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Is it just me or has the usefulness of Google Maps declined substantially over the past year or so? A miscellaneous listing of complaints: * It supports double

by jfasi 7y ago

Is it just me or has the usefulness of Google Maps declined substantially over the past year or so? A miscellaneous listing of complaints: * It supports double-tap to zoom, but the first tap always causes it to lose context and open whatever I happened to tap on. This is extremely annoying when searching for restaurants in an area with one hand because that first tap will always cause me to lose my search context. * Places I know are there don't show up, even when I zoom in to the point where the only thing in the viewport is the block where the store is located. * Street names are still impossible to discover. In NYC, whenever I find a place that's on an avenue I have to scroll blocks left and right just to find out what street the place is on because street labels aren't automatically placed in the viewport. * I routinely make a journey to places that turn out to be closed. I'm not talking about little mom and pop shops, although plenty of those are reported as open right now despite being permanently closed. I'm talking about major, newsworthy bankruptcies. I used to see Toy 'R Us on my map for months after the stores themselves shut down. It's gotten to the point where I call ahead whenever I want to go to a store I've never been to. * Automatically generated markers obscuring mass transit markers. I recently spent ten minutes trying desperately to find a subway station that I knew was close to me because its marker was hidden underneath a Dunkin' Donuts. I've literally never set foot in a Dunkin' Donuts, something which Google literally knows for a fact, and yet it decided that notifying me of that store's location was more important than the entrance to the mass transit system I use every single day. * While we're at it, let's talk about the little store markers. Google is running an ad auction on each impression, and that the reason you see useless stores that have nothing to offer you is because they decided to pay their way into your map. It's hard to believe Google is "organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible" when they shove Dunkin' Donuts in my face. If I seem mad, I'm not. I'm disappointed. So disappointed that I did the unthinkable and installed Apple Maps, and I have to say, I'm very glad I did.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
It's not just you. Google Maps seems to be stuck in this sad state of being almost, but not quite, good at being a map. Street names in particular seem like a low-hanging fruit that would vastly improve the UX, but for some reason, they don't do anything about it.
- UweSchmidt 7y ago
  +1 for street names in view port. I tend to research the route and then put away the phone when I'm on my bike. What is the name of the street where I need to turn right? Also, if I have to go straight ahead for a long time, the street names might change several times, but I don't care much. I'd rather know I need to go straight for 5km, than go straight for 100m, then go straight again for 800m ....
- CommieBobDole 7y ago
  I don't know for sure, but I think that's a problem that they had previously solved - I remember being impressed years ago by the fact that the street names always moved on zoom or scroll so they were always in view. It seems like they've regressed for some reason.
  - CommieBobDole 7y ago
    Update: I did some testing and this still works for me - every time I zoom or scroll, the street labels move to remain in frame. Tried on Chrome desktop, iOS native app, and iOS Safari, same behavior in all three.
    - Nition 7y ago
      I've never understood these street name complaints on Hacker News either. It's always kept the street names in the frame for me. If I zoom in a lot, it even starts repeating the street name over and over[1], getting denser and denser as I zoom in more. [1] Example screenshot in Firefox today: https://i.imgur.com/BDa4Dr2.png https://i.imgur.com/BDa4Dr2.png
      - rayiner 7y ago
        It doesn’t work very well in cities. Here is an example from DC. http://i68.tinypic.com/152ygx0.jpg http://i68.tinypic.com/152ygx0.jpg
      - sixothree 7y ago
jimmaswell 7y ago
Why don't you suggest changes to fix these some of these mistakes yourself? You can add a new location, report wrong business hours, etc.
- smichel17 7y ago
  Not the OP, but I'd much rather contribute that information to OpenStreetMap so that it's freely available to anyone who wants to use it (including Google!).
  - mrep 7y ago
    Google's data is copyrighted and open street maps is not per their policy "If you alter or build upon our data, you may distribute the result only under the same licence" [0]. They even mention google maps in their privacy policy: "OSM contributors are reminded never to add data from any copyrighted sources (e.g. Google Maps or printed maps) without explicit permission from the copyright holders." So no they cannot use it and a quick search looks like apple still relies on Tomtom which is also copyrighted [1] and thus they cannot use it either. [0]: https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/ahx4il/where_does_apple_maps_source_its_data_the_usual/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/ahx4il/where_does_ap...
    - hdfbdtbcdg 7y ago
      Google and Apple are both free to use OSM data (which is of course copyrighted). But the don't want to because they can't abide by the license terms.
      - rathel 7y ago
        Apple does use OSM in some countries like Ukraine IIRC. They are free to do so. https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Community_Guidelines/Regional_Cuts_-_Guideline https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Community_Guidel... Although their attribution is leaning on the minimalist side.
mr_custard 7y ago
Agreed. Furthermore, Google Maps is full of fake reviews with only the option to "Flag as inappropriate" and no option to properly report a fake review with supporting evidence - which I would do, if the option was there!
thatoneuser 7y ago
The lack of road names is unbelievable. It's the most fundamental aspect to a mapping program (to give you context and names in the area), yet every time I zoom into a destination I have to play the zoom around game until the street names pop up. I don't see what purpose this serves - otherwise it's just roads taking up space.
naravara 7y ago
