6 ms·

I recall from my time in Google Geo years ago that the idea of integrating Search and Maps was a big part of the "New Maps" release that happened around 2014. T

I recall from my time in Google Geo years ago that the idea of integrating Search and Maps was a big part of the "New Maps" release that happened around 2014. The rumor I heard was that someone (possibly even Larry himself) wanted to be able to have interactive maps directly on the search results page, so that the navigation from a search query to a map wouldn't involve even a page reload. So the big Maps frontend rewrite actually ended up merging MFE into GWS, the web search frontend server. I recall seeing maps hosted at google.com/maps around that time, but I don't know if that was ever launched fully or if it was just an experiment. In any case, though, my understanding is that the technical capacity for this has existed for nearly 10 years now, just behind a configuration setting. So it's possible that this change is just a code cleanup. It's also possible that someone is trying to increase the percentage of searches that have location information, that doesn't seem terribly far-fetched either, and I can imagine lots of ways people could try to rationalize it as actually benefiting users. (Whether it actually does benefit users is of course debatable.)

nolok 4y ago
This makes perfect sense product wise, if I'm searching "bakery" on my mobile phone I probably want the ones around me and not the generic location-agnostic google search of it, just like I would if I was searching on map. Matter of fact, this is actually something I do a couple times a month, search then clic the maps tab to see localized results then from them click the website result to find their webpage. As a techie I hate any direct change to the user-agnostic absolute search, but as a user I get it.
- titzer 4y ago
  This is achievable with geolocation based on IP address, which is how it works on, e.g. a desktop web browser.
  - pifm_guy 4y ago
    Less than half the population has decent geolocation by IP. Most people the IP address will only identify the country or even nothing at all. Not much use if you want to search bakery's.
    - froggit 4y ago
      Google is my ISP. My geolocated IP is accurate within a 15 mile radius. It doesn't matter if I have location services turned off or I'm using my desktop, searching "bakeries near me" finds them without issue. I suspect that isn't all just one big coincidence.
      - toast0 4y ago
        Google has what 3 or 4 cities where they operate as an ISP, each with a pretty small footprint. It's no surprise anyone knows where you are. A cable or telephone company has generalized coverage measured in states; some of them organize their network and customer IPs by small geographies, but sometimes all of southern california is in a single pool of IPs.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - donavanm 4y ago
      Coming from the CDN land this isnt true. We didnt put too much effort in to precision, but on the order of 99% of IP addresses get down to metro area. Cheap commerical providers like Maxmind get to the right postcode on the order of 90-95% of the time. Building your own latency and peering maps bridges that gap to 99% or better. Simply based on network topology and latency we should be able to get you down to post code or general area of a city.
  - michaelt 4y ago
    Not in my country - unless your ISP is in the business of selling customer PII to advertisers (coughvirgincough) your IP geolocation will often be a completely different city. Of course, personally if I wanted to search for nearby bakeries on my phone I'd have just opened the google maps app....
  - reacharavindh 4y ago
    funny how that works. I never ever allow location access to anything Google or any website for that matter, and have a muscle memory to hit deny when the browser prompts me. The other day I was searching something and then clicking my bookmarked Google News and suddenly all news were UK specific, and my search results fro "heatpumps" were are UK companies and products.. I was confused until I noticed that my work VPN chose a UK endpoint because the NL one where I am had higher latencies. So, Google heavily tailors the results based on where it thinks you're at. Also, I was delighted to know that inspire all the tracking Google probably does on me, it was easily fooled to think I was in the UK :-)
  - sk0g 4y ago
    "Achievable" is quite charitable from my experience. With the previous ISP I would get located in a city some 2000kms away, sometimes the scam ads would detect my location as null. Maybe it's more effective in places like the US.
    - dopidopHN 4y ago
      No, I’m randomly placed 2 states away. A solid day of driving.
  - rrwo 4y ago
    IP-based location is mostly usable for country. I've rarely found it gets the city right, often it doesn't even get the county right.
- qwery 4y ago
  > if I'm searching "bakery" on my mobile phone I probably want the ones around me Only when you're using a phone? Only if you're not at home? What if you want to find out what a bakery is? (Apologies for rapid fire, I'm not having a go at you, just curious)
  - johannes1234321 4y ago
    There isn't a necessity for an "or" One could show a map preview of local results, which can be expanded as well as generic search results below/aside/...
    - sideshowb 4y ago
      Or a header along the lines of We're showing you local results. To search the internet for "bakery" click here It'd be great if they did that for anything personalized as well while they're at it
