sensors were of the charts.
Terretta 10y ago
Last dozen images in the article are mis-distributed. They don't go with the local text.
a3n 10y ago
The difference between the album-cover paper map and Google Maps is that every "pixel" on the paper map was put there by conscious, functional and esthetic choice. In fact the people who designed and drew that map probably bragged about it to their peers. No designing human ever sees a rendered Google Map, except for testing. The overall esthetic programmed into the algorithms are designed, but no human looks at the final result and says "it would just look better if this was shifted up and to the right a bit." There are an infinite number of possible renderings on a digital map, but a specific published paper map goes out the door with a sigh of satisfaction. Which is to say, there's a long way to go before a digitial map is beautiful, and a specific rendering is as good as possible for the person viewing it for a specific purpose. The only way digital maps win (and they do) is that you can ask them things, and they cover the world.
nicoboo 10y ago
The article has its points and it is always interesting to analyze those specific readibility and rendering analysis. It helps to understand the choice made by interactive map platforms through static image and dynamic controls. Justin O'Beirne knows what he is talking about. He has worked for Apple Maps and he also created other interesting and really precise analysis in the past. http://www.justinobeirne.com/essay/google-maps-and-label-readability http://www.justinobeirne.com/essay/google-maps-and-label-rea...
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scbd 10y ago
It's way too slow and its missing some stuff buts it's moving in the right direction. Task based (someone mentioned this) is correct. Tasks are easy targets for Google's user-centered design and machine learning. It's not as simple as reproducing a road map from the 1950's, adding pan and zoom and calling it a day. You design for the device (hint: mobile) and the tasks that are used MOST. Do you really think Google doesn't keep track? People don't use Google Maps the same way as a 20in folded road map or a school atlas. If you wonder what tasks are they are designing for just look at the UI of the App. It's dominated by a big SEARCH bar and a big "get DIRECTIONS" button. That's what people do and that's what it's designed for. They are trying to make it glanceable in a car and make room to see search results or to add stuff based on interaction (like traffic, alternative routes, etc.) and not waste time and bandwidth on loading all the extra crap.
ddimitrov 10y ago
From my experience, using the Google maps within the city, it tends to ne pretty sparse with labels by default. This is a good thing because in a place like tokyo there is just too much stuff - if I care for aometgubd I either search for it, or drop a pub and check what is around. On the other hand, Maps always shows the labels of things I have searched for in the past, yielding a customized legend of landmarks+things that matter to me.
ddimitrov 10y ago
From my experience, using the Google maps within the city, it tends to ne pretty sparse with labels by default. This is a good thing because in a place like tokyo there is just too much stuff - if I care for aometgubd I either search for it, or drop a pub and check what is around. On the other hand, Maps always shows the labels of things I have searched for in the past, yielding a customized legend of landmarks+things that matter to me.

464 points by doff 10y ago

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The new maps look clearer and less cluttered and more useful to me. I would guess that the maps were simply designed to follow their primary utility function which is navigation. Old style printed maps had cities on them, because the map didn't know where you were going! You had to find your city or your location on the map. Now the map knows where you're going, so it can show that place extra-clearly while hiding a lot of detail that's not relevant. Roads are relatively more relevant than cities, since you travel along them to get from one place to another: displaying a road shows the user that they have a primary thoroughfare between locations. You might not care about the name of a city if you're just passing through; and the city that is your destination will be specifically shown. My guess is that they display only as many cities as needed to help people orient themselves while looking at the map, to understand what they're seeing. More than that is irrelevant to the primary use-case of navigation. > Google Maps of 2016 has a surplus of roads — but not enough cities. It's also out of balance. So what is the ideal? Balance. The ideal is utility, and the key use-case for Google Maps at that zoom level is driving navigation. The user's going to input their own destination into maps anyway, most of the time, and they'll expect it to appear, so it's no surprise when it does. Google would have data on this: how many users use Google Maps while driving regularly, multiple times on a trip (at that zoom level), while not having a destination entered (and with no destination, obviously no turn-by-turn directions)? Probably not many. Now imagine overlaying your route with current position and destination on the maps - it's going to be easier to scan the new ones. Edit: Navigation is the primary use-case for a map, and I'd guess usage motivated by that purpose dwarfs the rest by an order of magnitude, and so it's a good default.