It's not just the maps. The signal to noise ratio on search has gotten worse too. It used to be you'd get your good results buried underneath obviously bullshit content farms doing absurd SEO. Now it's buried underneath somewhat relevant content that is either manipulative/sensationalist, actively trying to spread disinformation, or just hosts a very generic pabulum version of what you're looking for. Instead of trying to find useful information amidst irrelevant nonsense I feel like I spend a lot more time now trying to sift out useful information for relevant nonsense, which is much harder.
- Sendotsh 7y ago
  This has been seriously grinding at me lately. Google is pretty much useless for me personally as a search engine lately. I find it so frustrating that I just end up not wanting to search for things. - It ignores that I tick "Australia Only", and shows me endless US results and international results despite me KNOWING there's Australian results for the thing I'm searching for, eg products in a store. I have to use site:.au in nearly every search. - It insists I mean some other word that my query was close to, and doesn't give any way to say otherwise. Sometimes it shows a "Did you mean ____?" but a lot of the time it just doesn't. - The sheer amount of spam in the results now is mind boggling. Searching for lots of common products or projects now is like trying to find that one email you know is in your spam folder in Gmail. Pages and pages of crap until you get the page you're after. - and so much more I could write a book I feel like Google Search is no longer about giving a user the page they want as quickly as possible, but to get a user to click through as many bullshit ad-filled content farms as they can BEFORE giving them the real result purely to make more money for Google. Or at least some point somewhere between Hanlon's Razor and "We know it's broken but we won't fix it because we make more money this way"... and closer to the later.
  - rurp 7y ago
    > It insists I mean some other word that my query was close to, and doesn't give any way to say otherwise. Sometimes it shows a "Did you mean ____?" but a lot of the time it just doesn't. I noticed a large uptick in this kind of behavior for the queries I was making a year or two ago, and it's what finally spurred me to make the switch over to DuckDuckGo. It's extremely frustrating how Google search will ignore a quoted term and instead return useless results for a different, but more popular, term.
jrnichols 7y ago
My experience has been very similar, and to this day I'm still dismayed at the negative opinion people have of Apple Maps. Most of the people I've asked haven't used it in years, instead just defaulting to Google Maps. I've also encountered a surprising number of people that just assume all maps are Google Maps. Kind of like the ones that don't know there's email besides Gmail.
- empath75 7y ago
  Shows how important first impressions are. Apple maps was terrible on release and Apple deleted google maps from people’s phones when it came out. I was visiting Costa Rica at the time and the small town I was in which was thoroughly mapped in google maps didn’t exist in Apple maps at all. An infuriating experience that made me never want to use Apple maps again.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Apple didn’t “delete Google Maps” when Apple maps came out. The Maps app was written by Apple from day one. It used Google’s data. Google wouldn’t allow Apple to do turn by turn directions without Apple giving Google more user data. Apple had to either find other sources for map data or give up user privacy.
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      > Google wouldn’t allow Apple to do turn by turn directions without Apple giving Google more user data. As I recall the reporting at the time, it was a choice of either more data or more money for turn-by-turn navigation.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > Apple maps was terrible on release Yeah, I remember when, just after release, on a trip between Woodland, CA, and Davis, CA, it decided to route me through Woodland Hills, CA. (Not “it mistook a Woodland address for Woodland Hills, but it routed from Woodland to Davis by way of Woodland Hills, adding ~800 miles to an ~12 mile trip.)
camhenlin 7y ago
Not totally related to your point, but it seems to me that Google doesn't care about the quality of Google Maps as much as Apple cares about the quality of Apple Maps. For example, my house had its address changed by our county in late November when a new street was cut nearby and the location of our driveway changed due to right of way. Our address was updated in the USPS AMS database back in January. As you can imagine, I wanted Map providers to have my most updated information as soon as possible so that people could easily find my address when I gave it to them and so when UPS or Fedex people look up my address on their phones, they can find it. In Google Maps, I've attempted to contribute an edit several times: each time with links to county tax data, county records, county maps, city maps, and a personal statement explaining the situation. Every time Google rejects it without action or any message other than "not applied". I'm pretty sure there is someone manually reviewing these requests as it always takes a variable amount of time before I get the rejection. It's really disappointing to put so much effort into editing someone else's data - for free - and have it be rejected outright without any sort of explanation. Now, I went and I did the exact same thing with Apple Maps! My edit was applied within a week and the Map is updated - iPhone users can easily find my house. It seems to me that while maybe Apple spent several years playing catch up with Google, at this point they are hungry to do well by their customers and are extremely responsive to quality concerns. I've not personally had a problem with Apple Maps in several years and don't see myself leaving Apple's platform any time soon
- yahelc 7y ago
  Also a pain-point -- 2.6 million people live in Queens, NY, but Google Maps gets the city wrong for the vast majority of them, and it causes major headaches for residents (since so many services rely on Google Maps), and they have yet to fix it, and reject any edits that attempt to do so for them. Picking a random example -- "1880 Willoughby" is in the neighborhood of Ridgewood in Queens. Either "Queens" or "Ridgewood" are acceptable as the city. However, Google Maps calls it "Flushing", which is a totally different neighborhood 10 miles away. Apparently this has to do with the history of where the central post offices were located for given areas in Queens, but no other online map provider struggles with this distinction.
  - 7y ago
kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