  - nolok 4y ago
    > Only when you're using a phone? No, eg when I'm at the office, and we talk about where to go eat and I type restaurant, or I need a new stapler and I type office supply, etc ... > Only if you're not at home? Not really, eg "movie theater" or "flower shop" come to mind for things I would request while at home > What if you want to find out what a bakery is? I would type what is a bakery or define bakery ? I'm a long time tech user, I miss the days of keyword centric search as I felt I could more easily communicate to the search engine what I wanted, but let's be honest those days have passed, most people type sentence and thus the engine interpret sentences
- amluto 4y ago
  Somehow DuckDuckGo has taken this to absurd extremes. Almost any search that doesn’t get many natural hits shows branches of my local government toward the bottom of the first page of results.
  - foreverathome 4y ago
    I have seen this too, also on bing. Not just government though, sometimes it manages to find a local house for sale instead.
    - gpshead 4y ago
      You do realize that duckduckgo is primarily a frontend for bing right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#Search_results https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#Search_results
- startupsfail 4y ago
  What we see is likely the attempt to squeeze even more juice from advertising over which Google virtually have a monopoly. Google is trying to continue its exponential growth while relying on selling advertisements. The market had already been saturated and optimised to crazy levels. Smart thing would be to expand to other sources of revenue, but other projects inside Google fail. As they are failing to compete internally for resources against that crazily optimised source of revenue. It is doubtful that Google can overcome that internally. Perhaps regulators should break up the monopoly in advertisement and search.
- philsnow 4y ago
  > if I'm searching "bakery" on my mobile phone I probably want the ones around me And yet for me, even in google maps on my iphone, when I search for bakery, the first one is almost always one that's ~40 miles away, and the closest one is almost always the second in the list. The rest of the list is definitely not sorted descending by distance. If I've searched for a _particular_ ABC bakery, I get other bakeries commingled in the list even if I know damn well there are other ABC bakeries closer than those.
  - Joe_Cool 4y ago
    The first one is the one that put the most coins into the AdWords slot, I'd guess.
  - blowski 4y ago
    I live in the UK. I recently searched for “pizza” and the top result was in Thailand.
  - oceanplexian 4y ago
    This behavior works exactly the way you would expect in Apple Maps. A search for a bakery returns relevant nearby results. The fact that Google doesn’t see the blatantly obvious problem, or that they try to argue that the users are wrong is a textbook case of why Apple has been doing OK in the market downturn while Google’s business continues to crash. Apple prioritizes their core products and human interface design, Google prioritizes short-term (advertising) revenue, while neglecting their core products in favor of the latest shiny thing.
- hbossy 4y ago
  It gets really annoying when you are trying to search for some specific term in English and google keep guessing that you wanted something that sounds similar in your native tongue.
pimlottc 4y ago
This reminds me of how Google integrated Maps into Calendar as a sidebar a while ago, a move that I absolutely hated. And instead of providing a preference setting to disable it, you have to “hide” the sidebar in a non-intuitive way [0]. I had to search to figure it out. 0: https://www.howtogeek.com/695504/how-to-stop-google-calendar-from-opening-maps-in-the-sidebar/amp/ https://www.howtogeek.com/695504/how-to-stop-google-calendar...
delroth 4y ago
I have links to google.com/maps in my IRC logs dating back from June 2014, so this absolutely tracks. I actually remember google.com/maps being launched at IO in 2014 -- the presentation had a broken link in it for the new version of Maps, and a few of us DoS SRE watching the livestream were able to hack together a config change in a few minutes to fix it without waiting for a urlmap push :)
the-rc 4y ago
I remember the spiffy demo where the thumbnail in search results morphed into the full Maps UI without reloading. But unification had started even earlier than that. Pretty much since Larry became CEO again, he pushed this mantra of "One Google", which brought the infamous Kennedy redesign across all services, as well as more of them available under the google.com host (e.g. maps as discussed here, but also flights and more). One of the ideas behind the latter was that you had to log into your Google account just once, which gradually made it all the way to YouTube(!). I vaguely recall other factors, such as compensating for the increased latency from going HTTPS everywhere, but also discussions about securing and hardening cookies. As far as I know, google.com/maps has been around the entire time, but perhaps now it might be simply the canonical URL in a larger number of cases.
CSSer 4y ago
