9 ms·

Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

229 points by rorhug 12y ago

jxf 12y ago
I have to say that I've had completely the opposite experience from the author. GMaps almost always find what I'm looking for in a timely fashion, I find the offline maps useful when I'm traveling to a different city, and so on. One of my favorite use cases is having GMaps give me directions by public transit, especially if there's a metro, which is nice if you're in a new city and want to save a few bucks on taxis or Uber. That said, they've definitely made a few changes I haven't been a fan of. For example, offline maps must now be refreshed once every 30 days, and if you're offline when the timer runs out you won't be able to see the map. (Previously there was no time limit.)
- etfb 12y ago
  There's a new version of it now, which is an option when you go to maps.google.com. I tried it and gave up because it doesn't seem to work on Tasmanian ADSL - sits and spins, never loads, presumably because the new state government got into the state's internet infrastructure and shot one of the hamsters.
- goostavos 12y ago
  I agree. On the whole, maps is still awesome -- and with the google now functionality? Holy crap, I feel like Iron Man when I'm driving around and command my phone to navigate me to the closest Taco Bell. That said, I do absolutely, 100% think the everything-is-now-done-through-the-search-box approach is remarkably horrible and unintuitive. I honestly thought that you couldn't customize directions any more. Hell, there were so many little features -- simple things like Search Nearby -- that I thought went away entirely. The UX is that terrible. Want to customize the route your currently on? That's easy! Ok, so just close what your currently doing -- hey! Why are you looking in the settings? Why would settings be in Settings? Listen to what I'm saying! So, close out of the -- No! It's not in the Hamburger button. Settings aren't in the menu. Why would settings be in a menu? Pay attention! Exit navigation. Back out of the Directions screen, back out of the location screen. Now, see the single line search bar? Click on that -- but don't search for anything, there's a small button in the drop down. Click that! Congratulations! You've found the settings! I just want to know how that UX meeting went. Settings!? In a menu!? No, no, no. Makes no sense from a user experience perspective.
- bwanab 12y ago
  Agreed. Maybe some parts of the world aren't so well mapped as my part (Greater Boston area), but I'd think the SF Bay area would be one of the better ones. For kicks I just tried a number of map searches and every one came back with accurate results. As they say, YMMV, but I don't think Google is trying to forsake us.
morganvachon 12y ago
I stopped reading when the screenshot showed AR (Arkansas) and he said it was Arizona (AZ). If you are that geographically challenged, even Google Maps can't save you. EDIT: I forgot that a sense of humor is not an option here. Geez.
- dang 12y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289
  - morganvachon 12y ago
    My point stands that if the guy is so incompetent that he can't figure out which state he's looking at, he shouldn't be writing an article critical of a mapping system in the first place. I'm more of a hardware hacker than a programmer, therefore I don't go around writing articles criticizing the latest version control system; I'd end up making a fool of myself as I wouldn't have a clue what I was talking about. And just to be clear, I actually agree with him that the new Google Maps seems less useful than the old version.
zatkin 12y ago
I am grateful that we are able to revert back to the old Google Maps for now. I hope that they keep this regression available to their users for a while.
- thotpoizn 12y ago
  I am a little annoyed that I have to keep going through clickrobatics every time I change back to old Google Maps, and explain why each time. I've already explained a dozen times, quit pestering me. Also, get off my damned lawn.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    I thought perhaps my way of loading Google Maps would still yield the old style - using '!m address' in DuckDuckGo - but no, sadly, its now the new dumbed-down page.
  - graeme 12y ago
    You can get around this by bookmarking a location. I bookmarked my address in the old maps, and use that as my entry point to google maps. It doesn't ask me to switch to new.
deleted 12y ago
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- craigching 12y ago
  > The need to show some forest when you live on the other side of the world is minimalistic. Really? I love reading about some exotic place somewhere and looking it up on google maps. How hard is it, really, to look for sambisa forest near you and when you don't find it, look globally?
joel_perl_prog 12y ago
Is this where we get to complain about how horrible Google Maps suddenly is? Because wow. I can speak about this. It's terrible. First and foremost, and they have their "reasons" of course, but my Samsung Rant (yeah just a feature phone) always had great maps. Just a simple Java app, built on the maps API. Well that doesn't work anymore. Like, nothing. Google basically says "Get an Android phone, sucker." F U Google. Is what I think of that. Secondly, the desktop (and basically the tablet experience too is the same) has gotten terrible. It takes a really long time before my mouse event matters. By this time, the screen, since it's still resolving and moving things around the canvas or whatever the hell it's doing, well by the time my mouse event registers, the object I wanted has moved away. I'm now doing something else! Directions. Just so retarded. The accordion shit on the left. Just show me the effing directions, like you used to. I don't want to tab around a widget in the upper left. Plus you have toggle it open in the first place, and it's not very responsive, either. Also, just simple double-clicking to zoom. Extremely less useful than it used to be: just this one simple thing. I could go on. How awful. What happened?
- solutionyogi 12y ago
  Completely agree. On my workstation (6 cores + 32 GB RAM), Google Maps is unbearably slow using the Chrome browser. I can not even imagine the performance on an average computer. My second biggest pet peeve: In old Maps, clicking on the marker will bring out a popup providing you various choices (http://imgur.com/qeLhJSd http://imgur.com/qeLhJSd). In new Maps, clicking on the marker centers it on the screen. What the F? What's the value add in bringing the marker to center when I click it? Just like GMail, Maps has gone from being great software to mediocre. I don't know who is making these horrible design choices at Googleplex.
  - deleted 12y ago
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  - pgrote 12y ago
    Here is the thing ... the clicking on a point on the math and getting info was a great feature. I loved it. I am also sure that there is no way Google simply removed it. But they did. The closest I can find is RIGHT CLICK/WHAT'S HERE.
uutr 12y ago
I don't see how citing 3 month old tweets is in any way relevant to a webapp. Also the selectiveness of tweets and bug reports makes it all seem very labored and seedy and betrays a lack in of understanding in how complex software development (btw directwrite is behind a flag in Chrome 35) And when you take into account that the author has a history of shitting on Google, it appeals like an attempt in catering to a like minded audience: http://techcrunch.com/author/jon-evans/ http://techcrunch.com/author/jon-evans/
7952 12y ago
If you enter a search term and just hit enter Google will try and guess which result you want (like the I feel Lucky button). The auto-complete will give more options to pick the correct place name from duplicate names in different places. I think they do a bad job of surfacing the different possible results. The Google Index does seem to lack a lot of more obscure names. In this case I would rather have high quality authoritative gazetteers than an algorithm that tries to guess what I mean.
deleted 12y ago
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hackbinary 12y ago
It seems to me that Google hired the Gnome Dev (team) that screwed up the Gnome 2.x GUI.
buro9 12y ago
In the example given it's the word "forest" that is the problem. "Sambisa" would have found it. "Sambisa Reserve" would have found it. "Sambisa Forest Reserve" would have found it. But my guess is that something attempts to understand keywords and context and when you end with "forest" it looks within the set of forests that are called Sambisa, and actually there isn't a forest called Sambisa, there's a nature reserve called Sambisa, which covers an area within a forest landscape. Yeah, that's pedantic and Google could do a better job when it attempts to contextualise like that (especially if it's topical), by just doing a second search internally for exact matches and doing a join/merge on the results. But still... you're going to have the same problem with Open Street Map for the same reason: http://open.mapquestapi.com/nominatim/v1/search.php?format=json&q=sambisa http://open.mapquestapi.com/nominatim/v1/search.php?format=j... http://open.mapquestapi.com/nominatim/v1/search.php?format=json&q=sambisa%20forest http://open.mapquestapi.com/nominatim/v1/search.php?format=j... http://open.mapquestapi.com/nominatim/v1/search.php?format=json&q=sambisa%20forest%20reserve http://open.mapquestapi.com/nominatim/v1/search.php?format=j...
- micampe 12y ago
  Ironically, Apple Maps finds it.
- SeanDav 12y ago
  or it could, I don't know, maybe search on closest matches to locations containing the words "Sambisa" and "forest" with priority to those areas containing the words in the correct order - like maybe "Sambisa Forest Reserve". Oooh maybe they can take out a patent on that idea first... (Sorry OP, not having a go at you - just getting incredibly frustrated with companies I used to love and respect - like Google and Amazon.)
  - judk 12y ago
    Amazing they hadn't thought of that, or believed it caused too many false positives. You should go in for Director of Search to straighten them out.
  - pjscott 12y ago
cocoflunchy 12y ago
The worst about that Sambisa Forest thing is that the autocompletion finds it (http://imgur.com/kWgcByo http://imgur.com/kWgcByo) and then when you press enter, you get a not found error (http://imgur.com/GyhVSaO http://imgur.com/GyhVSaO) !
- solutionyogi 12y ago
  Exactly. I don't know what they have changed but earlier, typing partial address (pressing enter) based on what you saw on auto complete used to work. In new version, you MUST use arrow key and select the auto complete item for it to work.
- mtarnovan 12y ago
  For me both autocomplete and selecting it from the autocomplete find works perfectly.
- Oletros 12y ago
  I receive a "Did you mean: Sambisa Forest Reserve, Nigeria" when pressing enter
mark_l_watson 12y ago