teddyh 10y ago
What you write is true for navigating when driving a car. For those who try to use Google Maps for other purposes, the changes are somewhat less useful.
- jasonlfunk 10y ago
  For what purposes is it less useful? If you aren't driving a car, you're unlikely to be traveling between cities.
  - teddyh 10y ago
    There are other uses of maps than simply traveling. It can also teach you the relative locations of things.
  - ars 10y ago
    You could be planning a trip - deciding where to stay for example. I personally have found the new google maps very frustrating and slow - I'm constantly zooming in and out. This article finally made me realize what I'm missing, and why I'm having so much trouble with it.
  - brbsix 10y ago
    A week or two ago I was trying to determine what cities were underneath a flight path. It was particularly difficult, whereas it wouldn't have posed a problem prior to these changes.
  - dingaling 10y ago
    Google Maps is used as the tiling layer for many non-navigation web apps: FlightRadar24 for example. Or those "find us" boxes on organisations' websites. In both those examples the map is used for geospatial orientation not navigation.
- csydas 10y ago
  I'd actually argue the contrary - viewing the map in transit is for the most part useless (not to mention dangerous if you're also the driver), and I'd assume most people rely on the audio cues rather than actually using the map. I would also guess that users would perhaps only look at it either prior to departure to get a general idea of what their route is like or when they're very close to their destination to look for something like parking or other landmarks to help navigate once near the location. (e.g., trying to navigate a new city and dealing with one-way streets)
mgalka 10y ago
Agree. I have no doubt the decision was based on lots of data and that Google got it right. And for my part I agree. I would imagine 95% of the people zoomed in around NYC are looking specifically for NYC. Having other, smaller cities labeled on the map only makes it more confusing.
- leonatan 10y ago
  If they are looking "specifically for NYC", what is so confusing exactly? Also your "95%" seems way off. Also the concernsus here seems that Google has all the data, they know best. This is a very naive look at things.
hodgesrm 10y ago
It's not surprising that paper maps often do a better job than Google maps, especially when you consider that people have been optimizing the format for several hundred years. For instance, you can't beat a decent topo map for browsing terrain looking for new places to go. Having a large map with high information density is just the ticket. The place where Google maps really excel is applications that combine a search result of some kind with geographic data. For ordinary navigation, especially if you want geographical context rather than just directions from point A to B, traditional maps still are much better in my opinion.

elmerland 10y ago

I'm surprised the author didn't mention the main difference between paper maps and google maps. That is, google maps is interactive. With a paper map what you see is what you get. You had to cram as much information as it would allow. But this is not the case with google maps. You can zoom in, out, and anywhere in between. You can't compare the two based on the level of information displayed at one fixed zoom level because google maps is 3D whereas traditional paper maps are 2D.

orillian 10y ago
A funny thing about interactive maps while driving. If I'm on my phone and I bring up a road map of the area I'm traveling and I am constantly zooming in and panning the app so that I can see locations around me then the map has failed me. Landmarks are key to any map, but landmarks that fade in and out of focus are not all that useful. I used to be excited by the prospect of being able to bring up a map of my route and being able to see where I was going on my phone mounted to my dash. But as of late, I've been struggling to find the right zoom level that shows enough detail of the area I'm traveling while showing enough of my route. On a number of occasions over the last year I've has to pull over and reorient myself on my map due to a failed pan/zoom attempt. It's funny that this article came out at this time as I've been evaluating ways to mount a larger device (tablet) on my dash as maps on my phone has gotten to be rather cumbersome. I feel that for the most part the details in this article are accurate, that the attempt by google to make the maps load quicker on mobile have compromised critical details available on the maps. One of the key areas where this could be addressed is by loading details based on need. For example if I select a travel route between two locations, load more of the details related to that route and reduce the extras that fall outside my concern. Show me roadways that leave my target route, as well as the cities and towns along my route. Making an attempt to provide me the details I need without my need to interact with them as much as possible would be great.
- basicplus2 10y ago
  yes I have had a similar experience except needing to zoom in so the Map displays a road name as not all road names are displayed when zoomed out past a certain point.

tomfaulhaber 10y ago

Google is a data company and the data available has changed over the last few years. Maps are both a way to present data and a way to collect data. The new data that Google has comes from Android handsets and from users using Google maps and Waze on Android and non-Android handsets. This data is all about users in motion. At the scale shown in this article, it's almost exclusively people driving. As a result, it makes a lot more sense to focus on the connections over the places they connect. This becomes clearer when you view the roads as more active entities by including congestion and other real-time data. This may not be the best presentation for everyone, but it seems to be the presentation that fits best with Google's current mission and capabilities.

altitudinous 10y ago

Google know more than the author about how Google Maps is used by end users. The author is grading Google Maps based on the number of cities and roads displayed, not how the users use it. Google provide an alternative mapping product, Google Earth, for satisfying curiosity about the planet. Google maps is primarily a navigation tool. They have very distinct use cases.