Their instance on using Play services for location rather than the GPS API.
wsinks 7y ago
I've been impressed with Apple Maps lately - like how whenever you scroll, the temp and AQI are auto updated! So killer.
sixothree 7y ago
> Street names are still impossible to discover. It's a map. Street names should be first class citizens. But alas. Google knows better than I do. > I routinely make a journey to places that turn out to be closed. I'm not talking about little mom and pop shops, although plenty of those are reported as open right now despite being permanently closed. I'm talking about major, newsworthy bankruptcies. I made the trip out to Coney Island from Manhattan only to find it closed that day....
arkades 7y ago
My experience mirrors yours exactly. And as of about two years ago, Apple maps has been more than sufficient as a replacement - they’re actually better now, in my opinion.
- briandear 7y ago
  The new iOS 13 street view is vastly better than Google now in terms of quality and fidelity. Apple isn’t playing around when it comes to improving Maps.
sytelus 7y ago
Some more stuff that never seems to be getting fixed: - When making turns in complex road netwrok, they don't zoom in. I can't tell you how many times I have taken wrong turns because zoom level is too coarse while making turns. - They often give routes with way too many turnings as if making a turn has no cost. Combine this with above and in many places Google Maps is a hell to use. - No one is still bothering to add select scenic route option. European map service like viamichelin.com does this very nicely. So many wasted road trips. - Little things like after trip is "complete", they suddenly zoom out all the way. This is utterly nonsensical. Most of the time I still actually need to find the place in dense urban area after parking. - The "Save" feature allows no annotation, icons, coloring. They even chose default color and icon so that its hard to distinguish. - No way to find restaurants or businesses using more useful filters like most reviewed as opposed to stupid highest rating.
Medicalidiot 7y ago
The permanently closed point is the most salient in my mind. There was a business that was closed for, what I was told, over 6 months in my area; Google said it was still open. Later I checked out the business on Google maps, but this time the hours were updated to say closed every day.
telltruth 7y ago
A lot of things have changed in this team since its long gone golden days. Previously it was run by Marissa Mayer and she was given essentially a blank check (being ex-girlfriend of founder also didn't hurt). She went out in massive spending spree and bought tons of startups, started streetview project, got much better aerial data and so on. Thanks to her aggressive investment and ambition, she managed to make Google Maps better than maps many government themselves had at the time. After she had to report to Huber and she left, the team had been in turmoil with not much of ambition and just usual executives thinking about how to make profits. So vast amount of affort in recent years has gone into those stuff and less into making maps unconditionally better. There is also no competition now that Apple Maps have pretty much given up matching the coverage and details of Google Maps. This is exactly the kind of things we need to worry about when monopoly invest in making super good "free stuff". They will put ton of money to leapfrog but then they will realize that they have created massive capital barrier for others to enter the market. So they will now just loiter and squeeze the customers out for profits.
buzzdenver 7y ago
A very simple feature they're missing is filtering by what is open now (or by the time I can arrive). Would be super useful when searching for a restaurant or store.
- CryptoBanker 7y ago
  This is an option actually
  - buzzdenver 7y ago
    I stand corrected, wasn't when I tried last time.
JustSomeNobody 7y ago
I've almost completely switched to Apple maps. I have to say, right now, my biggest annoyance is no matter how far I zoom in, the street text keeps getting smaller so I can read it!
- Austin_Conlon 7y ago
  Maybe this isn't ideal, but setting the system text size in Settings should make the street labels larger. You can put text size adjustment in Control Center too for easier access.
  - JustSomeNobody 7y ago
    Thanks, I will try that.
Forge36 7y ago
>Places I know are there don't show up, even when I zoom in to the point where the only thing in the viewport is the block where the store is located. I swore I was seeing the same bug. With some searches I found the news articles stating the business had actually permanently closed. I wonder if the problem in some cases is: A) Users don't realize when a search is open it hides some results. B) Some business are getting flagged as closed inappropriately to avoid showing them?
zapita 7y ago
I also switched to Apple Maps and have not looked back.
JJMcJ 7y ago
> Street names are still impossible to discover. Let's not forget State Routes and similar. Okay, so Main Street is also State Route 434, but 99.9999% of people call it Main Street and may not even be aware it's SR 434.
vitaflo 7y ago
I just finished a 2 month road trip and used a mixture of Google Maps and Apple Maps and have to agree, Google Maps was surprisingly sub par. This really surprised me. The largest offender was routing from an Airbnb in Northern California to a restaurant nearby about 14 miles away. Google put us on a path that would take 3 hours! I had to double check to make sure it wasn't on walking or public transit mode. It was the most convoluted thing I've ever seen. Every time I re-entered it gave the same ridiculous route. Very strange routing like this happened with regularity. Apple Maps had no such issues (and routed properly around closures). Add on the fact that the reviews in Google Maps are worthless because everything gets 5 stars, as we got further into the trip we pretty just only used Apple Maps.
briandear 7y ago
I live at Moffett Field, literally a stone’s throw from Google HQ and my street address doesn’t show up on Google maps despite repeated attempts to contact and correct. My street shows up, but not the actual number. Apple Maps however, is perfectly accurate for my address. Essentially in Google’s backyard and they can’t get it right. So it makes me suspicious of the quality of the entire system.
craftyguy 7y ago
This rant about a mobile app seems only tangentially (at best) related to the article/topic. You don't actually discuss anything in the article, but seemed to have keyed off of 'google maps' in the title to inspire your off topic rant.