The author is complaining about product development siloing at Google. I know, because I consulted there, that they are working on better cross business integration for internal systems (this is a goal of all large organizations). That said, don't you want some degree of siloing between products? Certainly share infrastructure, share some data as appropriate, but it just seems to me that by having smaller independent teams that you get more creative products, and better productivity with smaller teams. BTW, I love Google maps and Google Now - my fanboy'ism is based on both pretty good functionality right now, and I my expectation that it will keep getting better. I have some privacy issues with these products but at least for now I consider the functionality worth some loss of privacy - I can see my opinion changing however.
- cliveowen 12y ago
  Id' really like to have some opinions about Google Now that everyone seems to find awesome. Let's start with the fact that if I want to set a reminder and I don't have an internet connection I can't. Since when having an internet connection is a prerequisite for even basic tasks? Secondly, of all the suggestions it gave me over the months based on my search history none has been helpful. None. If you search for the same things everyday you'll not get related suggestions, but as soon as you search something like the name of that actor that now eludes you, you'll get 2-3 tabs with the latest news on that actor, even though there's no value in it: you already found what you searched for and it was a one time thing. It keeps telling me the time to work even though by now it should've known when it is appropriate to do so. I mean, it's 4 pm, I didn't move from home, do you really think I'm gonna be 7 hours late to work and it's now a good time to remind me?
  - mark_l_watson 12y ago
    I was praising Google Now for its potential. I agree that some of the proffered help can be silly. I find the most useful alerts come from the automated reading of my email; for example: plane schedules and also information on package delivery. So, I really do believe that Google Now has a lot of potential, but I have concerns about privacy also.
greggman 12y ago
100 times YES! I've gotten this behavior for years and it drives me nuts because I can't understand how it's not fixed? I remember in 2009 I was driving down from SF to LA. I stopped in Santa Barbara. I needed my bearings and I didn't not know the address or the name of the street I was on but I did see an Albertson's supermarket about 200 feet away so I searched for Albertsons and Google gives me some place in Texas. (I think this was on a SonyW810) I've searched for Pizza in Tokyo last December and had it give me some place in Chicago. It's so infuriating. It knows I'm in Tokyo, it's pinpointed me on the map. So in what situation would I EVER want Pizza in Texas unless I specifically asked for "Pizza, Texas"? There's other things too. It mostly feels like maps hasn't changed in years. Sure, there's the new maps UI which many people, including me, feel like it's a change for the worse. The geek in me loves that it's slick and live and webgl but can you figure out how to get a short link to a place? Clicking "Share" just brings up a G+ form. Not what I wanted. I wanted a link I could msg to someone. Didn't have that problem with the old maps. How about how to print? The old maps had a print button and it would format for printing. The new maps has one but I can never remember where it's buried in the UI. Picking Print from the browser directly doesn't do this. Trying to figure out the UI that pops up and down. Here's one. Pick any marker on the map or search for something like Best Buy. The popup UI should show some details on whatever you picked or the one it picked for you. Now click "Directions". Ok, now how do you get back to the state just before you clicked "Directions"? There's no back button, clicking the X in the corner goes all the way back before you selected anything. In other words there is no back. If you clicked directions by accident well, I guess you just have to start over and type your search in again. If you clicked some dot on a detailed map, well now you've lost your place. Even more frustrating is who can compete with them? How do you compete with free? If they're not going to do a good job then I'd love for someone else to try but the moment that someone else does try they'll finally feel some pressure to up their game and you're out of business. And where's the ads? Maybe you don't want ads but I do. I want to see logos of places. Maybe I'm looking for McDonalds. Even if I'm not the logos serve as landmarks. You'd think it would be in their best interest to sell ads on maps since 90+% of all of Google's revenue is ads. And, if done right it would be extremely useful for users as well. It would even fit their mission statement if done well. Sigh....
- DanBC 12y ago
dochtman 12y ago
I've used Google Maps with the new UI for a long time, and it was pretty screwy. It used to be much, much slower than the old UI. These days, performance is a little better, though it's still not quite snappy. Some parts of the new UI still suck, though. Just today, I wanted to print route directions. However, there's no print thingy anywhere in sight. You now have to click "List all steps", and only then a printer icon appears... Completely non-obvious. My wife mentioned that she had already reverted to just using Print Screen a few times because she couldn't find the stupid widget.
bambax 12y ago
What's happening with Google Maps is reminiscent of IE6: a beautiful product appears, light-years ahead of the competition, and free. The competition in question, being light-years behind, and non-free, promptly dies. Then the beautiful product gets frozen in place, and its team "locked up in a dark dungeon" (Spolsky, 2004), which creates a huge opportunity for (open) alternatives. OpenStreetMap + Leaflet is to Google Maps what Firefox was to IE6... but there is still a very long way to go.
- mhurron 12y ago
  Frozen in place would have been more useful. Even just talking about the new UI, Google Maps has become a giant pain to work with.
  - gdulli 12y ago
    Exactly. The problem is, Google has all these employees they need to keep busy, which translates into "upgrading" or redesigning products whether they need it or not. Products always suffer from this pattern. It turns out that Google isn't smart enough to avoid the same mistakes made by the companies it supplanted.
- raldi 12y ago
  In what year would you say Google Maps became frozen in time?
meritt 12y ago
You can still switch back to Classic Maps via the question-mark icon in the bottom right. Classic for life.
- Pacabel 12y ago
  I'm always very hesitant to rely on fallbacks like that. They tend to go unmaintained, at best, but usually just get removed after some period of time. There's the slight possibility that it might be different in this case, given that Google has many resources at its disposal. But in other cases, such a fallback is merely an attempt to temporarily mitigate legitimate complains about a now-inferior experience, without doing any actual work.
- pgrote 12y ago
  I am having trouble locating it. Am I looking in the right place? http://i.imgur.com/QJxKMMc.png http://i.imgur.com/QJxKMMc.png
  - meritt 12y ago
    Your screenshot looks like you're already in classic maps, this is the bottom right of the new version: http://i.imgur.com/K9PJI5V.png http://i.imgur.com/K9PJI5V.png
    - pgrote 12y ago
      Well, this is embarrassing. Thanks for the follow-up.
g8oz 12y ago
Glad I'm not the only one suffering. I've got 2 problems with this new fullscreen Google Maps - 1) Noticeably slower 2) Drilling down to each step in public transit directions is now very awkward - it used to be very elegant. At this point Bing Maps is competitive.
Yossarian_Lives 12y ago
My pet peeve as a Londoner; the disappearance of the transit layer when searching for a place. If you've not searched for anything, New-oogle Maps will happily show you the card that lets you activate the transit layer and superimpose the spiderweb of tube lines on to the London map. However, the second a marker gets dropped, good luck seeing that layer ever again. I mean, even if you clickity clack through the directions>origin>transit, Google will mark up its suggested routes while still refusing to superimpose the tube lines. It's maddening! For all the sophisticated route-mapping that I'm sure Google is bringing to bear on the problem, I'd much rather just look at a map that simultaneously shows a search result marker and the tube network at the same time and figure out my own route. And heaven forbid that I might want to see a collection of results for DIY shops and figure out which one I can get to quickest with reference to the underground network -- it seems that Google would have me route-map each of them in turn, write down the results and then decide. It's so deeply counter-intuitive that I struggle to think of any possible rationalisation for the decision. I don't suppose anyone has a bookmarklet that toggles the transit layer?
- adwf 12y ago
  Yeah, I have the exact same complaint. Took me 10 minutes to find out how to get the transit layer back. Then I found out it was practically unusable because as soon as you scroll across London, it disappears... Have you tried using Citymapper? I've only used it a couple of times as I'm not a Londoner, but it's quite good (it knows to avoid the circle line!). Coincidentally, the first time was to get to #HNLondon where one of the Citymapper guys was giving a talk.
  - Yossarian_Lives 12y ago
    Citymapper is excellent, especially their mobile app's get-me-home feature (ideal for instant bus combos after the tube's closed). However, it's not designed for the vaguer queries -- nearby cafes, haberdasheries, etc -- at which google maps used to excel.
infinotize 12y ago
I will go against the grain a little and say I don't mind the new Google Maps, and it's getting better to the point where I might even say I like it more than the old Maps. They have been steadily improving it - initially the street view UI was terrible, and there wasn't even a distance scale. I think we've gotten to the point where releasing such poor stuff and calling it beta doesn't fly anymore when you consider how many people will be using it. I've gotten used to putting in unnecessarily verbose context in searches, and I assume that's why I don't have search issues in sending me to other irrelevant parts of the world. I guess there is a lot to complain about. But for me it's still the best map, and pretty usable. The Google approach of changing things on you - too bad! - is obnoxious. Pushing out Chrome notifications in OS, enabling them by default, and having to find blog posts on how to disable because it's not in settings or documentation, this kinda stuff is just getting old.
swatkat 12y ago
The new maps.google.com is completely broken for me. Page doesn't load properly most of the time. First thing I do is to revert to classic maps. Maps app on my Android phone works fine though.
charlus 12y ago