kylec 10y ago
I'm sure Google knows more than the author about their own maps, but please give the author his due: he wrote a successful blog called 41Latitude that did a lot of in-depth analysis of Google Maps's display of information, and later led the Apple Maps team. If he has something to say about information density on maps, I'm inclined to listen.
- hueving 10y ago
  >and later led the Apple Maps team I'm not sure that puts him in a position to be trusted to criticize google maps. Apple maps has been considered inferior to google maps since its launch. Just because he has ideas about how to pack an overwhelming amount of information onto a map doesn't mean it's a good idea for normal users.
  - Bud 10y ago
    Nice use of the asshole passive voice there. "Has been considered."
  - borski 10y ago
    Apple Maps has actually significantly improved since its launch, and I wish people would give it its due. I, for one, often prefer Apple Maps to Google Maps nowadays.
    - skrause 10y ago
      My main problem with Apple Maps has always been that it just shows too little information on the screen, exactly what the author now criticizes about Google Maps. That doesn't seem to have changes with the current Apple Maps.

jrbapna 10y ago

While the analysis is fine, the conclusion is almost certainly false. At Google's scale, nearly any iteration made on core products is backed by an immense understanding of their end users and a near unlimited supply of user data.

DanBC 10y ago
> At Google's scale, nearly any iteration made on core products is backed by an immense understanding of their end users and a near unlimited supply of user data. Which just makes the changes to maps so baffling.
lucb1e 10y ago
There can be a million things wrong with user testing, and while I am certain they know more about it than me, I think it's a safe bet to say they're not perfect either and may make mistakes in such a complex topic. (Small example of what I mean: many people like the new style because it's prettier, but when I use OSM I get to places a lot faster than people using Google Maps, so they might be asking the wrong question even if they did user testing with a million people. But that's just one example of everything that could go wrong.)
- jrbapna 10y ago
  Sure, it's possible, however unlikely, that a mistake of this sort fell through the cracks, but I wouldn't place any bets on it

rspeer 10y ago

Gripe: The font used on this blog is so thin it's almost invisible. I dislike this trend.

developer2 10y ago
The font is so small I had to zoom in 3 times to 150% get a comfortable size. And then zoomed in one more time to 175% to make the font a little thicker - as you say, due to the light color. The irony made me giggle a little.
skarap 10y ago
Font + gray text + pretending that my screen is %70 narrower than it actually is. All very popular trends which leave me puzzled.
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ljk 10y ago
ironic that the writer is criticizing google map while using unreadable font
jakub_g 10y ago
Fully agree. That's why I generally browse internet on mobile in Opera which supports text reflow and force-zoom, contrary to Chrome which only supports the latter.
Freak_NL 10y ago
I wouldn't mind too much if the website styling didn't break zooming in the browser. The paragraph width is fixed as a percentage of the viewport, which means zooming in only makes the font bigger, keeping the same narrow column for its contents. On the whole the HTML and CSS on that blog are a mess though. Firefox's Reader View helps here by bypassing the author's styling completely.

notatoad 10y ago

This criticism reminds me a bit of when people criticize Google search results for a query like "insurance" or "shoes" having too many ads. Searching for vague terms is useless, so they just display ads instead. At the zoom level the screenshots are taken at, maps are essentially useless. The most important information they can convey is "there's lots of roads here" or "this region is densely populated". The maps aren't optimized for accuracy, they're displaying a summary. The long island example really struck me - the old map displayed the primary route only, the new map conveys the fact that there are multiple options. If you're stuck in traffic and you pull up the map, you can see there's another decent route and ask the app to provide you with directions on an alternate route. If you're using the old maps, you'd just see the single primary route highlightedand assume you should stick with the route you're on.

drumttocs8 10y ago

Really, just zoom in if you're unhappy with the decluttering setting...

mbrock 10y ago

There's a broad trend of tech companies disrupting traditional industries and then making rookie mistakes and generally not living up to the standards of the tradition. Google, hire cartographers. Amazon, hire librarians and typesetters. Spotify, hire musicologists.

