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If Google Maps would like to hire me so the km/miles switch can remember I only ever want to see distances in km, my contact details are in my HN profile. I mu
by stevesimmons 1y ago
If Google Maps would like to hire me so the km/miles switch can remember I only ever want to see distances in km, my contact details are in my HN profile.
I must have changed that back from miles once a fortnight since Google Maps launched 20 years ago. That's 500 times. Totally ridiculous for a company who core goal is profiling their users...
- jldugger 1y ago> That's 500 times. Totally ridiculous for a company who core goal is profiling their users Seven interviews later and 1 PR later: Fails in A/B due to declining user engagement
- sreekotay 1y agoNailed it in one. Or (similarly) never makes the priority/cut-off list because "what metric does it move?"
- BuyMyBitcoins 1y agoWell, the setting is for kilometers, so the metric is metric.
- mhss 1y agoIt's funny cuz is true. Except it'd probably be one long design doc with 10 rounds of review, 15 CLs (PRs) and months of rollouts later ... fails A/B due to declining user engagement.
- kirubakaran 1y agoWhen I was traveling in Mexico, it drove me nuts that even though I was signed in, Google Flights switched my currency from dollars to pesos every single time I opened a new tab! I think they really don't care.
- galangalalgol 1y agoI think they rely on ip for a lot of stuff they shouldn't. Getting a local esim switches me to km until I switch back to my old one. Have no idea about Australia. Edit: after typing this realized this isn't ip, its provider. That maybe does make sense to cue off of.
- withinboredom 1y agoYou know what’s funny. The browser sends an Accept-Language header that they completely ignore.
- CamelCaseName 1y agoThis is super frustrating when you travel a lot. You can change it back to your preferred currency, but it doesn't really stick.
- bapak 1y agoYou know what's even more annoying? Google Maps app on the iPhone uses the local currency for hotels and it doesn't let you change it at all. Oh, "local" as defined by your IP too, so enjoy your VPNs. The only solution is using the website instead, it has a currency dropdown.
- EspadaV9 1y agoWait, there's a setting for this? I've lived in Australia for over 16 years now but everything is still in miles instead of Kms and I have never been able to find a setting to change it (although it sounds like even if I did find itz it would be mostly useless).
- worthless-trash 1y agoIve lived in Australia for 45 years, everything is in km.. never had to touch it for miles. However i did go to the US and it showed units in miles on my phone which made no sense. In Gmaps, Tap your profile picture, then select "Settings" and "Distance units". Choose between "Automatic", "Kilometers", or "Miles". Pick the units you want.
- stevesimmons 1y agoThat's in the mobile app. In the web browser, there's no such setting. Or at least, none that I can find.
- worthless-trash 1y agoBottom right, left click on the scale.. |----------| It "seems" persistent for me.
- EspadaV9 1y agoI got the app wrong, it was Uber. I have my phone set to English (UK) and change the measurement system to metric. Uber doesn't respect that though, so it keeps using miles.
- Symbiote 1y agoIt could be using your phone/browser language settings; try English (Australia) rather than English (United States).
- EspadaV9 1y agoAh, thank you, this was it. I had the language set to English (UK), but changed the distance setting to KM. I got the app wrong, it was Uber, and Uber doesn't respect the override, so it always uses miles. Changing it to English (Australia) and Uber switches KM.
- hsbauauvhabzb 1y agoWhile you’re there can you add a ‘how much I value my time’ input field for tolls? Google suggests I spend $20 through 3 tolls to save a single minute. Constantly. Edit: and while you’re there, move the ‘speed camera ahead, is it still there?’ Dialog. IT COVERS THE DAMN SPEED LIMIT ICON.
- Twirrim 1y agoAnd also while you're there, if no car ever in the history of your app goes down the road at the speed limit ever it's a good indication you'll never be able to ever do it at that speed. e.g. small narrow single lane country roads which are only theoretically 60mph roads.
- xp84 1y agoImagine the data they must have on the speeds people actually drive on every mile of every road, they’d easily be able to warn you not that you’re “over the speed limit” as in driving 70 on the freeway, but more usefully, if you’re in the top X percentile of speeds usually or even currently driven, which actually is a decent measure of unsafe was and would also be a great predictor of likelihood to get a ticket.
- yonatan8070 1y agoI saw this video recently where the author set up a camera to record sections of highways and measure the speeds of drivers, and make cool graphs out of it. https://youtu.be/TYTaNsnBjcw https://youtu.be/TYTaNsnBjcw
- sebastiennight 1y agoWith the data you're mentioning, it's probably just as easy to build an accident predictor model as well.
- hsbauauvhabzb 1y agoOr sell the data to third parties instead because that wouldn’t bring profit.
- kshri24 1y agoAnother issue with Google Maps is it not showing Plus Codes for some locations that highlight the entire area. If you however place a pin on that location, it provides a Plus Code. Pretty stupid IMHO. Also it is really, really hard to search for "Nearby" places. Have to do it through "Directions". Really bad UX.
- kevindamm 1y agoYou can put "... near <location>" at the end of your query to get nearby places. "... near me" also works
- ximeng 1y agoHow about allowing you to use Google maps while navigating without two phones or opening Apple Maps as well?
- yonatan8070 1y agoWhat do you mean?
- ximeng 1y agoIf you are following a route in Google maps in Apple CarPlay you can’t search in the map without cancelling the navigation. So you need to use another phone or another maps app.
- yonatan8070 1y agoOhhh Yeah it makes sense I haven't encountered that since I don't have CarPlay
- daemin 1y agoIt would be a very useful feature as on road trips you can have a passenger setup the navigation rather than the driver and then also look around and examine places along the route.