It's completely stopped working for me on Chrome / Linux (Rats! WebGL hit a snag error) I've tried a few times to fix this but ultimately I've transitioned to always using my phone for maps.
gyardley 12y ago
The Google Maps product really is lacking outside of the United States. I was down in Chile's Lake District last week, and Google totally failed me, both in Pucón and Panguipulli. These are not particularly tiny towns - in fact, Pucón is a major tourist destination. But Google was completely lacking in street information for both places. I ended up having to use Bing. Google wasn't even second - both Nokia's HERE Maps (which powers Yahoo) and Apple's map product were better (although Apple was still pretty atrocious). Here's a couple of links for comparison - Pucón in Google Maps (http://goo.gl/maps/rm1D9 http://goo.gl/maps/rm1D9) vs Pucón in Bing Maps (http://binged.it/1gR5K55 http://binged.it/1gR5K55). If Bing Maps had a dedicated iOS application, I'd just switch permanently.
- surana90 12y ago
  I so agree with you.I was in Puerto Natales, Chile and it completely failed me. Baffled.
- dublinben 12y ago
  For the sake of completeness, here's the same location on OpenStreetMap. It's similar to Bing, if not even better. http://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=-39.277500%2C-71.971100#map=15/-39.2774/-71.9765 http://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=-39.277500%2C-71.9...
- milliams 12y ago
  I quite like using Geofabrik's MapCompare tool for things like this. For example, take a look at http://tools.geofabrik.de/mc/#14/-39.2756/-71.9824&num=4&mt0=mapnik&mt1=google-map&mt2=bing-map&mt3=nokia-map http://tools.geofabrik.de/mc/#14/-39.2756/-71.9824&num=4&mt0...
  - gyardley 12y ago
    That's awesome! Thanks for the link.
jsnell 12y ago
This is a bad article. It tries to draw some kind of causality link between the new maps UI and a couple of bad search results that the author received. (And then tries to blame it on some completely random academic paper written by Googlers, which as far as I can tell doesn't even have a hint of being from a geo-context, and doesn't look particularly applicable to geocoding or local searches). Of course blaming the new UI is a real crowd-pleaser, as can be seen in the HN comments, which must be good for getting some page hits on a Saturday afternoon. The reality is that Google Maps has always had a (frequently changing) set of searches producing bad results. Some of those failures would have been much more visible, widely publicized, and serious than a blogger not finding the closest burger joint. This article presents the past as searches always just working, which just wasn't true. As such there's no compelling evidence there of the search result quality having actually degraded over time.
- DanBC 12y ago
  So they had a project with usable interface and sub optimal searching, and they decided to "fix" the UI but not the searching?
  - beams_of_light 12y ago
    The search function was far better prior to the new Google Maps, IMNSHO. Also, I have an IP based out of Dallas, TX, and for some reason, Google Maps insists that I live in San Francisco. I have even set my default location (in Chrome, no less) and I still get San Francisco by default, forcing me to put a location in. What the author said about locations is true. I used to be able to search for something unique to my area even if the map wasn't centered over my home town and it would find it, but now, it fails because I'm in San Francisco.
  - jsnell 12y ago
    No, of course not. What kind of a comment is that anyway? You appear to be doing exactly the same kind of conflating of the UI and the backend that I was complaining about. There's a bunch of people whose job is to improve the search quality. They're largely not going to be the same people who'll work on the UI, so it's not some kind of either-or choice. But it's a very difficult problem where it's rare that a change is uniformly beneficial, that's insanely dependent on frequently changing input data, and that users are very unforgiving about. My theory on the last point is that a map search is much more concrete than a web search. People have an intuition both about what the right answer should be, as well as an expectation that there is a right answer in the first place. But of course that's not the case, and the results are never going to be optimal. (I.e. your "sub optimal searching" bit is a bit of a truism). I used to work on the Google maps geocoding team a long time ago. At that time amazing amounts of CPU and engineer time would be spent on verifying the quality of all algorithm and data changes, both during development and during launch. Changes that were unevaluated or were a net negative on quality would only be launched under very exceptional circumstances. Now, the evaluation would of course not be a fully deterministic process, it'd always need to be based on some kind of sampling. But on average that should still mean quality ratcheting up slowly. Maybe things have changed since then and stuff is just randomly launched with no regard to quality, but I have no particular reason to believe so. To me it seems much more likely that the anecdotes from the article don't represent any kind of trend.
noir_lord 12y ago
I was trying to find out how much it costs to use Google Maps in a business product (SaaS) I literally could not find a price without the "give us your details and our sales team will be in touch" which to me translates as "We need to work out exactly where to stick the hose to suck out the money". Compare that with this https://www.mapbox.com/plans/ https://www.mapbox.com/plans/. I know who will be getting my money in the near future.
- bobbyi_settv 12y ago
  Have you looked at OpenStreetMap? Is there anything in particular that it lacks compared to Mapbox?
  - noir_lord 12y ago
    Commercial backing. I know that sounds somewhat daft but I like been a paying customer as it means I can get some support plus the documentation for mapbox is lovely as well.
    - liotier 12y ago
      Do you realize that what Mapbox gives you is Openstreetmap data ?
      - noir_lord 12y ago
        Yep, I researched the options thoroughly. I like that mapbox wraps it all up, clearly documents it and provides it at a reasonable cost, to me that is a value added worth paying for is all.
        liotier 12y ago
        > Yep, I researched the options thoroughly. Interesting - someone used you comment as validation that Mapbox provides insufficient attribution to Openstreetmap: https://twitter.com/Anonymaps/status/465216595242274817 https://twitter.com/Anonymaps/status/465216595242274817
bowlofpetunias 12y ago
This is basically endemic in any Google search related functionality. Be it Maps, Images, regular web search or internal search in Google Apps, more and more I don't get what I asked for but what Google thinks I want, filtered for assumed typos, regions and languages until the result has very little relation to what I'm looking for. This becomes especially galling when I know the info is there and my keywords are correct and specific, and the search returns absolutely nothing even remotely related.
asaikali 12y ago
With the old google maps I could count on the fact that I could hope on Google maps 60 seconds before I needed to head out find the directions I needed hit print and be on my way. Or I could have some one on the phone talking to me and saying something hey I am lost I am kinda in this area of town I could pump that into google maps and give walking directions or even driving directions realtime over the phone. The new google maps is frustrating to use. All the ways that I used to use google maps for just don't seem to work with the new maps either because they removed the feature, or moved the UI elements in such a way that they don't exist on the same page any more or its just too slow on my very fast laptop and my very fast internet. I really hope they fix it fast, I am loosing all hope that maps will ever be usable again.
surana90 12y ago
Continuing the rant - I would speak for India, if you are going from Point A to Point B it shows you 4 ways to get there. You could filter it with options like - Buses, Trains or Least Transfer, Less walking etc. Now there are times when there are more then 10 buses running between these two points and with a frequency like of 20-30 mins. So if you happen to use Google Maps then it would show you only 4 results even after you filter down to Buses. Why not show all the options Google? When you have it in your results, just show it. Because I and lot of people that I know have been in this situation where we are waiting for the bus that google maps is showing and in the process missing out on the ones that are not shown.
lohankin 12y ago
There's a simple explanation for recent GUI disasters across google applications: Google+. They decided to make a Swiss Army Knife under the banner of Google+, and needed kind of "consistency" of style. Everything is consistency ugly now, and Google+ guy is gone. Situation may improve as they starts dismantling the monstrosity. With respect to search quality - they hired some AI astronauts, neural networks do wonders for them. The goal is to train their system to accommodate astronauts' brains. They say it openly.
davidw 12y ago
Some other things: * Start in San Francisco by typing San Francisco. It still manages to find that city. Do 'directions' and type in Eugene, OR, USA - my home town, which is a fairly straightforward drive north. It can't find it and gives you bad results. * THEY KILLED TERRAIN MODE! This was a super-useful feature that I still use on my computer, but can no longer access on my mobile devices.
- ejain 12y ago
  The gradual disappearance of the terrain mode is ironic, given how their ads always seem to show happy young people on outdoor adventures...
- magicalist 12y ago
  Are you talking web or mobile? The web one found Eugene, OR just fine for me...
  - davidw 12y ago
    It finds it ok searching for it, but when you put it as a destination from San Francisco, in the little box, it chokes.
    - jordanthoms 12y ago
      Works fine for me, and it has Eugene as an option after typing only the first few characters.
      - davidw 12y ago
        Here's what I get. Ends up somewhere in the Central Valley: https://maps.google.com/maps?saddr=San+Francisco,+CA&daddr=Eugene,+OR,+USA&hl=en&ll=37.792422,-121.633759&spn=0.979945,2.113495&sll=37.77493,-122.419416&sspn=0.980176,2.113495&geocode=FVJmQAIdKAe0-CkhAGkAbZqFgDH_rXbwZxNQSg%3BFcAzQgIdoAXM-CkjsgNKVfSQgDF-eNByL-aYHA&oq=euge&mra=ls&t=m&z=10 https://maps.google.com/maps?saddr=San+Francisco,+CA&daddr=E...
- 12y ago
ktran03 12y ago
Among the points already mentioned, I really hate the 'shake to report issue' feature. Stuck in traffic and frustrated, that thing comes up every time I hit a pothole. The thought that comes to mind everytime is "No Google, I don't want to report a problem, AT THIS MOMENT". Overall bad choice of control. Much more sensical to stick that in somewhere fitting, like settings.