powera 10y ago
Why do you think they haven't?
- mbrock 10y ago
  Well, I assume Google has a big staff of skilled people working on GIS, but I'm curious to know what kind of input they get from people trained in the art of cartographical mapmaking... My hunch is that the tech industry is bad at taking advantage of this kind of traditional trade knowledge, and the essay in question here is an indicator. As for Amazon, the Kindle e-books very often have horrific typesetting that would be laughed out of any traditional book printing shop. And as for Spotify, their catalogue mechanisms and information design are clearly awful from a musicology standpoint.
  - Pyxl101 10y ago
    Does Amazon typeset the physical books they sell in their store? Should they be expected to typeset ebooks that they aren't involved in publishing?
  - ehnto 10y ago
    Something that has become interesting to me recently is the amount of knowledge about maratime weather and sailing that isn't readily accessible in a some kind of neat database, app or website. You actually have to talk to people and wander through museums to find out some of it. It's an example of an industry and body of knowledge that still grows and is passed around outside of the internet. Weather patterns for a particular area, places to anchor and dock, safe passages through reefs. You can't always google the answer and much of it is gleaned from other sailors who used experience and their tools to figure it out. Having grown up pretty much constantly online, with the answer to any question I have being reasonably available with a quick search; that some common information about the world can still be discovered and shared is is really fascinating. It sometimes feels like there isn't much outside of STEM fields left to explore.

PhantomGremlin 10y ago

There's much more wrong with Google maps on the desktop than what the article mentions. My biggest gripe is contrast, rather the lack thereof. Zooming in and out doesn't help. There's a lack of contrast at all levels! And the algorithm for displaying place names sucks. You'll see certain names at one level, zoom in and they disappear, zoom in some more and they finally reappear. Paper maps are unquestionably more ergonomic (but much less convenient) than Google maps. But it's not just Google. I find other online maps equally bad. It's quite sad that a paper Rand McNally map is so much better at actually presenting the geography of an area. Perhaps other posters here are right, it seems like Google maps is designed for point-to-point navigation, nothing more.

jasonkester 10y ago

The difference between today's Google maps and the authors 1960 paper map is easy to understand when you stop to think about how those maps are used. The paper map was used to navigate from place to place. That never happens with a google map. Sure, you navigate with them, but by telling Google where you want to go and letting them draw a line on your map. You don't need all that extra information if your phone is navigating you from place to place. You just need something clean that you can glance at to get a sense of where you are. So that's what they've designed their maps to give you.

sz4kerto 10y ago

Look at Here maps. It is a much better designed map, from a cartography perspective.

sccxy 10y ago
I would also recommend Here Maps. Offline usage is best for travelling.
Nux 10y ago
+1 HERE maps, excellent app/service.

panic 10y ago

I'm confused by the replies saying that more dense labels would somehow harm usability for driving or navigation. When you're driving, you know where you're going, the map knows where you're going, and it's easy to see the route you need to take. When you're not on a route, denser labels help you to orient yourself with the map and to know when to zoom into a particular location. That said, I also think the focus on paper maps is misplaced. Old-style road maps had to answer the question, "how do I get there from here?" New-style digital maps don't need to answer that question any more! Questions new-style maps need to answer include: * I know the name of a place or street; where should I zoom in to see more things around that place or street? * I need to go to a (gas station / rest stop / hospital); where's the closest one? * How would I get home from where I am? * I'm in an unfamiliar place and would like to go "downtown" (where there are restaurants and things to do); where is "downtown"? * Where is my car right now? Roads help you to orient yourself with the map, but they aren't as fundamentally important to digital maps as they were to old-style road maps. The visual space of the map might be better spent helping answer questions like these.

Gustomaximus 10y ago
For driving Google Maps getting quite bad. See this screenshoot: http://imgur.com/uPO8QJh http://imgur.com/uPO8QJh This kind of crowded display is fairly common now. I use Here Maps now which is much better + I like supporting a second option to avoid one service getting 2 monopolistic. My theory of why google maps is getting worse is there must be designers dedicated to this that need to constantly look for 'new' things to add even if its to the detriment as they can hardly say its all good now and twiddle their thumbs. Maybe that's unfair but I've seen this effect on other digital products first hand.
- chris_wot 10y ago
  There are also one too many buttons when you choose a route. If I want to drive, then I type in the address, select it, press a button to activate it, then press a similar button to start the route. Why is that last button needed?

tuukkah 10y ago

With open-source tools and services for OSM data from Mapzen and Mapbox, you can make your own map styles: light or heavy in detail, highlighting cities, highways or footpaths.

hueving 10y ago

The comparison to a paper map is stupid. A paper map is severely limited in that you can't zoom in on it so it has to be packed with enough information to hopefully be useful. An interactive map only needs to give you enough context to know what to zoom in on. If I'm using a touch interface that overloads me with information in one screen, it's a bad interface. It's like claiming that the new york times should display the entire full front page of the newspaper on a mobile device so you can read several articles without scrolling or loading more content because that's what you used to be able to do with the real paper.