- rufus_foreman 1y agoIf you can get anyone at Google to care about that you'll be miles ahead of anyone else. Anyway, how many metric hours are in a fortnight?
- sitzkrieg 1y agothinking google would ever care about improving ux ever again is hilarious
- xp84 1y agoIt’s true, except expand that to all big tech companies. The only time UX is changed it’s either to make ads more effective or to “streamline” things by shoving more and more of the functionality into an endless nested chain of ••• and More menus.
- 392 1y agoAlso accepting gmaps work, if only it could preemptively cache the return trip for any trip longer than an hour, so that I'm not stuck with no service trying to remember how I got there.
- jraph 1y agoSuggestion to use an offline app that will save you from such surprises. https://www.comaps.app/ https://www.comaps.app/
- czbd 1y agoI clicked the link with nothing better to do, and woa, that's a really good maps app. Like, "I haven't seen something like this before" levels of good. Reorients itself with my phone, accurately - and in real time, not after I'd already walked ten steps in that direction. With other maps, I thought that maybe my phone's compass is broken. The default but optional 3D top-down view is the most comprehensible-looking map I've seen in a long time. It barely uses disk space, and going by my short experience with it, it really is very light on the battery. Exceptional, this is what I'm using from now on. Just hope the iOS 15 support is maintained, that's a killer app to keep perfectly good devices productive even after they're restricted from everything else :)
- jraph 1y agoHappy to have made you discover something cool :-) > 3D top-down view is the most comprehensible-looking map I've seen in a long time The 3D top-down view with building heights is possible thanks to OSM providing this data, thanks to people improving the map with apps like Street Complete and Every Door. Make sure to check them out :-) There's with this 3D view though: it sometimes hides streets. I usually end up disabling it at some point.
- linhns 1y agoWoah. What a gem you have provided us here.
- moribunda 1y ago
- fooker 1y agoGoogle Maps core functionality is sort of in maintenance mode, and things have been slowly bit rotting over the last 3-4 years. Unless you want to launch some AI feature (used to be chat app for ten years and then Google got bamboozled by ChatGPT…) you’ll not find allies and your career will not progress.
- jasonkester 1y agoWhile you’re at it, can you find and punch the guy who thinks it’s a good idea to zoom the map to “actual size, 1cm = 1cm” mode for your entire trip? I assume he’s also the one that taught it to spitefully let you drive off the side of the screen if you ever zoom out manually so that you can see more road on the phone than you can in real life. (With a “recenter” button that will zoom you all the way back in). Satnavs had this all figured out in 2005.
- Symbiote 1y agoAlso punch the guy that allows Google Maps navigation to flip back to a route that's been specifically rejected. Earlier this week Google prompted me with "your route may be affected by tsunami warning". Indeed, so I chose the longer, inland route rather than the coast roads. 15 minutes later I realise it's rerouted me "due to traffic conditions" -- obviously the coast road isn't as busy! (This has happened many times before, but this was the first time I had a safety reason not to take the faster route.)
- olalonde 1y agoAlso the currency in Google Flights... It always defaults based on your IP geolocation.
- linhns 1y agoDefaulting to local currency is good since people usually book in local currency, putting switch button at the end is really bad though.
- olalonde 1y agoPeople tend to book using the currency they're familiar with, not necessarily the local one, so remembering their preferred currency makes sense. As someone who travels a lot but likes to see flight prices in USD, this is really annoying.
- bombela 1y agoWhen I worked at Google; 10y ago!; I used the internal googler feedback form to open an issue for this bug. No replies. Every year I fill up the feedback form on Google map to complain about this bug. Some years, I even did it twice. For good measure. This bug is shameful at this point.
- mgw 1y agoAnother Google Maps request: Places I‘ve labelled used to at least sometimes (if inconsistently) show up in search. Now they never shop up, even when I type the exact name of the label.
- undebuggable 1y ago> I must have changed that back from miles once a fortnight since Google Maps launched 20 years ago. That's 500 times. Totally ridiculous for a company who core goal is profiling their users... Similar with "privacy popups" everywhere. Similar with every bank with "remember this device" feature. I add exactly the same device on every login, until it fills entirely the limit of allowed devices.
- Filligree 1y agoI could take a quick look, though I’m not so sure I’d even find the code. Your comment does not constitute a bug report, however. At a minimum: - Are you logged in or out? - What browser? - What country is your profile set to? - What country are you sending requests from?
- RedNifre 1y agoWhile you're at it, could you also change YouTube so that captions being on/off is a per-language thing and not a "The user turned off subtitles for language X, therefore it's the only they speak, therefore let's turn on subtitles for all other languages." thing? It's really annoying that whenever I watch a video that has a language different from the previous video I watched, the first thing I have to do is to turn off the captions.
- opan 1y agoThis isn't a proper solution, but if you watch with yt-dlp+mpv, you can configure default audio and sub languages in mpv (globally) and they will also work for YT videos in addition to your movies and such. Plus if you do toggle them on/off for one session it won't mess up your mpv config.
- marzipanWhale 1y agoThis, but with 24 hour clock.
- withinboredom 1y agoAnd language. I’m so tired of seeing the map in Portuguese because I went to Portugal 5 years ago.
- undebuggable 1y agoThe same here. Oftentimes Google Maps switches to most exotic language "because of reasons". Then I set it manually to my preferred language, for decades now, and it's been the same language all the time. Are they trying to say with poker face "we don't track you"? I don't think my home-grown privacy habits are that good, somehow they manage to show me an ad of "blue sneakers" someone in the household mentioned this morning.