- roryhughes 12y ago
  They could just put it in settings too and when you shake to show it there would be a button saying 'Don't show again on shake'.
justzisguyuknow 12y ago
Not long ago I did a Google Maps search (on Android) for "restaurants" in my brooklyn neighborhood... and got directed to the Restaurants.com offices in New Jersey. Effing pathetic.
dalek2point3 12y ago
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Mapping is too important a thing to let one company control the experience. The debate is not about whether Google Maps is good or bad, but if its bad for you there is little choice. You can't fix it. It's not a 100% there, but get on the OpenStreetMap train, fix your local area and have fun. And enjoy all the good stuff startups are building on top of that data. Here is an easy way to get started: http://www.openstreetmap.org/fixthemap http://www.openstreetmap.org/fixthemap
jameshart 12y ago
Something is, indeed, terribly terribly wrong in Google Maps algorithm land. For at least the last couple of weeks, Google Maps has been insisting that Basingstoke in England is called "Town Centre", and is one of the most important places in England. On a view of the entire country, it's displaying a label in the same font-size it uses for Southampton, Bristol and Liverpool marking Basingstoke as "Town Centre". Manchester and Birmingham aren't labelled at all. If this is the quality of mapping Google is providing for a major first-world English-speaking market - you should be grateful it even knows Nigeria exists.
- blibble 12y ago
  Basingstoke one of the most important places in England? pull the other one
  - felicopter 12y ago
    He was referring to "Town Centre".
  - MaysonL 12y ago
    Google Maps seems to think so.
wyck 12y ago
The old google maps allows you to paste KML file URL's into the search, now it doesn't work, you have to revert to the old version. ps. KML files were developed by Google for maps...
- maxerickson 12y ago
  Keyhole created KML for use in their earth viewer. Later, Google bought them and branded the software as Google Earth. Supporting KML in the web maps was just a neat thing Google also did.
  - wyck 12y ago
    Ah did not know that, it was for sure a neat thing they did. I manage a site that uses KML files extensively for bike and running paths and this switch did cause a minor bump.
- alphakappa 12y ago
  KML was created by Keyhole (the precursor to Google Earth)
  - cynwoody 12y ago
    And Keyhole was named after the original US spy satellites, the KH series†, dating from 1959. High-res imagery download was via parachute-net. †http://fly.historicwings.com/2013/02/kh-1-the-first-spy-satellite/ http://fly.historicwings.com/2013/02/kh-1-the-first-spy-sate...
personZ 12y ago
Trivia, but Gleghorn-South Kilgore is in Arkansas (AR) rather than Arizona (AZ). It is an interesting case and I wonder how Google decided that location was important to him. Contextual search is really tough, and the same choices that might give great answers for most answers can yield infuriating answers for other questions. In this case he is searching for something that doesn't exist, and a forest that probably gets searched a dozen times in aggregate a day on Google Maps, likely contrived for effect. That doesn't excuse those cases, but it isn't correlated with the cases where people got surprisingly cogent answers to their questions.
chapel 12y ago
This blog post is way off. The issue isn't that Google Maps couldn't find Sambisa Forest, it is that it has an issue with how it handles auto complete and pressing enter without selecting the choices it brings up. It quite frankly looks like a bug. You can see for yourself here: http://i.imgur.com/vX1xqp2.gif http://i.imgur.com/vX1xqp2.gif
- aeturnum 12y ago
  I disagree that the blog post is way off and I think the issue is that google can't find Sambisa Forest (it can't - as your gif demonstrates). It can find, "Sambisa Forest Reserve," which is great, but not the point of the blog. They are saying that google's ability to take natural language requests (sambisa forest, in-n-out east bay) and come up with an answer that corresponds what you searched for has seriously degraded. Personally, that is consistent with my experience. What is causing the problem (bug, difference in focus, etc) is also worth discussing. Why does google have so much trouble finding answers to queries that seem straightforward? Why can it suggest "Sambisa Forest Reserve" (based on "sambisa forest") and then have no idea how to find "sambia forest?" The title might be a little grandiose, but I think it's a fair question.
ignostic 12y ago
I can't say that I've had problems figuring the UI out, but I have had problems with the algorithm lately. If I had to guess I'd say it's Google often failing to factor in the location at some points, because I can rarely repeat the errors. For example, I searched Maps for a Mexican restaurant with my phone recently. It directed me to a place in Florida (hundreds of miles away). Seriously, when there's a highly-rated place on Google Maps with the same name not 3 miles from where you've located me? When I returned home and searched, I had no such problems - it pointed straight at the place. I've had the reverse happen as well. Is it the fact that I'm blocking so many cookies that Google is relying on? Or is there just a signal somewhere that tells Maps to override reason and relevance? I have tried alternatives, but the top contenders - like Bing and OpenMaps - have their own very special set of problems.. I'm not sure what to use at this point.
bla2 12y ago
I think the new UI is much much nicer than the old one.
microcolonel 12y ago
http://pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=71064 http://pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=71064 http://pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=71065 http://pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=71065 Keep in mind that Mapquest, Yahoo maps, Bing maps, and Nokia HERE have no record of it at all. So this is really between Google Maps and OpenStreetMap.
Friedduck 12y ago
It's nice to hear that I'm not the only one that feels this way. Search for local businesses has become nearly impossible. Whether it's failing to return anything or results that are wholly irrelevant, search and particularly maps have taken a large step backward. There's a great market opportunity here. (Really) old guard companies like YP still haven't responded to the shift and I infer from Google's backslide that it's not a priority for them. We can't buy everything from Amazon (esp. Hachette books!)
takeda 12y ago
For me the most annoying thing is that apparently I no longer can see traffic and directions at the same time.
nailer 12y ago
Google knows: - Home is in London - Work is in London - My most recent restaurant reviews are in London - My IP address is in London - My location, if you ask my browser, is in London Stop showing me a map of the US when I open Maps.
- maxerickson 12y ago
  I'm in the U.S. If I open https://maps.google.co.uk/ https://maps.google.co.uk/ it shows the UK. I expect there are people in places outside the U.S. who would be frustrated by maps.google.com showing their current location, so it isn't an easy thing to solve for everyone.
- dwb 12y ago
  I agree, and this is just a workaround, but use http://maps.google.co.uk http://maps.google.co.uk instead.
lindablus 12y ago
What ever happened to layers? I can't seem to find a way to show bike routes + terrain or bike routes + traffic or any other combination.
nextstep 12y ago
I'm glad tha Apple maps is steadily improving. There needs to be competition so that free services will compete for users by improving the user experience. I think iOS 8 will include major updates to Apple maps that will integrate transit directions. Apple recently bought the mapping company Embark along with a few other transit-related acquisitions.
- abruzzi 12y ago
  The problem is Apple Maps isn't usable outside an iOS device or a specific "Maps" app on Macs only. Share links open google maps, unless you have the above machines. This makes it less than useful for general use.
- mempko 12y ago
  There has been free competition for ages. Google just has all the mind share.
ejain 12y ago
I blame the current state of Google Maps on micro-optimization, and overconfidence in the ability to predict what you want.
jhoechtl 12y ago
Frankly, I would not even stop at Maps. Since a year or so Google makes so intensely use of all sort of metadata (my browsing interests in the future, the places if have visited, my contacts on G+) that the internet has become a small world for me. I find myself increasingly using duckduckgo just because of this. Heck, as I use the public DNS servers of google, even deleting Cookies or using browser porn mode doesn't help much. It's an example that overly smartness actually degrades the experience for me rather than being and improvement.
- andybak 12y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble
annapowellsmith 12y ago
https://www.google.com/maps?output=classic https://www.google.com/maps?output=classic
Mithaldu 12y ago
Interesting thing here: Reading the article i was wondering what's the fuss, because Google Maps looked and acted like it ever did. Turned out that, because i was using Opera 12, it was still giving me the old Google Maps. So if you really want the old one on the desktop, that's one workaround. :)
GigabyteCoin 12y ago
I concur. Google maps needs some serious work. It's as if it's running on auto-pilot right now or something. I can't quite put my finger on it, but something needs to be changed.
__david__ 12y ago
I can't get street view to work at all with the new maps. I just get a black screen whenever it tries. Is that happening to anyone else? I'm on Firefox beta (30).
keehun 12y ago
This is beyond creepy: http://www.theheraldng.com/us-marines-satellite-locate-missing-girls-sambisa-forest-bringbackourgirls/ http://www.theheraldng.com/us-marines-satellite-locate-missi... TechCrunch randomly chose a thing to search and that's where they are? Granted, it's a huge 60,000kmsq area... But of every place TechCrunch could've searched for on Google Maps, it's the same place?
mhartl 12y ago
I didn't understand what the big deal was until I drove to downtown LA last night. Google Maps turn-by-turn directions instructed me to make a U turn in the middle of the 110S freeway (which would have crashed me into the center divider). Then, on the 10W, it kept trying to have me get off the freeway and then get right back on. I don't know WTF happened, but this is an all-hands-on deck situation for Google: must fix ASAHP.
- maxerickson 12y ago
  In a small town I know, I think they switched their data provider (I guess to the Census TIGER data). I don't have a great memory of what they had, but I recently noticed some alignment problems that I hadn't noticed in the past. What I think I remember isn't a great point of reference, but a switch to a cheaper, lower quality data set would explain problems with routing.