> It's also possible that someone is trying to increase the percentage of searches that have location information, that doesn't seem terribly far-fetched either, and I can imagine lots of ways people could try to rationalize it as actually benefiting users. Could you speak more to how this kind of thing figuratively plays out? With privacy on most of our (tech-focused) minds, I’m mostly curious how openly an initiative like this is/would be carried out. Would you imagine it as a buried lede or as a very transparent, explicit OKR?
- hansvm 4y ago
  It's easy to rationalize it as benefiting the users, so I'd imagine it's an explicit OKR, maybe even a few levels up in the org. Like, one thing I've wanted on occasion is the ability to search for brick and mortar stores in a given radius who have the thing I want -- either because I want to physically inspect it before committing to a purchase or because for whatever reason the time/cost of shipping wouldn't be practical. That sort of query is hard for Google to serve right now though for reasons including the lack of relevant location information in both the search results and the queries whose user behavior would help drive relevance rankings for those location-specific results. Location information is a bit of a double-edged sword too though, even ignoring privacy concerns. I have to spoof my location and change my search language to get some results because of aggressive filtering happening behind the scenes. If a given query doesn't match Google's current understanding of the user then the right results existing in the corpus often won't imply that the user is able to find them with _any_ search operators.
- googleburner 4y ago
  With the document policy changes over the last 5 years, most decisions are now very opaque. Google TTLs everything except Docs and code history & reviews, at this point: emails, chats, bug reports, ... There's probably a tech debt focused OKR for this work, but some other teams probably has OKRs that indirectly benefit from the data, and they're probably providing staffing support, tied to the tech debt OKR. OKRs are for telling people why you're great, if you're at the bottom of the pyramid, and for giving the rank-and-file some direction, if you're at the top. The top level OKRs are usually very precise and very vague at the same time. So there's probably an OKR in search to improve the quality of the location signals. It can be vague on how. Plus, having more and better data filters into your downstream systems, so even without an OKR for the data you know it will make your models more powerful.
The5thElephant 4y ago
It is absolutely bizarre to me how half-assed Google is with integrating its products. I have a week of events coming up in Google Calendar each with a different event location. Why can't I see a map of all those event locations alongside the calendar with all the same event details listed? Why can't I associate a Google Calendar event with a specific album or set of photos in Google Photos and see those in the map and calendar as well? This is why I'm building https://visible.page https://visible.page with my brother. We have all these capabilities of visualizing data on the web, yet no one has actually put them together in a convenient and consumer friendly way to visualize any type of information together in one place. All these big tech companies seem to just give up on any kind of significant innovation as soon as they reach a certain level of monopoly on their market. Twitter, Spotify, Facebook, Google, etc. I can think of a dozen significant feature experiments they could try that would make my daily life better using those tools yet they don't.
- NameError 4y ago
  An example of poor google integration that bugs me from time to time - when you search for a geographic feature, the info panel shows a great preview map with the outline of the feature. E.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=rhine+river https://www.google.com/search?q=rhine+river If you click into google maps, the outline is gone. Searching "Rhine River" just puts a marker at one point along the river.
  - vxNsr 4y ago
    oh wow, it's actually worse for me: there's no marker at all, just a map of western europe: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Rhine+River/@49.34645,7.879395,7z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x4796eb8bf7df150b:0xbbc945e6761c3c82!8m2!3d49.2313352!4d8.3860749 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Rhine+River/@49.34645,7.87...
  - thwarted 4y ago
    This is not the case for me. I just now searched in mobile Chrome for "Lakeview Chicago" and the mini-map static image has a purple outline around the neighborhood. Clicking on that took me to Google maps with the neighborhood outlined in a red dotted line (which is harder to see, but obscures less of the other features/labels on the map). This was on Android, in the maps app, just now, but I've seen the same thing in a desktop browser.
googlryas 4y ago
Funny, because there is a crummy form of Google maps present into he SERP, and it behaves completely differently from actual Google maps. It constantly annoys me, usually when searching for a business, that something that looks exactly like google maps, in Google, doesn't behave the same as google maps.
- cco 4y ago
  100%! I always ascribe it to some PM somewhere, but when I click on the "search maps" I would _love_ to be taken to the "real Google Maps". The search maps is just a terrible experience, half implemented, doesn't do what I want, even down to little things. My hack is to pick directions, which will get me to Google Maps, then cancel directions, this loses all state, but you're still in the location you want and can usually then just click the business you were looking for.