Bud 10y ago
Not stupid at all, actually. The paper map is hand-tuned and shows a great deal of thought and care about precisely what to show, how to show it, and where to show it. There are many lessons that digital maps can learn from hand-crafted maps.
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donretag 10y ago

"The primary route across Long Island — Interstate 495" Off-topic, but as a native NYCer, we would never call it that. It's the LIE. I once had a woman ask me in the parking lot of a Walgreens how to get on the 278. I was puzzled for a second, then I realized she was talking about the BQE. Living out in California now, I miss the days of calling highways by name.

iamflimflam1 10y ago

I suspect that these changes are dues to the switch from bitmap tiles to vectors.

FatalLogic 10y ago
Do you mean they're focusing more effort on reducing the complexity of the maps, to save bandwidth, because vectors derive much larger bandwidth savings from reduced complexity than bitmaps would?
Doctor_Fegg 10y ago
There might be something in that, yes. Obviously I don't know the details of Google's internal tech, but certainly that's true of the OSM equivalents: Mapnik (produces raster tiles) is much better at label placement than Mapbox GL (renders vector tiles).
lucb1e 10y ago
Right, giving away too many labels at once would make it too easy for people to copy the map data. By requiring much higher zoom levels, people would have to do many more requests to grab everything. Not applicable at the zoom scale used in the article, but on higher zoom levels this is certainly a factor.

ulkesh 10y ago

"What Happened to Google Maps?" or "How to say 'more roads and less labels' in 20 different ways".

powera 10y ago

It's probably already been said, but comparing Google Maps to a paper map is stupid. The paper map has to have lots of cities on it, because there's no other way to find where exactly the specific suburb is if it's not on the map. In Google Maps, you can zoom in, you can search, you can have a link for direction sent to you, ... The author may claim "less is just less", but apart from "printing a map before knowing where I'm going", I can't think of a situation where the "improved" map would be at all useful.

x0054 10y ago

So I am not crazy after all! The other day I was driving in Palm Springs, and I was using Google Maps. I literally had to zoom in until the road I was on almost completely field the screen before it would show me the name of the road or the roads around it. They did something to their display algorithm where you now have to zoom almost entirely into an area to see anything about the area, very inconvenient.

stinos 10y ago
So I am not crazy after all! He, came here to post the same thing. Since the last 2 or 3 years I had the impression GM went worse (for what I do with it, not even mobile) after every update made to it, and sometimes also slower and more CPU hungry. To the point I stopped using it and went looking for alternatives.
Numberwang 10y ago
Finally I have an explanation to why GMaps have been annoying me so much. Especially driving country roads and having to zoom in to kite level in order to see the medium sized villages is ridiculous. Anyone know if Bing Maps is better?
- idop 10y ago
  I've been trying to form a habit of using OpenStreetMap recently (though not because of the article's subject), you could give it a try.
  - lucb1e 10y ago
    I use: - OpenStreetMap / OsmAnd for general use (about 75% of the time); - Google Maps for traffic info, street view and businesses (about 20% of the time); and - Bing Maps for areal imagery (about 5-10% of the time). Google Maps is always extremely slow, but their business listings are very comprehensive due to their extensive marketing, and traffic info and street view are also expensive things open source cannot really rival. Bing Maps runs at the speed of light when zooming and panning around the map. So much better than Google Maps, but the map's quality is not great so I just use it for areal imagery (another thing OSM does not have). OpenStreetMap is as fast as Bing Maps and its map quality is better than both google and microsoft if you disregard business listings (at least in western Europe and the middle of nowhere[1]). [1] https://twitter.com/lucb1e/status/522491538912604160 https://twitter.com/lucb1e/status/522491538912604160

rrockstar 10y ago

The way I use Google Maps a lot is for discovery. I look at the map of New York to see cities around it. When I look at a more zoomed in level of the city I want to see different boroughs and major roads. More zoomed in you want to discover shops and businesses. The bareness of the current Google Maps makes it very unsuitable for these functions. For example, even at full zoom level it only shows a few (<5%) of the shops and bars at the city center where i live. If i want to get a feel for a city (where are the most restaurants, where are the shopping centres, etc) the maps are really bad for that unless i go searching for the specific terms in the search bar. But that is the down side of the search bar: you never finf something you didn't know you were looking for.

ekr 10y ago

I've only ever been using Google Maps for the sattelite imagery, street view, and routin. For those things, Google Maps is still great. OpenStreetMap is what I use for orienting, find cycling paths, trails etc. So I'm not too bothered by this change. What I don't understand is why hasn't anybody taken the Google Maps routing and use it in OSM apps? Might not be legal, but similar non-commercial projects it should be fine.

