6 ms·
You'd say that Google Maps hasn't improved much in the last 20 years?
by JacobAsmuth 4mo ago
You'd say that Google Maps hasn't improved much in the last 20 years?
- jazzyjackson 4mo agoIt’s doing a great job making sure I know where Burger King is when zooming into a city
- rickypp 4mo agoI started to notice "Turn left at the light, after the Chipotle™" last year... ads in my turn by turn navigation is next level innovation
- johannes1234321 4mo agoI believe that the initial idea there was to refer to notable landmarks and these company signs are readable from a distance. But yes, they could serve well as ad space.
- decimalenough 4mo agoThis also works much better in the vast slabs of the world where roads don't have names, or if they do, they're signposted badly if at all. (India, Japan, most of Africa, etc.)
- bobro 4mo agoSo you think they weren’t getting paid for this? You think they just freely mention corporate food companies purely for users benefit?
- tasty_freeze 4mo agoNo kidding. When I zoom in on a few square miles around my house and ask to see restaurants, it shows only a few of them even though there is plenty of space -- it isn't like it has to prune some to make it readable. I zoom in and some appear that weren't there before ... why? There was room to display it before I zoomed in. Gaaah!
- bell-cot 4mo agoI'd assume it's pruning to make only the best-paying (to Google) restaurants visible.
- morganf 4mo agoOh wow I always complain about this, I didn't realize other people were also so frustrated by this. Tons and tons of cafes by my house, but I zoom in with about a six block radius, where there are at least 20 cafes or cafe-restaurants there, and literally 1 or 2 come up.
- gwking 4mo agoThe grocer on my block is so tiny that I hit the max zoom before it shows up. If you pan around fiddle I can occasionally get it to appear, but it effectively does not exist according to google maps.
- andreareina 4mo agoNot to mention that zooming in will make some listings disappear
- telchior 4mo agoYeah I utterly despise using Google Maps now because of this. In my neighborhood, there are restaurants that will only appear at a very specific zoom level. Zoom in OR out and they'll disappear. I see things when I'm out and about all the time that just never appear on Google Maps -- cafes for instance. You can search cafe, coffee, restaurant, etc and they won't appear. Search the exact name and it comes up with 300 reviews. Sometimes, they'll come up in general search in week 1, disappear in week 2, and reappear in week 3. Google is not good at consumer software and not a responsible company in many ways; Maps really deserves to be replaced with something, but unfortunately there's no competitor to speak of. Apple Maps is nice but listings don't come up because they're literally not in the database.
- pjc50 4mo agoThis is to force you to use search rather than your eyes.
- nightshift1 4mo agoInteresting submission on that topic : How Google Maps allocates survival across London's restaurants https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46203343 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46203343
- walt_grata 4mo agoId say it improved until about 2016, since then the additions have generally made the software worse. More overlays and popups More needlessly verbose navigation instructions Less predictable routes. Thats just the start
- forgetfreeman 4mo ago"needlessly verbose navigation instructions" You ever try to navigate the highway systems in either DC or Houston with verbal instructions enabled? It sounds like someone is having a stroke.
- walt_grata 4mo agoYep to the point where its easier without the gps.
- intexpress 4mo agoApple Maps has been better than Google Maps for at least 10 years and nowadays the way that Google Maps improves is often just by copying Apple Maps
- californical 4mo agoI’ve agreed for a long time… Unfortunately though, Apple Maps just added Ads, so expect them to start having the same issues as Google Maps does (like showing big ads for every location whenever you’re moving around at the map). After Apple Maps being one of my favorite reasons for having an iPhone for the last 7ish years, I’m back to OpenStreetMaps mostly, or still Google to look up business hours. Sad… but having downloaded maps will probably be a good thing long-term
- dlev_pika 4mo agoGoogle: HOW ABOUT SOME AI ON IT?!? You know you want it. Lmao
- boelboel 4mo agoIt's been up and down for about 8-12 years. Problems get fixed and new ones get added without a particular direction, at least that's what it feels like as a regular user. Some come back years after they were first fixed.
- ElectricalTears 4mo agoMaps thinks it's fine to do a u-turn on the Sydney harbour bridge.
- adithyassekhar 4mo agoIs this like a platform 9 3/4 thing?
- saltcured 4mo agoI wonder if it ever does that for the SF Bay Bridge. "Perform Immelmann turn in 200 feet"
- XorNot 4mo agoMaps straight up can't navigate sanely in Australia I've found. I've switched to OsmAnd for driving because it'll give a sensible main road following route. Google Maps reliably sends me down residential roads and adds a whole bunch of turns and then winds up with idiot ideas like "turn right into this two way 4 lane road we tried to slightly avoid".
- daedrdev 4mo agoGoogle has said to turn right at an intersection where you are turning left for years because it doesn't know about a T shaped intersection that tens of thousands use a day.
- blt 4mo agoNot relative to its available resources. For example, there's still no option to penalize intersections. I'm still getting absurd side-street routes and unprotected lefts/crossings to save 1 minute on a 20-minute trip.
- driverdan 4mo agoMaps peaked after Google acquired Waze in 2013 and integrated the data. Since then they've added worthless annoying social features and more advertising.
- joquarky 4mo agoI feel like every other time I open maps I get some "look at what's new" pop-up, which derails my thought process and muscle memory.