nolok 4y ago

This makes perfect sense product wise, if I'm searching "bakery" on my mobile phone I probably want the ones around me and not the generic location-agnostic google search of it, just like I would if I was searching on map. Matter of fact, this is actually something I do a couple times a month, search then clic the maps tab to see localized results then from them click the website result to find their webpage. As a techie I hate any direct change to the user-agnostic absolute search, but as a user I get it.

titzer 4y ago
This is achievable with geolocation based on IP address, which is how it works on, e.g. a desktop web browser.
- pifm_guy 4y ago
  Less than half the population has decent geolocation by IP. Most people the IP address will only identify the country or even nothing at all. Not much use if you want to search bakery's.
  - froggit 4y ago
    Google is my ISP. My geolocated IP is accurate within a 15 mile radius. It doesn't matter if I have location services turned off or I'm using my desktop, searching "bakeries near me" finds them without issue. I suspect that isn't all just one big coincidence.
    - toast0 4y ago
      Google has what 3 or 4 cities where they operate as an ISP, each with a pretty small footprint. It's no surprise anyone knows where you are. A cable or telephone company has generalized coverage measured in states; some of them organize their network and customer IPs by small geographies, but sometimes all of southern california is in a single pool of IPs.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - donavanm 4y ago
    Coming from the CDN land this isnt true. We didnt put too much effort in to precision, but on the order of 99% of IP addresses get down to metro area. Cheap commerical providers like Maxmind get to the right postcode on the order of 90-95% of the time. Building your own latency and peering maps bridges that gap to 99% or better. Simply based on network topology and latency we should be able to get you down to post code or general area of a city.
- michaelt 4y ago
  Not in my country - unless your ISP is in the business of selling customer PII to advertisers (coughvirgincough) your IP geolocation will often be a completely different city. Of course, personally if I wanted to search for nearby bakeries on my phone I'd have just opened the google maps app....
- reacharavindh 4y ago
  funny how that works. I never ever allow location access to anything Google or any website for that matter, and have a muscle memory to hit deny when the browser prompts me. The other day I was searching something and then clicking my bookmarked Google News and suddenly all news were UK specific, and my search results fro "heatpumps" were are UK companies and products.. I was confused until I noticed that my work VPN chose a UK endpoint because the NL one where I am had higher latencies. So, Google heavily tailors the results based on where it thinks you're at. Also, I was delighted to know that inspire all the tracking Google probably does on me, it was easily fooled to think I was in the UK :-)
- sk0g 4y ago
  "Achievable" is quite charitable from my experience. With the previous ISP I would get located in a city some 2000kms away, sometimes the scam ads would detect my location as null. Maybe it's more effective in places like the US.
  - dopidopHN 4y ago
    No, I’m randomly placed 2 states away. A solid day of driving.
- rrwo 4y ago
  IP-based location is mostly usable for country. I've rarely found it gets the city right, often it doesn't even get the county right.
qwery 4y ago
> if I'm searching "bakery" on my mobile phone I probably want the ones around me Only when you're using a phone? Only if you're not at home? What if you want to find out what a bakery is? (Apologies for rapid fire, I'm not having a go at you, just curious)
- johannes1234321 4y ago
  There isn't a necessity for an "or" One could show a map preview of local results, which can be expanded as well as generic search results below/aside/...
  - sideshowb 4y ago
    Or a header along the lines of We're showing you local results. To search the internet for "bakery" click here It'd be great if they did that for anything personalized as well while they're at it
- nolok 4y ago
  > Only when you're using a phone? No, eg when I'm at the office, and we talk about where to go eat and I type restaurant, or I need a new stapler and I type office supply, etc ... > Only if you're not at home? Not really, eg "movie theater" or "flower shop" come to mind for things I would request while at home > What if you want to find out what a bakery is? I would type what is a bakery or define bakery ? I'm a long time tech user, I miss the days of keyword centric search as I felt I could more easily communicate to the search engine what I wanted, but let's be honest those days have passed, most people type sentence and thus the engine interpret sentences
amluto 4y ago
Somehow DuckDuckGo has taken this to absurd extremes. Almost any search that doesn’t get many natural hits shows branches of my local government toward the bottom of the first page of results.
- foreverathome 4y ago
  I have seen this too, also on bing. Not just government though, sometimes it manages to find a local house for sale instead.
  - gpshead 4y ago
    You do realize that duckduckgo is primarily a frontend for bing right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#Search_results https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#Search_results
startupsfail 4y ago
What we see is likely the attempt to squeeze even more juice from advertising over which Google virtually have a monopoly. Google is trying to continue its exponential growth while relying on selling advertisements. The market had already been saturated and optimised to crazy levels. Smart thing would be to expand to other sources of revenue, but other projects inside Google fail. As they are failing to compete internally for resources against that crazily optimised source of revenue. It is doubtful that Google can overcome that internally. Perhaps regulators should break up the monopoly in advertisement and search.
philsnow 4y ago
> if I'm searching "bakery" on my mobile phone I probably want the ones around me And yet for me, even in google maps on my iphone, when I search for bakery, the first one is almost always one that's ~40 miles away, and the closest one is almost always the second in the list. The rest of the list is definitely not sorted descending by distance. If I've searched for a _particular_ ABC bakery, I get other bakeries commingled in the list even if I know damn well there are other ABC bakeries closer than those.
- Joe_Cool 4y ago
  The first one is the one that put the most coins into the AdWords slot, I'd guess.
- blowski 4y ago
  I live in the UK. I recently searched for “pizza” and the top result was in Thailand.
- oceanplexian 4y ago
  This behavior works exactly the way you would expect in Apple Maps. A search for a bakery returns relevant nearby results. The fact that Google doesn’t see the blatantly obvious problem, or that they try to argue that the users are wrong is a textbook case of why Apple has been doing OK in the market downturn while Google’s business continues to crash. Apple prioritizes their core products and human interface design, Google prioritizes short-term (advertising) revenue, while neglecting their core products in favor of the latest shiny thing.
hbossy 4y ago
It gets really annoying when you are trying to search for some specific term in English and google keep guessing that you wanted something that sounds similar in your native tongue.