Doctor_Fegg 10y ago
There's a lot of effort right now going into making OSM itself better for car navigation. (Take a look at the OSRM changelog: pretty much every feature in the last 6 months seems to be targeted to this use case.) And I'd say OSM is already better than Google for cycling and walking routing.

ableal 10y ago

The "Google, where did I leave my keys?" joke is getting closer to feature status, and that's probably what's going on with Google Maps. Anecdatum: last month I was driving out for a weekend in some rural bungalows a few miles outside a small city (Elvas, Portugal). The address was a bit vague, the place name too common, so much so that I had GPS coords stowed away in a message pic (don't ask ;-). So, when I pop out Google Maps in the old faithful iPad2 (which happens to be the 3G version, and therefore GPS chipped, good for navigation), and zoom in the area ... amidst thin local roads and lots of blank space, there's the place name and the days we're staying there. Turns out the Gmail app in that iPad was also used to send or review the emails with the reservations. Even in my 'desktop' I've been noticing Google Maps marking out city places which seem small compared to other landmarks, but where I often go or mention in emails. (Thanks, I do know where I left my keys today, I'm good.)

JetSpiegel 10y ago
Never thought I'd see Elvas mentioned on HN, now I've seen everything.

sabujp 10y ago

Comparing google maps to here maps at the same zoom level (on desktop, not on mobile) here maps has more info. It's like google maps has completely given up on the desktop.

ZeroGravitas 10y ago

The conclusion seems to undermine the whole piece. If the changes were made to help mobile uses then great, I almost always use it on mobile, and apparently so do the majority of users. He poses the question of which map you'd want when lost. A mobile phone with Google Maps is clearly the right answer.

jalami 10y ago

I noticed the same thing a few months ago. I live in a larger city, largest in our county, but we don't exist on the map unless you really zoom. A small town right next-door that's a lot more affluent shows up even when zoomed out to the tristate region. My guess was Google is stepping up their advertisement business for cities. That or people just find whitespace aesthetically pleasing and Google designers went kind of crazy with it.

lemiffe 10y ago

"Less is just less. And that's certainly the case here." Not sure I agree, in my opinion most of us use search & destinations nowadays, even in offline mode. The only reason I look at a map is to gauge distance between me and my destination.

kuschku 10y ago
Almost no one I know uses directions – all look at the map, see "3 intersections north, then right, then the 2nd on the left" and drive/bike/walk like that. I certainly do And for this use case Google maps is getting pretty useless
- JoeAltmaier 10y ago
  Oh we all know that person that just follows the printed directions blindly. They get off the route, they're helpless. And they can't get there a 2nd time without the directions again, because they never paid attention to where they were actually going.

SeanDav 10y ago

Google really won't care about any comments here, they are all about the data. So simply stop using Google maps. Tell your family to stop using Google maps. Tell all your friends to stop using Google maps. Blog about not using Google Maps. Find alternatives, there are several mentioned in these comments for starters. When/if Google start seeing a reduction in their map use, only then will they start paying attention.

wtbob 10y ago

Great article, but man it reads oddly with JavaScript turned off. Huge masses of text repeated, scrolling weirdly broken. It's almost a proof of its own point …

agumonkey 10y ago

The Google part happened in Maps. It was a mapping product, and now it's a geographical fronted to search. The v2 was all about services on a cute (and sluggish) rendering substrate. It's now usable these days, still way slower than OSM or bing. I miss the old presentation but alas ... ps: I recently discovered the 'my timelime' feature. Surprising to say the least.

london888 10y ago

Anyone done a comparison with Apple Maps?

macintux 10y ago
Out of curiosity, I took the final comparison and re-created it (roughly) in desktop Apple Maps. http://imgur.com/5CvnHn8 http://imgur.com/5CvnHn8

london888 10y ago

Most use cases the user will have their location and destination marked with route - so they don't need all the detail at that zoom level.

AJRF 10y ago

I think what Google is doing makes sense given smartphone adoption and the fact the maps are use for fundamentally different functions now. You don't need a hulking great map with loads of detail at a high level to get from point A to point B, you now just use your smartphone for that. I assume Google spotted a trend of people searching place names as opposed to picking points between two separate locations. So how does that change the function of the map? Well, we no longer need to have the zoomed out overload of detail, if we need more information about a place we are visiting, we type in the city name, or address, then zoom in close to see the detail we need. The article kind of skimps over the point that we can interact with those maps now.