229 points by rorhug 12y ago

jxf 12y ago

I have to say that I've had completely the opposite experience from the author. GMaps almost always find what I'm looking for in a timely fashion, I find the offline maps useful when I'm traveling to a different city, and so on. One of my favorite use cases is having GMaps give me directions by public transit, especially if there's a metro, which is nice if you're in a new city and want to save a few bucks on taxis or Uber. That said, they've definitely made a few changes I haven't been a fan of. For example, offline maps must now be refreshed once every 30 days, and if you're offline when the timer runs out you won't be able to see the map. (Previously there was no time limit.)

etfb 12y ago
There's a new version of it now, which is an option when you go to maps.google.com. I tried it and gave up because it doesn't seem to work on Tasmanian ADSL - sits and spins, never loads, presumably because the new state government got into the state's internet infrastructure and shot one of the hamsters.
goostavos 12y ago
I agree. On the whole, maps is still awesome -- and with the google now functionality? Holy crap, I feel like Iron Man when I'm driving around and command my phone to navigate me to the closest Taco Bell. That said, I do absolutely, 100% think the everything-is-now-done-through-the-search-box approach is remarkably horrible and unintuitive. I honestly thought that you couldn't customize directions any more. Hell, there were so many little features -- simple things like Search Nearby -- that I thought went away entirely. The UX is that terrible. Want to customize the route your currently on? That's easy! Ok, so just close what your currently doing -- hey! Why are you looking in the settings? Why would settings be in Settings? Listen to what I'm saying! So, close out of the -- No! It's not in the Hamburger button. Settings aren't in the menu. Why would settings be in a menu? Pay attention! Exit navigation. Back out of the Directions screen, back out of the location screen. Now, see the single line search bar? Click on that -- but don't search for anything, there's a small button in the drop down. Click that! Congratulations! You've found the settings! I just want to know how that UX meeting went. Settings!? In a menu!? No, no, no. Makes no sense from a user experience perspective.
bwanab 12y ago
Agreed. Maybe some parts of the world aren't so well mapped as my part (Greater Boston area), but I'd think the SF Bay area would be one of the better ones. For kicks I just tried a number of map searches and every one came back with accurate results. As they say, YMMV, but I don't think Google is trying to forsake us.

morganvachon 12y ago

I stopped reading when the screenshot showed AR (Arkansas) and he said it was Arizona (AZ). If you are that geographically challenged, even Google Maps can't save you. EDIT: I forgot that a sense of humor is not an option here. Geez.

dang 12y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289
- morganvachon 12y ago
  My point stands that if the guy is so incompetent that he can't figure out which state he's looking at, he shouldn't be writing an article critical of a mapping system in the first place. I'm more of a hardware hacker than a programmer, therefore I don't go around writing articles criticizing the latest version control system; I'd end up making a fool of myself as I wouldn't have a clue what I was talking about. And just to be clear, I actually agree with him that the new Google Maps seems less useful than the old version.

zatkin 12y ago

I am grateful that we are able to revert back to the old Google Maps for now. I hope that they keep this regression available to their users for a while.

thotpoizn 12y ago
I am a little annoyed that I have to keep going through clickrobatics every time I change back to old Google Maps, and explain why each time. I've already explained a dozen times, quit pestering me. Also, get off my damned lawn.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  I thought perhaps my way of loading Google Maps would still yield the old style - using '!m address' in DuckDuckGo - but no, sadly, its now the new dumbed-down page.
- graeme 12y ago
  You can get around this by bookmarking a location. I bookmarked my address in the old maps, and use that as my entry point to google maps. It doesn't ask me to switch to new.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

craigching 12y ago
> The need to show some forest when you live on the other side of the world is minimalistic. Really? I love reading about some exotic place somewhere and looking it up on google maps. How hard is it, really, to look for sambisa forest near you and when you don't find it, look globally?

joel_perl_prog 12y ago

Is this where we get to complain about how horrible Google Maps suddenly is? Because wow. I can speak about this. It's terrible. First and foremost, and they have their "reasons" of course, but my Samsung Rant (yeah just a feature phone) always had great maps. Just a simple Java app, built on the maps API. Well that doesn't work anymore. Like, nothing. Google basically says "Get an Android phone, sucker." F U Google. Is what I think of that. Secondly, the desktop (and basically the tablet experience too is the same) has gotten terrible. It takes a really long time before my mouse event matters. By this time, the screen, since it's still resolving and moving things around the canvas or whatever the hell it's doing, well by the time my mouse event registers, the object I wanted has moved away. I'm now doing something else! Directions. Just so retarded. The accordion shit on the left. Just show me the effing directions, like you used to. I don't want to tab around a widget in the upper left. Plus you have toggle it open in the first place, and it's not very responsive, either. Also, just simple double-clicking to zoom. Extremely less useful than it used to be: just this one simple thing. I could go on. How awful. What happened?

