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In reality Google Maps is farther ahead of its competitors than most people realize. Google Maps now provides wholly personalized points of interest and attent

by ak217 9y ago

In reality Google Maps is farther ahead of its competitors than most people realize. Google Maps now provides wholly personalized points of interest and attention affordances in its UI. It's also well on its way to 3D scanning and annotating POIs in every structure in the world, including very large pedestrian-only interiors. It also has realtime transit and traffic feeds, and more pedestrian trails and venue detail than anyone else. All of these are areas where its competition is not just behind, but falling further behind. But the personalization combined with superior POI search really illustrates how Google's competitors don't even have the platform to properly conceptualize the type of product Google is building, much less build it.

AlphaSite 9y ago
I don’t know if I’d say most of these things matter enough at the end of the day, just to cherry pick, Apple has 3D, interiors, traffic, transit and pedestrians. Not everywhere, but it’s a problem which time and money can fix. Both of which apple has in abundance. Also anecdotally I’m not sure if I can agree that Google’s POIs are vastly better, mostly just different but of a similar low quality (which is to say neither pleases me).
- tschwimmer 9y ago
  I can't speak to your usecase and preferences, but a cartographer points out how much richer Google Maps are here: https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat
gambiting 9y ago
It still feels years behind any dedicated maps though(like TomTom), at least in those countries that I've tried it(UK, Spain, Poland, Germany). It's just consistently wrong about which roads are connected with each other, it doesn't know that certain roads are one-way or that you can't make a left/right turn out of a certain street. I've reported dozens of mistakes and they just don't get fixed. Every single morning on my way to work it tries to route me left on a no-left-turn intersection - I've literally filed a map correction report for this 3 or 4 times, still nothing. TomTom just don't have this issue, I've been using it for 5 years now and it's never done anything like that. Also TomTom Traffic is vastly better than Google Traffic, consistently beating it for time and route prediction(I've been driving with Android Auto and TomTom 5000 set up side by side for a while, and if TomTom suggests a detour it's usually a good one - take the one google suggests and you're getting stuck on some small street that google thinks you can drive through but you actually can't).
sjwright 9y ago
You might be right, but most of those reasons don’t actually matter. To be frank, the only things I miss when not using Google maps is their highlighting of high activity areas. Both maps have similarly good cartography where it matters. In most countries, both maps are similarly accurate.

by ak217 9y ago

AlphaSite 9y ago

I don’t know if I’d say most of these things matter enough at the end of the day, just to cherry pick, Apple has 3D, interiors, traffic, transit and pedestrians. Not everywhere, but it’s a problem which time and money can fix. Both of which apple has in abundance. Also anecdotally I’m not sure if I can agree that Google’s POIs are vastly better, mostly just different but of a similar low quality (which is to say neither pleases me).

tschwimmer 9y ago
I can't speak to your usecase and preferences, but a cartographer points out how much richer Google Maps are here: https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat

gambiting 9y ago

It still feels years behind any dedicated maps though(like TomTom), at least in those countries that I've tried it(UK, Spain, Poland, Germany). It's just consistently wrong about which roads are connected with each other, it doesn't know that certain roads are one-way or that you can't make a left/right turn out of a certain street. I've reported dozens of mistakes and they just don't get fixed. Every single morning on my way to work it tries to route me left on a no-left-turn intersection - I've literally filed a map correction report for this 3 or 4 times, still nothing. TomTom just don't have this issue, I've been using it for 5 years now and it's never done anything like that. Also TomTom Traffic is vastly better than Google Traffic, consistently beating it for time and route prediction(I've been driving with Android Auto and TomTom 5000 set up side by side for a while, and if TomTom suggests a detour it's usually a good one - take the one google suggests and you're getting stuck on some small street that google thinks you can drive through but you actually can't).

sjwright 9y ago

You might be right, but most of those reasons don’t actually matter. To be frank, the only things I miss when not using Google maps is their highlighting of high activity areas. Both maps have similarly good cartography where it matters. In most countries, both maps are similarly accurate.