Tempest1981 10y ago
Why can't the map serve multiple functions? I guess I wasn't overloaded by the detail.
- AJRF 10y ago
  I would guess that placing labels on a map has some cost. Not doing this(especially over 3G, 4G, EDGE) might have some gain in loading time. If you need that fine-grain detail zoom in? Not saying I advocate this approach, but thought I would try give you an answer :)

cwmma 10y ago

I suspect part of the idea is that you will use the search to find cities instead of finding them visually based on their names on the map. The issue with large cities that are near other large cities being omitted from maps is 'The Baltimore Phenomenon' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartographic_generalization#The_Baltimore_Phenomenon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartographic_generalization#Th...

a3_nm 10y ago

I think that OpenStreetMap has a bit more information that Google Maps at the same zoom level. To compare on New York: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=9/40.5263/-73.8556 https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=9/40.5263/-73.8556 https://www.google.fr/maps/@40.5487361,-73.9399427,9z https://www.google.fr/maps/@40.5487361,-73.9399427,9z (Edit: as the child comments correctly point out, this is only the default OSM rendering style.)

maxerickson 10y ago
Keep in mind that the tiles shown by default on the OpenStreetMap website are just an example rendering. Anyone can take the OpenStreetMap data and use it to render a map with different cartographic choices. There's even several other example renderings that can be easily accessed on the website, for example https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=9/40.5253/-74.2003&layers=C https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=9/40.5253/-74.2003&layers...
ris 10y ago
The default rendering for OSM might do, many other renderings are available (including your own if you like).
lucb1e 10y ago
It has a lot more info indeed and I love it. But then here come the users, looking for eye candy over functionality (I've heard this from two people): "ugh that is so ugly look at all this clutter"

adwf 10y ago

It's the speed/lag that really annoys me nowadays. If I pan across the map or zoom in, I know I'm waiting a good 5-6 seconds before the new tiles will be loaded. And that's on desktop, not mobile. It's so irritating I've just about abandoned google.

flyinghamster 10y ago

I've noticed the disappearing detail from Google Maps as well, and I find it really annoying - especially when perusing a rural area and having to zoom in to ridiculous levels to see town names. Another thing I'd like to see is making the "avoid tolls" setting easier to get to. Northern Illinois is toll road central, and I-355 in particular is a huge ripoff when you pay cash. Since I don't need any of the tollways for commuting, I can't justify getting an I-Pass.

brokenmachine 10y ago
Yes! I hate that!! It doesn't even remember the setting, you have to hit the three dots for menu before you search, choose "Route Options", then tick "Avoid tolls", then hit OK. EVERY TIME. And if you forget to go through this and start navigation, there's no way to change it, you have to hit back, then do the above. Why not have a way to change route options from the navigation screen??

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googleisking 10y ago

Google Maps, like several other google products (like Groups, even Search), has seen a constant degrade in user experience since 2005 or so. Maybe people forgot, but google maps was /blazing fast/ in the beginning. Nowdays, it brings my browser down to a crawl even before the images are shown. Maybe people are just stuck with this "google is the best" mentality, but this has stopped being universally true since many years. Use OpenStreetMap. It's data is way superior. It's _your_ data. Cannot strett this enough. Want a fancy browser? Nokia maps have always been incredibly sleek to use: https://maps.here.com/ Heck, even bing maps are /so much faster/. The imagery is also higher quality in several regions. Google has still the lead with street view, but for the actual maps I really encourage you to look for alternatives. They've destroyed their interface as far I'm concerned.

nud 10y ago
OpenSteetMap is very difficult to compare to Google Maps as it uses pre-rendered raster map images at fixed resolutions, rather than a dynamic vector-based approach. For me at least, this makes it far slower to load in non-cached areas, and the lack of precise zooming is super annoying.
- lucb1e 10y ago
  For me Google Maps is slower than OpenStreetMap anywhere in the world, cache or no cache. Might have something to do with not using Chrome, where Google makes their websites work the best of course. What do you mean by "the lack of precise zooming is super annoying"? In my experience, zooming in Bing Maps and OpenStreetMap are very fast, and only in Google Maps you're waiting ten seconds for the region to load and browser to respond before you can zoom further.
  - nud 10y ago
    On Google Maps, your zoom factor is any real number within a range. On Open Street View, you are stuck using one of several predefined zoom levels (integers 1-20). To test out, try modifying the "10" in both of the links below: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7058316,-74.2581905,10z https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7058316,-74.2581905,10z https://maps.here.com/?map=40.71455,-74.00714,10,normal&x=ep https://maps.here.com/?map=40.71455,-74.00714,10,normal&x=ep

sztanko 10y ago

Optimal placement of labels is an NP-hard problem[1]. Since google maps transferred to vector and label placement is now done on the (mobile) client, I am not surprised by what happened. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_label_placement https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_label_placement

maxerickson 10y ago
It would be cheap to transmit pre-calculated hints for various display situations.