pimlottc 4y ago

This reminds me of how Google integrated Maps into Calendar as a sidebar a while ago, a move that I absolutely hated. And instead of providing a preference setting to disable it, you have to “hide” the sidebar in a non-intuitive way [0]. I had to search to figure it out. 0: https://www.howtogeek.com/695504/how-to-stop-google-calendar-from-opening-maps-in-the-sidebar/amp/ https://www.howtogeek.com/695504/how-to-stop-google-calendar...

delroth 4y ago

I have links to google.com/maps in my IRC logs dating back from June 2014, so this absolutely tracks. I actually remember google.com/maps being launched at IO in 2014 -- the presentation had a broken link in it for the new version of Maps, and a few of us DoS SRE watching the livestream were able to hack together a config change in a few minutes to fix it without waiting for a urlmap push :)

the-rc 4y ago

I remember the spiffy demo where the thumbnail in search results morphed into the full Maps UI without reloading. But unification had started even earlier than that. Pretty much since Larry became CEO again, he pushed this mantra of "One Google", which brought the infamous Kennedy redesign across all services, as well as more of them available under the google.com host (e.g. maps as discussed here, but also flights and more). One of the ideas behind the latter was that you had to log into your Google account just once, which gradually made it all the way to YouTube(!). I vaguely recall other factors, such as compensating for the increased latency from going HTTPS everywhere, but also discussions about securing and hardening cookies. As far as I know, google.com/maps has been around the entire time, but perhaps now it might be simply the canonical URL in a larger number of cases.