by jfasi 7y ago

TeMPOraL 7y ago

It's not just you. Google Maps seems to be stuck in this sad state of being almost, but not quite, good at being a map. Street names in particular seem like a low-hanging fruit that would vastly improve the UX, but for some reason, they don't do anything about it.

UweSchmidt 7y ago
+1 for street names in view port. I tend to research the route and then put away the phone when I'm on my bike. What is the name of the street where I need to turn right? Also, if I have to go straight ahead for a long time, the street names might change several times, but I don't care much. I'd rather know I need to go straight for 5km, than go straight for 100m, then go straight again for 800m ....
CommieBobDole 7y ago
I don't know for sure, but I think that's a problem that they had previously solved - I remember being impressed years ago by the fact that the street names always moved on zoom or scroll so they were always in view. It seems like they've regressed for some reason.
- CommieBobDole 7y ago
  Update: I did some testing and this still works for me - every time I zoom or scroll, the street labels move to remain in frame. Tried on Chrome desktop, iOS native app, and iOS Safari, same behavior in all three.
  - Nition 7y ago
    I've never understood these street name complaints on Hacker News either. It's always kept the street names in the frame for me. If I zoom in a lot, it even starts repeating the street name over and over[1], getting denser and denser as I zoom in more. [1] Example screenshot in Firefox today: https://i.imgur.com/BDa4Dr2.png https://i.imgur.com/BDa4Dr2.png
    - rayiner 7y ago
      It doesn’t work very well in cities. Here is an example from DC. http://i68.tinypic.com/152ygx0.jpg http://i68.tinypic.com/152ygx0.jpg
    - sixothree 7y ago

jimmaswell 7y ago

Why don't you suggest changes to fix these some of these mistakes yourself? You can add a new location, report wrong business hours, etc.