solutionyogi 12y ago
Completely agree. On my workstation (6 cores + 32 GB RAM), Google Maps is unbearably slow using the Chrome browser. I can not even imagine the performance on an average computer. My second biggest pet peeve: In old Maps, clicking on the marker will bring out a popup providing you various choices (http://imgur.com/qeLhJSd http://imgur.com/qeLhJSd). In new Maps, clicking on the marker centers it on the screen. What the F? What's the value add in bringing the marker to center when I click it? Just like GMail, Maps has gone from being great software to mediocre. I don't know who is making these horrible design choices at Googleplex.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- pgrote 12y ago
  Here is the thing ... the clicking on a point on the math and getting info was a great feature. I loved it. I am also sure that there is no way Google simply removed it. But they did. The closest I can find is RIGHT CLICK/WHAT'S HERE.

uutr 12y ago

I don't see how citing 3 month old tweets is in any way relevant to a webapp. Also the selectiveness of tweets and bug reports makes it all seem very labored and seedy and betrays a lack in of understanding in how complex software development (btw directwrite is behind a flag in Chrome 35) And when you take into account that the author has a history of shitting on Google, it appeals like an attempt in catering to a like minded audience: http://techcrunch.com/author/jon-evans/ http://techcrunch.com/author/jon-evans/

7952 12y ago

If you enter a search term and just hit enter Google will try and guess which result you want (like the I feel Lucky button). The auto-complete will give more options to pick the correct place name from duplicate names in different places. I think they do a bad job of surfacing the different possible results. The Google Index does seem to lack a lot of more obscure names. In this case I would rather have high quality authoritative gazetteers than an algorithm that tries to guess what I mean.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

hackbinary 12y ago

It seems to me that Google hired the Gnome Dev (team) that screwed up the Gnome 2.x GUI.

buro9 12y ago

In the example given it's the word "forest" that is the problem. "Sambisa" would have found it. "Sambisa Reserve" would have found it. "Sambisa Forest Reserve" would have found it. But my guess is that something attempts to understand keywords and context and when you end with "forest" it looks within the set of forests that are called Sambisa, and actually there isn't a forest called Sambisa, there's a nature reserve called Sambisa, which covers an area within a forest landscape. Yeah, that's pedantic and Google could do a better job when it attempts to contextualise like that (especially if it's topical), by just doing a second search internally for exact matches and doing a join/merge on the results. But still... you're going to have the same problem with Open Street Map for the same reason: http://open.mapquestapi.com/nominatim/v1/search.php?format=json&q=sambisa http://open.mapquestapi.com/nominatim/v1/search.php?format=j... http://open.mapquestapi.com/nominatim/v1/search.php?format=json&q=sambisa%20forest http://open.mapquestapi.com/nominatim/v1/search.php?format=j... http://open.mapquestapi.com/nominatim/v1/search.php?format=json&q=sambisa%20forest%20reserve http://open.mapquestapi.com/nominatim/v1/search.php?format=j...

micampe 12y ago
Ironically, Apple Maps finds it.
SeanDav 12y ago
or it could, I don't know, maybe search on closest matches to locations containing the words "Sambisa" and "forest" with priority to those areas containing the words in the correct order - like maybe "Sambisa Forest Reserve". Oooh maybe they can take out a patent on that idea first... (Sorry OP, not having a go at you - just getting incredibly frustrated with companies I used to love and respect - like Google and Amazon.)
- judk 12y ago
  Amazing they hadn't thought of that, or believed it caused too many false positives. You should go in for Director of Search to straighten them out.
- pjscott 12y ago

cocoflunchy 12y ago

The worst about that Sambisa Forest thing is that the autocompletion finds it (http://imgur.com/kWgcByo http://imgur.com/kWgcByo) and then when you press enter, you get a not found error (http://imgur.com/GyhVSaO http://imgur.com/GyhVSaO) !

solutionyogi 12y ago
Exactly. I don't know what they have changed but earlier, typing partial address (pressing enter) based on what you saw on auto complete used to work. In new version, you MUST use arrow key and select the auto complete item for it to work.
mtarnovan 12y ago
For me both autocomplete and selecting it from the autocomplete find works perfectly.
Oletros 12y ago
I receive a "Did you mean: Sambisa Forest Reserve, Nigeria" when pressing enter

mark_l_watson 12y ago

The author is complaining about product development siloing at Google. I know, because I consulted there, that they are working on better cross business integration for internal systems (this is a goal of all large organizations). That said, don't you want some degree of siloing between products? Certainly share infrastructure, share some data as appropriate, but it just seems to me that by having smaller independent teams that you get more creative products, and better productivity with smaller teams. BTW, I love Google maps and Google Now - my fanboy'ism is based on both pretty good functionality right now, and I my expectation that it will keep getting better. I have some privacy issues with these products but at least for now I consider the functionality worth some loss of privacy - I can see my opinion changing however.

cliveowen 12y ago
Id' really like to have some opinions about Google Now that everyone seems to find awesome. Let's start with the fact that if I want to set a reminder and I don't have an internet connection I can't. Since when having an internet connection is a prerequisite for even basic tasks? Secondly, of all the suggestions it gave me over the months based on my search history none has been helpful. None. If you search for the same things everyday you'll not get related suggestions, but as soon as you search something like the name of that actor that now eludes you, you'll get 2-3 tabs with the latest news on that actor, even though there's no value in it: you already found what you searched for and it was a one time thing. It keeps telling me the time to work even though by now it should've known when it is appropriate to do so. I mean, it's 4 pm, I didn't move from home, do you really think I'm gonna be 7 hours late to work and it's now a good time to remind me?
- mark_l_watson 12y ago
  I was praising Google Now for its potential. I agree that some of the proffered help can be silly. I find the most useful alerts come from the automated reading of my email; for example: plane schedules and also information on package delivery. So, I really do believe that Google Now has a lot of potential, but I have concerns about privacy also.

greggman 12y ago

100 times YES! I've gotten this behavior for years and it drives me nuts because I can't understand how it's not fixed? I remember in 2009 I was driving down from SF to LA. I stopped in Santa Barbara. I needed my bearings and I didn't not know the address or the name of the street I was on but I did see an Albertson's supermarket about 200 feet away so I searched for Albertsons and Google gives me some place in Texas. (I think this was on a SonyW810) I've searched for Pizza in Tokyo last December and had it give me some place in Chicago. It's so infuriating. It knows I'm in Tokyo, it's pinpointed me on the map. So in what situation would I EVER want Pizza in Texas unless I specifically asked for "Pizza, Texas"? There's other things too. It mostly feels like maps hasn't changed in years. Sure, there's the new maps UI which many people, including me, feel like it's a change for the worse. The geek in me loves that it's slick and live and webgl but can you figure out how to get a short link to a place? Clicking "Share" just brings up a G+ form. Not what I wanted. I wanted a link I could msg to someone. Didn't have that problem with the old maps. How about how to print? The old maps had a print button and it would format for printing. The new maps has one but I can never remember where it's buried in the UI. Picking Print from the browser directly doesn't do this. Trying to figure out the UI that pops up and down. Here's one. Pick any marker on the map or search for something like Best Buy. The popup UI should show some details on whatever you picked or the one it picked for you. Now click "Directions". Ok, now how do you get back to the state just before you clicked "Directions"? There's no back button, clicking the X in the corner goes all the way back before you selected anything. In other words there is no back. If you clicked directions by accident well, I guess you just have to start over and type your search in again. If you clicked some dot on a detailed map, well now you've lost your place. Even more frustrating is who can compete with them? How do you compete with free? If they're not going to do a good job then I'd love for someone else to try but the moment that someone else does try they'll finally feel some pressure to up their game and you're out of business. And where's the ads? Maybe you don't want ads but I do. I want to see logos of places. Maybe I'm looking for McDonalds. Even if I'm not the logos serve as landmarks. You'd think it would be in their best interest to sell ads on maps since 90+% of all of Google's revenue is ads. And, if done right it would be extremely useful for users as well. It would even fit their mission statement if done well. Sigh....