sztanko 10y ago

lucb1e 10y ago

I've been noticing this but could never quite put my finger on what it was. This is exactly it. On google maps I can never find what I want. I thought it was because I've been using OpenStreetMap, and had gotten used to a different display style. Seeing a place once in OSM anywhere in the world, and zooming out from it to continent view, I can almost always find it again later. On Google Maps I always got lost. Now I finally get what the problem is.

darkhorn 10y ago

Satellite imagery for close zoom levels aren't loaded for Turkey! https://productforums.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/maps/Ixm4C6hviZQ;context-place=topicsearchin/maps/category$3Afirefox https://productforums.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/maps/Ixm4C6...

kuschku 10y ago
And in Germany they haven’t been updated since 2004. Google’s products are shit outside of the US, more at 11 It’s nothing new, it’s been like this for quite a while.

xgbi 10y ago

What if they simply don't want people to print the map and rather use google maps to actually perform the guidance?

praestigiare 10y ago

When using a map for navigation at a glance, with a route overlaid on the map, I do not need to know the names of the streets, but I do need to see that there are three cross streets before my turn.

jccalhoun 10y ago

I've had the frustrating experience of looking on google maps and seeing a town I was looking for not be labeled at a zoom level where I could see where it was in relationship to other towns. But I wonder if part of this is about google trying to funnel users into using maps in a particular way. Is this their attempt to get users to search more and scrutinize maps less? Are they trying to make online interactive maps a different experience than paper maps?

DanHulton 10y ago

Is it just me, or is that site unreadable? Chrome 50, Windows 10, and the font is about the thinnest I've ever seen.

cr3ative 10y ago
Chrome/Win 10 and I had serious trouble making the site readable; zooming to 175% just about worked. Default rendering: http://i.imgur.com/uhbRcsR.png http://i.imgur.com/uhbRcsR.png
gefh 10y ago
Not just you. My irony sensors were of the charts.

Terretta 10y ago

Last dozen images in the article are mis-distributed. They don't go with the local text.

a3n 10y ago

The difference between the album-cover paper map and Google Maps is that every "pixel" on the paper map was put there by conscious, functional and esthetic choice. In fact the people who designed and drew that map probably bragged about it to their peers. No designing human ever sees a rendered Google Map, except for testing. The overall esthetic programmed into the algorithms are designed, but no human looks at the final result and says "it would just look better if this was shifted up and to the right a bit." There are an infinite number of possible renderings on a digital map, but a specific published paper map goes out the door with a sigh of satisfaction. Which is to say, there's a long way to go before a digitial map is beautiful, and a specific rendering is as good as possible for the person viewing it for a specific purpose. The only way digital maps win (and they do) is that you can ask them things, and they cover the world.

nicoboo 10y ago

The article has its points and it is always interesting to analyze those specific readibility and rendering analysis. It helps to understand the choice made by interactive map platforms through static image and dynamic controls. Justin O'Beirne knows what he is talking about. He has worked for Apple Maps and he also created other interesting and really precise analysis in the past. http://www.justinobeirne.com/essay/google-maps-and-label-readability http://www.justinobeirne.com/essay/google-maps-and-label-rea...

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scbd 10y ago

It's way too slow and its missing some stuff buts it's moving in the right direction. Task based (someone mentioned this) is correct. Tasks are easy targets for Google's user-centered design and machine learning. It's not as simple as reproducing a road map from the 1950's, adding pan and zoom and calling it a day. You design for the device (hint: mobile) and the tasks that are used MOST. Do you really think Google doesn't keep track? People don't use Google Maps the same way as a 20in folded road map or a school atlas. If you wonder what tasks are they are designing for just look at the UI of the App. It's dominated by a big SEARCH bar and a big "get DIRECTIONS" button. That's what people do and that's what it's designed for. They are trying to make it glanceable in a car and make room to see search results or to add stuff based on interaction (like traffic, alternative routes, etc.) and not waste time and bandwidth on loading all the extra crap.

ddimitrov 10y ago

From my experience, using the Google maps within the city, it tends to ne pretty sparse with labels by default. This is a good thing because in a place like tokyo there is just too much stuff - if I care for aometgubd I either search for it, or drop a pub and check what is around. On the other hand, Maps always shows the labels of things I have searched for in the past, yielding a customized legend of landmarks+things that matter to me.

ddimitrov 10y ago