smichel17 7y ago
Not the OP, but I'd much rather contribute that information to OpenStreetMap so that it's freely available to anyone who wants to use it (including Google!).
- mrep 7y ago
  Google's data is copyrighted and open street maps is not per their policy "If you alter or build upon our data, you may distribute the result only under the same licence" [0]. They even mention google maps in their privacy policy: "OSM contributors are reminded never to add data from any copyrighted sources (e.g. Google Maps or printed maps) without explicit permission from the copyright holders." So no they cannot use it and a quick search looks like apple still relies on Tomtom which is also copyrighted [1] and thus they cannot use it either. [0]: https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/ahx4il/where_does_apple_maps_source_its_data_the_usual/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/ahx4il/where_does_ap...
  - hdfbdtbcdg 7y ago
    Google and Apple are both free to use OSM data (which is of course copyrighted). But the don't want to because they can't abide by the license terms.
    - rathel 7y ago
      Apple does use OSM in some countries like Ukraine IIRC. They are free to do so. https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Community_Guidelines/Regional_Cuts_-_Guideline https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Community_Guidel... Although their attribution is leaning on the minimalist side.

mr_custard 7y ago

Agreed. Furthermore, Google Maps is full of fake reviews with only the option to "Flag as inappropriate" and no option to properly report a fake review with supporting evidence - which I would do, if the option was there!

thatoneuser 7y ago

The lack of road names is unbelievable. It's the most fundamental aspect to a mapping program (to give you context and names in the area), yet every time I zoom into a destination I have to play the zoom around game until the street names pop up. I don't see what purpose this serves - otherwise it's just roads taking up space.

naravara 7y ago

It's not just the maps. The signal to noise ratio on search has gotten worse too. It used to be you'd get your good results buried underneath obviously bullshit content farms doing absurd SEO. Now it's buried underneath somewhat relevant content that is either manipulative/sensationalist, actively trying to spread disinformation, or just hosts a very generic pabulum version of what you're looking for. Instead of trying to find useful information amidst irrelevant nonsense I feel like I spend a lot more time now trying to sift out useful information for relevant nonsense, which is much harder.

Sendotsh 7y ago
This has been seriously grinding at me lately. Google is pretty much useless for me personally as a search engine lately. I find it so frustrating that I just end up not wanting to search for things. - It ignores that I tick "Australia Only", and shows me endless US results and international results despite me KNOWING there's Australian results for the thing I'm searching for, eg products in a store. I have to use site:.au in nearly every search. - It insists I mean some other word that my query was close to, and doesn't give any way to say otherwise. Sometimes it shows a "Did you mean ____?" but a lot of the time it just doesn't. - The sheer amount of spam in the results now is mind boggling. Searching for lots of common products or projects now is like trying to find that one email you know is in your spam folder in Gmail. Pages and pages of crap until you get the page you're after. - and so much more I could write a book I feel like Google Search is no longer about giving a user the page they want as quickly as possible, but to get a user to click through as many bullshit ad-filled content farms as they can BEFORE giving them the real result purely to make more money for Google. Or at least some point somewhere between Hanlon's Razor and "We know it's broken but we won't fix it because we make more money this way"... and closer to the later.
- rurp 7y ago
  > It insists I mean some other word that my query was close to, and doesn't give any way to say otherwise. Sometimes it shows a "Did you mean ____?" but a lot of the time it just doesn't. I noticed a large uptick in this kind of behavior for the queries I was making a year or two ago, and it's what finally spurred me to make the switch over to DuckDuckGo. It's extremely frustrating how Google search will ignore a quoted term and instead return useless results for a different, but more popular, term.

jrnichols 7y ago

My experience has been very similar, and to this day I'm still dismayed at the negative opinion people have of Apple Maps. Most of the people I've asked haven't used it in years, instead just defaulting to Google Maps. I've also encountered a surprising number of people that just assume all maps are Google Maps. Kind of like the ones that don't know there's email besides Gmail.