CSSer 4y ago

> It's also possible that someone is trying to increase the percentage of searches that have location information, that doesn't seem terribly far-fetched either, and I can imagine lots of ways people could try to rationalize it as actually benefiting users. Could you speak more to how this kind of thing figuratively plays out? With privacy on most of our (tech-focused) minds, I’m mostly curious how openly an initiative like this is/would be carried out. Would you imagine it as a buried lede or as a very transparent, explicit OKR?

hansvm 4y ago
It's easy to rationalize it as benefiting the users, so I'd imagine it's an explicit OKR, maybe even a few levels up in the org. Like, one thing I've wanted on occasion is the ability to search for brick and mortar stores in a given radius who have the thing I want -- either because I want to physically inspect it before committing to a purchase or because for whatever reason the time/cost of shipping wouldn't be practical. That sort of query is hard for Google to serve right now though for reasons including the lack of relevant location information in both the search results and the queries whose user behavior would help drive relevance rankings for those location-specific results. Location information is a bit of a double-edged sword too though, even ignoring privacy concerns. I have to spoof my location and change my search language to get some results because of aggressive filtering happening behind the scenes. If a given query doesn't match Google's current understanding of the user then the right results existing in the corpus often won't imply that the user is able to find them with _any_ search operators.
googleburner 4y ago
With the document policy changes over the last 5 years, most decisions are now very opaque. Google TTLs everything except Docs and code history & reviews, at this point: emails, chats, bug reports, ... There's probably a tech debt focused OKR for this work, but some other teams probably has OKRs that indirectly benefit from the data, and they're probably providing staffing support, tied to the tech debt OKR. OKRs are for telling people why you're great, if you're at the bottom of the pyramid, and for giving the rank-and-file some direction, if you're at the top. The top level OKRs are usually very precise and very vague at the same time. So there's probably an OKR in search to improve the quality of the location signals. It can be vague on how. Plus, having more and better data filters into your downstream systems, so even without an OKR for the data you know it will make your models more powerful.

The5thElephant 4y ago

It is absolutely bizarre to me how half-assed Google is with integrating its products. I have a week of events coming up in Google Calendar each with a different event location. Why can't I see a map of all those event locations alongside the calendar with all the same event details listed? Why can't I associate a Google Calendar event with a specific album or set of photos in Google Photos and see those in the map and calendar as well? This is why I'm building https://visible.page https://visible.page with my brother. We have all these capabilities of visualizing data on the web, yet no one has actually put them together in a convenient and consumer friendly way to visualize any type of information together in one place. All these big tech companies seem to just give up on any kind of significant innovation as soon as they reach a certain level of monopoly on their market. Twitter, Spotify, Facebook, Google, etc. I can think of a dozen significant feature experiments they could try that would make my daily life better using those tools yet they don't.

NameError 4y ago
An example of poor google integration that bugs me from time to time - when you search for a geographic feature, the info panel shows a great preview map with the outline of the feature. E.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=rhine+river https://www.google.com/search?q=rhine+river If you click into google maps, the outline is gone. Searching "Rhine River" just puts a marker at one point along the river.
- vxNsr 4y ago
  oh wow, it's actually worse for me: there's no marker at all, just a map of western europe: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Rhine+River/@49.34645,7.879395,7z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x4796eb8bf7df150b:0xbbc945e6761c3c82!8m2!3d49.2313352!4d8.3860749 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Rhine+River/@49.34645,7.87...
- thwarted 4y ago
  This is not the case for me. I just now searched in mobile Chrome for "Lakeview Chicago" and the mini-map static image has a purple outline around the neighborhood. Clicking on that took me to Google maps with the neighborhood outlined in a red dotted line (which is harder to see, but obscures less of the other features/labels on the map). This was on Android, in the maps app, just now, but I've seen the same thing in a desktop browser.

googlryas 4y ago

Funny, because there is a crummy form of Google maps present into he SERP, and it behaves completely differently from actual Google maps. It constantly annoys me, usually when searching for a business, that something that looks exactly like google maps, in Google, doesn't behave the same as google maps.

cco 4y ago
100%! I always ascribe it to some PM somewhere, but when I click on the "search maps" I would _love_ to be taken to the "real Google Maps". The search maps is just a terrible experience, half implemented, doesn't do what I want, even down to little things. My hack is to pick directions, which will get me to Google Maps, then cancel directions, this loses all state, but you're still in the location you want and can usually then just click the business you were looking for.