DanBC 12y ago

dochtman 12y ago

I've used Google Maps with the new UI for a long time, and it was pretty screwy. It used to be much, much slower than the old UI. These days, performance is a little better, though it's still not quite snappy. Some parts of the new UI still suck, though. Just today, I wanted to print route directions. However, there's no print thingy anywhere in sight. You now have to click "List all steps", and only then a printer icon appears... Completely non-obvious. My wife mentioned that she had already reverted to just using Print Screen a few times because she couldn't find the stupid widget.

bambax 12y ago

What's happening with Google Maps is reminiscent of IE6: a beautiful product appears, light-years ahead of the competition, and free. The competition in question, being light-years behind, and non-free, promptly dies. Then the beautiful product gets frozen in place, and its team "locked up in a dark dungeon" (Spolsky, 2004), which creates a huge opportunity for (open) alternatives. OpenStreetMap + Leaflet is to Google Maps what Firefox was to IE6... but there is still a very long way to go.

mhurron 12y ago
Frozen in place would have been more useful. Even just talking about the new UI, Google Maps has become a giant pain to work with.
- gdulli 12y ago
  Exactly. The problem is, Google has all these employees they need to keep busy, which translates into "upgrading" or redesigning products whether they need it or not. Products always suffer from this pattern. It turns out that Google isn't smart enough to avoid the same mistakes made by the companies it supplanted.
raldi 12y ago
In what year would you say Google Maps became frozen in time?

meritt 12y ago

You can still switch back to Classic Maps via the question-mark icon in the bottom right. Classic for life.

Pacabel 12y ago
I'm always very hesitant to rely on fallbacks like that. They tend to go unmaintained, at best, but usually just get removed after some period of time. There's the slight possibility that it might be different in this case, given that Google has many resources at its disposal. But in other cases, such a fallback is merely an attempt to temporarily mitigate legitimate complains about a now-inferior experience, without doing any actual work.
pgrote 12y ago
I am having trouble locating it. Am I looking in the right place? http://i.imgur.com/QJxKMMc.png http://i.imgur.com/QJxKMMc.png
- meritt 12y ago
  Your screenshot looks like you're already in classic maps, this is the bottom right of the new version: http://i.imgur.com/K9PJI5V.png http://i.imgur.com/K9PJI5V.png
  - pgrote 12y ago
    Well, this is embarrassing. Thanks for the follow-up.

g8oz 12y ago

Glad I'm not the only one suffering. I've got 2 problems with this new fullscreen Google Maps - 1) Noticeably slower 2) Drilling down to each step in public transit directions is now very awkward - it used to be very elegant. At this point Bing Maps is competitive.

Yossarian_Lives 12y ago

My pet peeve as a Londoner; the disappearance of the transit layer when searching for a place. If you've not searched for anything, New-oogle Maps will happily show you the card that lets you activate the transit layer and superimpose the spiderweb of tube lines on to the London map. However, the second a marker gets dropped, good luck seeing that layer ever again. I mean, even if you clickity clack through the directions>origin>transit, Google will mark up its suggested routes while still refusing to superimpose the tube lines. It's maddening! For all the sophisticated route-mapping that I'm sure Google is bringing to bear on the problem, I'd much rather just look at a map that simultaneously shows a search result marker and the tube network at the same time and figure out my own route. And heaven forbid that I might want to see a collection of results for DIY shops and figure out which one I can get to quickest with reference to the underground network -- it seems that Google would have me route-map each of them in turn, write down the results and then decide. It's so deeply counter-intuitive that I struggle to think of any possible rationalisation for the decision. I don't suppose anyone has a bookmarklet that toggles the transit layer?

adwf 12y ago
Yeah, I have the exact same complaint. Took me 10 minutes to find out how to get the transit layer back. Then I found out it was practically unusable because as soon as you scroll across London, it disappears... Have you tried using Citymapper? I've only used it a couple of times as I'm not a Londoner, but it's quite good (it knows to avoid the circle line!). Coincidentally, the first time was to get to #HNLondon where one of the Citymapper guys was giving a talk.
- Yossarian_Lives 12y ago
  Citymapper is excellent, especially their mobile app's get-me-home feature (ideal for instant bus combos after the tube's closed). However, it's not designed for the vaguer queries -- nearby cafes, haberdasheries, etc -- at which google maps used to excel.

infinotize 12y ago

I will go against the grain a little and say I don't mind the new Google Maps, and it's getting better to the point where I might even say I like it more than the old Maps. They have been steadily improving it - initially the street view UI was terrible, and there wasn't even a distance scale. I think we've gotten to the point where releasing such poor stuff and calling it beta doesn't fly anymore when you consider how many people will be using it. I've gotten used to putting in unnecessarily verbose context in searches, and I assume that's why I don't have search issues in sending me to other irrelevant parts of the world. I guess there is a lot to complain about. But for me it's still the best map, and pretty usable. The Google approach of changing things on you - too bad! - is obnoxious. Pushing out Chrome notifications in OS, enabling them by default, and having to find blog posts on how to disable because it's not in settings or documentation, this kinda stuff is just getting old.

swatkat 12y ago

The new maps.google.com is completely broken for me. Page doesn't load properly most of the time. First thing I do is to revert to classic maps. Maps app on my Android phone works fine though.

charlus 12y ago

It's completely stopped working for me on Chrome / Linux (Rats! WebGL hit a snag error) I've tried a few times to fix this but ultimately I've transitioned to always using my phone for maps.

gyardley 12y ago

The Google Maps product really is lacking outside of the United States. I was down in Chile's Lake District last week, and Google totally failed me, both in Pucón and Panguipulli. These are not particularly tiny towns - in fact, Pucón is a major tourist destination. But Google was completely lacking in street information for both places. I ended up having to use Bing. Google wasn't even second - both Nokia's HERE Maps (which powers Yahoo) and Apple's map product were better (although Apple was still pretty atrocious). Here's a couple of links for comparison - Pucón in Google Maps (http://goo.gl/maps/rm1D9 http://goo.gl/maps/rm1D9) vs Pucón in Bing Maps (http://binged.it/1gR5K55 http://binged.it/1gR5K55). If Bing Maps had a dedicated iOS application, I'd just switch permanently.

surana90 12y ago
I so agree with you.I was in Puerto Natales, Chile and it completely failed me. Baffled.
dublinben 12y ago
For the sake of completeness, here's the same location on OpenStreetMap. It's similar to Bing, if not even better. http://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=-39.277500%2C-71.971100#map=15/-39.2774/-71.9765 http://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=-39.277500%2C-71.9...
milliams 12y ago
I quite like using Geofabrik's MapCompare tool for things like this. For example, take a look at http://tools.geofabrik.de/mc/#14/-39.2756/-71.9824&num=4&mt0=mapnik&mt1=google-map&mt2=bing-map&mt3=nokia-map http://tools.geofabrik.de/mc/#14/-39.2756/-71.9824&num=4&mt0...
- gyardley 12y ago
  That's awesome! Thanks for the link.

jsnell 12y ago

This is a bad article. It tries to draw some kind of causality link between the new maps UI and a couple of bad search results that the author received. (And then tries to blame it on some completely random academic paper written by Googlers, which as far as I can tell doesn't even have a hint of being from a geo-context, and doesn't look particularly applicable to geocoding or local searches). Of course blaming the new UI is a real crowd-pleaser, as can be seen in the HN comments, which must be good for getting some page hits on a Saturday afternoon. The reality is that Google Maps has always had a (frequently changing) set of searches producing bad results. Some of those failures would have been much more visible, widely publicized, and serious than a blogger not finding the closest burger joint. This article presents the past as searches always just working, which just wasn't true. As such there's no compelling evidence there of the search result quality having actually degraded over time.