empath75 7y ago
Shows how important first impressions are. Apple maps was terrible on release and Apple deleted google maps from people’s phones when it came out. I was visiting Costa Rica at the time and the small town I was in which was thoroughly mapped in google maps didn’t exist in Apple maps at all. An infuriating experience that made me never want to use Apple maps again.
- scarface74 7y ago
  Apple didn’t “delete Google Maps” when Apple maps came out. The Maps app was written by Apple from day one. It used Google’s data. Google wouldn’t allow Apple to do turn by turn directions without Apple giving Google more user data. Apple had to either find other sources for map data or give up user privacy.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > Google wouldn’t allow Apple to do turn by turn directions without Apple giving Google more user data. As I recall the reporting at the time, it was a choice of either more data or more money for turn-by-turn navigation.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > Apple maps was terrible on release Yeah, I remember when, just after release, on a trip between Woodland, CA, and Davis, CA, it decided to route me through Woodland Hills, CA. (Not “it mistook a Woodland address for Woodland Hills, but it routed from Woodland to Davis by way of Woodland Hills, adding ~800 miles to an ~12 mile trip.)

camhenlin 7y ago

Not totally related to your point, but it seems to me that Google doesn't care about the quality of Google Maps as much as Apple cares about the quality of Apple Maps. For example, my house had its address changed by our county in late November when a new street was cut nearby and the location of our driveway changed due to right of way. Our address was updated in the USPS AMS database back in January. As you can imagine, I wanted Map providers to have my most updated information as soon as possible so that people could easily find my address when I gave it to them and so when UPS or Fedex people look up my address on their phones, they can find it. In Google Maps, I've attempted to contribute an edit several times: each time with links to county tax data, county records, county maps, city maps, and a personal statement explaining the situation. Every time Google rejects it without action or any message other than "not applied". I'm pretty sure there is someone manually reviewing these requests as it always takes a variable amount of time before I get the rejection. It's really disappointing to put so much effort into editing someone else's data - for free - and have it be rejected outright without any sort of explanation. Now, I went and I did the exact same thing with Apple Maps! My edit was applied within a week and the Map is updated - iPhone users can easily find my house. It seems to me that while maybe Apple spent several years playing catch up with Google, at this point they are hungry to do well by their customers and are extremely responsive to quality concerns. I've not personally had a problem with Apple Maps in several years and don't see myself leaving Apple's platform any time soon

yahelc 7y ago
Also a pain-point -- 2.6 million people live in Queens, NY, but Google Maps gets the city wrong for the vast majority of them, and it causes major headaches for residents (since so many services rely on Google Maps), and they have yet to fix it, and reject any edits that attempt to do so for them. Picking a random example -- "1880 Willoughby" is in the neighborhood of Ridgewood in Queens. Either "Queens" or "Ridgewood" are acceptable as the city. However, Google Maps calls it "Flushing", which is a totally different neighborhood 10 miles away. Apparently this has to do with the history of where the central post offices were located for given areas in Queens, but no other online map provider struggles with this distinction.
- 7y ago

kevin_thibedeau 7y ago

Their instance on using Play services for location rather than the GPS API.

wsinks 7y ago

I've been impressed with Apple Maps lately - like how whenever you scroll, the temp and AQI are auto updated! So killer.

sixothree 7y ago

> Street names are still impossible to discover. It's a map. Street names should be first class citizens. But alas. Google knows better than I do. > I routinely make a journey to places that turn out to be closed. I'm not talking about little mom and pop shops, although plenty of those are reported as open right now despite being permanently closed. I'm talking about major, newsworthy bankruptcies. I made the trip out to Coney Island from Manhattan only to find it closed that day....

arkades 7y ago

My experience mirrors yours exactly. And as of about two years ago, Apple maps has been more than sufficient as a replacement - they’re actually better now, in my opinion.

briandear 7y ago
The new iOS 13 street view is vastly better than Google now in terms of quality and fidelity. Apple isn’t playing around when it comes to improving Maps.

sytelus 7y ago

Some more stuff that never seems to be getting fixed: - When making turns in complex road netwrok, they don't zoom in. I can't tell you how many times I have taken wrong turns because zoom level is too coarse while making turns. - They often give routes with way too many turnings as if making a turn has no cost. Combine this with above and in many places Google Maps is a hell to use. - No one is still bothering to add select scenic route option. European map service like viamichelin.com does this very nicely. So many wasted road trips. - Little things like after trip is "complete", they suddenly zoom out all the way. This is utterly nonsensical. Most of the time I still actually need to find the place in dense urban area after parking. - The "Save" feature allows no annotation, icons, coloring. They even chose default color and icon so that its hard to distinguish. - No way to find restaurants or businesses using more useful filters like most reviewed as opposed to stupid highest rating.