- asdff 4mo agoIt is still drawing bike lane networks in cemeteries and random bits of grass and pavement. So no. The way I see it is is actually worse than it was in 2006. When I opened it today it asked me if I would like to see Dua Lipa's recommended restaurants.
- 21asdffdsa12 4mo agoSir, this is Dua Lipas favorites Wendys - do not cause a promotion commotion, not again Sir!
- da_chicken 4mo agoMy best friend bought a house. She noticed within the first month that the name of the road she lived on was misspelled in Google Maps. Specifically, it's a slightly unusual spelling of the road name. Like "Chickorie" vs "Chickory". It's particularly annoying because there's a road the next town over with the traditional spelling. It doesn't even share address numbers, but Google Maps still frequently misdirects people. It's correct everywhere else. The road sign, the municipal tax parcel GIS, the post office, Apple Maps, MapQuest, OpenStreetMaps. All of them had the correct name, except Google Maps. So she reported it through Google Maps. And reported it. And reported it. Every few months she reports it again. She's asked friends to report it as well. It's still wrong. She bought her house in 2015.
- eitally 4mo agoMy anecdote is worth just as much as yours. I moved cross-country in early 2016 (for work at Google) and noticed when we closed on our house that the next street over was mis-pronounced by Google Maps. I reported it and it was fixed within a week.
- awinter-py 4mo agoodds of a given street being labeled on gmaps for android still feels like 50/50 unless you get the zoom exactly right
- 3eb7988a1663 4mo agoThis is my biggest annoyance. Such a crap shoot if I can actually see the street names.
- Animats 4mo agoGoogle bought Google Earth from Keyhole. I had a Keyhole account long before Google was in the business, and it worked about like Google Earth does now.
- defrost 4mo agoKeyhole dates back to 2001 and draws on several precursors, eg: ERMapper (Perth, Western Australia) which offered similar functionality in the 1990s - in addition to computational process pipelines for, say, warping and geomosaicing inputs, multi spectral filtering (adding and subtracting weighted bands to sharpen certain features, etc). ER Mapper was the first software I dog fooded that transferred images without the dial up scan line by scan line top down process that existed to that point in time. The same discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and variation techniques occurred to several entities at much the same time .. some US patent pettiness killed a lot of development for a couple of years from 1999 forward: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LizardTech,_Inc._v._Earth_Resource_Mapping,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LizardTech,_Inc._v._Earth_Reso....
- stackghost 4mo agoI'd say it's much worse than it used to be.
- ipaddr 4mo agoIt does less than before and it blocks more things and has more spam. Now you have to pay for map embedding on a website. Let's go back 20 years
- allthetime 4mo agoGo to a park near your house with walking paths in it. Compare Google Maps with OSM. That said; of course Google Maps has improved and is likely better than alternatives in lots of ways, but it’s actually not great or anywhere near the detail and granularity of OSM when it comes to the actual map part.
- prasadjoglekar 4mo agoIt's a mixed bag at best. The product has had numerous features pushed, but in the US, the navigation feature is objectively worse than 5+ years ago. Too much spoonfeeding of directions to ensure the app is kept on. But the app won't actually tell you the freeway number and direction - which the driver can see on the dozen signs on the road. Or, the incessant "police activity" shit from Waze. That creates all kinds of rear ending hazards as morons try to slow down.
- Noumenon72 4mo agoI didn't realize till you said this how it's their fault I have to turn on my screen at every important turn to tell which road they mean, because they won't just say "turn onto the interchange, EXIT 7A".
- gmerc 4mo agoIt’s regressed a lot.
- forgetfreeman 4mo agoI'd say it's devolved aggressively at least on mobile. Between the firehose of modal bullshit I didn't ask for, sub-optimal pathfinding, and annoying prompts from waze legacy features there's a ton of unwanted friction added to the process.
- throwaway27448 4mo agoIt's rather baffling how little they've improved it in certainly the last 15 years. Waze is certainly the better consumer product, even if it relies on similar (the same?) backend software. Apple Maps has caught up and passed it in terms of usable software, even if the actual map quality is worse in some places. For instance: there's no way to get it to stop killing directions on reaching the destination. Apple Maps puts you into "parking" mode where you can still see the route to the destination—extremely useful for cities where you might have to drive around a bit to find a space.
- meroes 4mo agoMy house and street and surrounding streets still aren’t on Google Maps after a month post closing (new development). It’s on Apple Maps and Uber; Amazon and FedEx deliver. Google Maps feels like I’m constantly in an A B test for how bad it can be and I’m always getting the bad side. It repeatedly doesn’t update in CarPlay, showing the same miles to destination as I progress. It doesn’t label streets well either. I try to manually find routes in SF and I have to switch to Apple Maps because not enough streets are labeled no matter how much or little I zoom.
- Fordec 4mo agoI used to be able to view maps in 3D. Not anything fancy, just a tilt shift. This year I noticed the feature appears to be gone. Also, if I want to see my home city with an up to date overhead view from this side of 2023 to see what has been built lately, I have to go look up Sentinel imagery. I would claim it has indeed become worse.
- bigfatkitten 4mo agoOver the last 8-10 years or so, I’d say it has gotten considerably worse.
- almarcher 4mo ago[dead]
- Citizen_Lame 4mo agoI would say Google Maps regressed, over bloated, showing ads or at least unrelated results. Mysterious hang-ups, where app refuses to work every once in a while.