Medicalidiot 7y ago

The permanently closed point is the most salient in my mind. There was a business that was closed for, what I was told, over 6 months in my area; Google said it was still open. Later I checked out the business on Google maps, but this time the hours were updated to say closed every day.

telltruth 7y ago

A lot of things have changed in this team since its long gone golden days. Previously it was run by Marissa Mayer and she was given essentially a blank check (being ex-girlfriend of founder also didn't hurt). She went out in massive spending spree and bought tons of startups, started streetview project, got much better aerial data and so on. Thanks to her aggressive investment and ambition, she managed to make Google Maps better than maps many government themselves had at the time. After she had to report to Huber and she left, the team had been in turmoil with not much of ambition and just usual executives thinking about how to make profits. So vast amount of affort in recent years has gone into those stuff and less into making maps unconditionally better. There is also no competition now that Apple Maps have pretty much given up matching the coverage and details of Google Maps. This is exactly the kind of things we need to worry about when monopoly invest in making super good "free stuff". They will put ton of money to leapfrog but then they will realize that they have created massive capital barrier for others to enter the market. So they will now just loiter and squeeze the customers out for profits.

buzzdenver 7y ago

A very simple feature they're missing is filtering by what is open now (or by the time I can arrive). Would be super useful when searching for a restaurant or store.

CryptoBanker 7y ago
This is an option actually
- buzzdenver 7y ago
  I stand corrected, wasn't when I tried last time.

JustSomeNobody 7y ago

I've almost completely switched to Apple maps. I have to say, right now, my biggest annoyance is no matter how far I zoom in, the street text keeps getting smaller so I can read it!

Austin_Conlon 7y ago
Maybe this isn't ideal, but setting the system text size in Settings should make the street labels larger. You can put text size adjustment in Control Center too for easier access.
- JustSomeNobody 7y ago
  Thanks, I will try that.

Forge36 7y ago

>Places I know are there don't show up, even when I zoom in to the point where the only thing in the viewport is the block where the store is located. I swore I was seeing the same bug. With some searches I found the news articles stating the business had actually permanently closed. I wonder if the problem in some cases is: A) Users don't realize when a search is open it hides some results. B) Some business are getting flagged as closed inappropriately to avoid showing them?

zapita 7y ago

I also switched to Apple Maps and have not looked back.

JJMcJ 7y ago

> Street names are still impossible to discover. Let's not forget State Routes and similar. Okay, so Main Street is also State Route 434, but 99.9999% of people call it Main Street and may not even be aware it's SR 434.

vitaflo 7y ago

I just finished a 2 month road trip and used a mixture of Google Maps and Apple Maps and have to agree, Google Maps was surprisingly sub par. This really surprised me. The largest offender was routing from an Airbnb in Northern California to a restaurant nearby about 14 miles away. Google put us on a path that would take 3 hours! I had to double check to make sure it wasn't on walking or public transit mode. It was the most convoluted thing I've ever seen. Every time I re-entered it gave the same ridiculous route. Very strange routing like this happened with regularity. Apple Maps had no such issues (and routed properly around closures). Add on the fact that the reviews in Google Maps are worthless because everything gets 5 stars, as we got further into the trip we pretty just only used Apple Maps.

briandear 7y ago

I live at Moffett Field, literally a stone’s throw from Google HQ and my street address doesn’t show up on Google maps despite repeated attempts to contact and correct. My street shows up, but not the actual number. Apple Maps however, is perfectly accurate for my address. Essentially in Google’s backyard and they can’t get it right. So it makes me suspicious of the quality of the entire system.

craftyguy 7y ago

This rant about a mobile app seems only tangentially (at best) related to the article/topic. You don't actually discuss anything in the article, but seemed to have keyed off of 'google maps' in the title to inspire your off topic rant.