DanBC 12y ago
So they had a project with usable interface and sub optimal searching, and they decided to "fix" the UI but not the searching?
- beams_of_light 12y ago
  The search function was far better prior to the new Google Maps, IMNSHO. Also, I have an IP based out of Dallas, TX, and for some reason, Google Maps insists that I live in San Francisco. I have even set my default location (in Chrome, no less) and I still get San Francisco by default, forcing me to put a location in. What the author said about locations is true. I used to be able to search for something unique to my area even if the map wasn't centered over my home town and it would find it, but now, it fails because I'm in San Francisco.
- jsnell 12y ago
  No, of course not. What kind of a comment is that anyway? You appear to be doing exactly the same kind of conflating of the UI and the backend that I was complaining about. There's a bunch of people whose job is to improve the search quality. They're largely not going to be the same people who'll work on the UI, so it's not some kind of either-or choice. But it's a very difficult problem where it's rare that a change is uniformly beneficial, that's insanely dependent on frequently changing input data, and that users are very unforgiving about. My theory on the last point is that a map search is much more concrete than a web search. People have an intuition both about what the right answer should be, as well as an expectation that there is a right answer in the first place. But of course that's not the case, and the results are never going to be optimal. (I.e. your "sub optimal searching" bit is a bit of a truism). I used to work on the Google maps geocoding team a long time ago. At that time amazing amounts of CPU and engineer time would be spent on verifying the quality of all algorithm and data changes, both during development and during launch. Changes that were unevaluated or were a net negative on quality would only be launched under very exceptional circumstances. Now, the evaluation would of course not be a fully deterministic process, it'd always need to be based on some kind of sampling. But on average that should still mean quality ratcheting up slowly. Maybe things have changed since then and stuff is just randomly launched with no regard to quality, but I have no particular reason to believe so. To me it seems much more likely that the anecdotes from the article don't represent any kind of trend.

noir_lord 12y ago

I was trying to find out how much it costs to use Google Maps in a business product (SaaS) I literally could not find a price without the "give us your details and our sales team will be in touch" which to me translates as "We need to work out exactly where to stick the hose to suck out the money". Compare that with this https://www.mapbox.com/plans/ https://www.mapbox.com/plans/. I know who will be getting my money in the near future.

bobbyi_settv 12y ago
Have you looked at OpenStreetMap? Is there anything in particular that it lacks compared to Mapbox?
- noir_lord 12y ago
  Commercial backing. I know that sounds somewhat daft but I like been a paying customer as it means I can get some support plus the documentation for mapbox is lovely as well.
  - liotier 12y ago
    Do you realize that what Mapbox gives you is Openstreetmap data ?
    - noir_lord 12y ago
      Yep, I researched the options thoroughly. I like that mapbox wraps it all up, clearly documents it and provides it at a reasonable cost, to me that is a value added worth paying for is all.
      - liotier 12y ago
        > Yep, I researched the options thoroughly. Interesting - someone used you comment as validation that Mapbox provides insufficient attribution to Openstreetmap: https://twitter.com/Anonymaps/status/465216595242274817 https://twitter.com/Anonymaps/status/465216595242274817

bowlofpetunias 12y ago

This is basically endemic in any Google search related functionality. Be it Maps, Images, regular web search or internal search in Google Apps, more and more I don't get what I asked for but what Google thinks I want, filtered for assumed typos, regions and languages until the result has very little relation to what I'm looking for. This becomes especially galling when I know the info is there and my keywords are correct and specific, and the search returns absolutely nothing even remotely related.

asaikali 12y ago

With the old google maps I could count on the fact that I could hope on Google maps 60 seconds before I needed to head out find the directions I needed hit print and be on my way. Or I could have some one on the phone talking to me and saying something hey I am lost I am kinda in this area of town I could pump that into google maps and give walking directions or even driving directions realtime over the phone. The new google maps is frustrating to use. All the ways that I used to use google maps for just don't seem to work with the new maps either because they removed the feature, or moved the UI elements in such a way that they don't exist on the same page any more or its just too slow on my very fast laptop and my very fast internet. I really hope they fix it fast, I am loosing all hope that maps will ever be usable again.

surana90 12y ago

Continuing the rant - I would speak for India, if you are going from Point A to Point B it shows you 4 ways to get there. You could filter it with options like - Buses, Trains or Least Transfer, Less walking etc. Now there are times when there are more then 10 buses running between these two points and with a frequency like of 20-30 mins. So if you happen to use Google Maps then it would show you only 4 results even after you filter down to Buses. Why not show all the options Google? When you have it in your results, just show it. Because I and lot of people that I know have been in this situation where we are waiting for the bus that google maps is showing and in the process missing out on the ones that are not shown.

lohankin 12y ago

There's a simple explanation for recent GUI disasters across google applications: Google+. They decided to make a Swiss Army Knife under the banner of Google+, and needed kind of "consistency" of style. Everything is consistency ugly now, and Google+ guy is gone. Situation may improve as they starts dismantling the monstrosity. With respect to search quality - they hired some AI astronauts, neural networks do wonders for them. The goal is to train their system to accommodate astronauts' brains. They say it openly.

davidw 12y ago

Some other things: * Start in San Francisco by typing San Francisco. It still manages to find that city. Do 'directions' and type in Eugene, OR, USA - my home town, which is a fairly straightforward drive north. It can't find it and gives you bad results. * THEY KILLED TERRAIN MODE! This was a super-useful feature that I still use on my computer, but can no longer access on my mobile devices.

ejain 12y ago
The gradual disappearance of the terrain mode is ironic, given how their ads always seem to show happy young people on outdoor adventures...
magicalist 12y ago
Are you talking web or mobile? The web one found Eugene, OR just fine for me...
- davidw 12y ago
  It finds it ok searching for it, but when you put it as a destination from San Francisco, in the little box, it chokes.
  - jordanthoms 12y ago
    Works fine for me, and it has Eugene as an option after typing only the first few characters.
    - davidw 12y ago
      Here's what I get. Ends up somewhere in the Central Valley: https://maps.google.com/maps?saddr=San+Francisco,+CA&daddr=Eugene,+OR,+USA&hl=en&ll=37.792422,-121.633759&spn=0.979945,2.113495&sll=37.77493,-122.419416&sspn=0.980176,2.113495&geocode=FVJmQAIdKAe0-CkhAGkAbZqFgDH_rXbwZxNQSg%3BFcAzQgIdoAXM-CkjsgNKVfSQgDF-eNByL-aYHA&oq=euge&mra=ls&t=m&z=10 https://maps.google.com/maps?saddr=San+Francisco,+CA&daddr=E...
12y ago

ktran03 12y ago

Among the points already mentioned, I really hate the 'shake to report issue' feature. Stuck in traffic and frustrated, that thing comes up every time I hit a pothole. The thought that comes to mind everytime is "No Google, I don't want to report a problem, AT THIS MOMENT". Overall bad choice of control. Much more sensical to stick that in somewhere fitting, like settings.

roryhughes 12y ago
They could just put it in settings too and when you shake to show it there would be a button saying 'Don't show again on shake'.

justzisguyuknow 12y ago

Not long ago I did a Google Maps search (on Android) for "restaurants" in my brooklyn neighborhood... and got directed to the Restaurants.com offices in New Jersey. Effing pathetic.

dalek2point3 12y ago

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Mapping is too important a thing to let one company control the experience. The debate is not about whether Google Maps is good or bad, but if its bad for you there is little choice. You can't fix it. It's not a 100% there, but get on the OpenStreetMap train, fix your local area and have fun. And enjoy all the good stuff startups are building on top of that data. Here is an easy way to get started: http://www.openstreetmap.org/fixthemap http://www.openstreetmap.org/fixthemap

jameshart 12y ago

Something is, indeed, terribly terribly wrong in Google Maps algorithm land. For at least the last couple of weeks, Google Maps has been insisting that Basingstoke in England is called "Town Centre", and is one of the most important places in England. On a view of the entire country, it's displaying a label in the same font-size it uses for Southampton, Bristol and Liverpool marking Basingstoke as "Town Centre". Manchester and Birmingham aren't labelled at all. If this is the quality of mapping Google is providing for a major first-world English-speaking market - you should be grateful it even knows Nigeria exists.

blibble 12y ago
Basingstoke one of the most important places in England? pull the other one
- felicopter 12y ago
  He was referring to "Town Centre".
- MaysonL 12y ago
  Google Maps seems to think so.

wyck 12y ago

The old google maps allows you to paste KML file URL's into the search, now it doesn't work, you have to revert to the old version. ps. KML files were developed by Google for maps...

maxerickson 12y ago
Keyhole created KML for use in their earth viewer. Later, Google bought them and branded the software as Google Earth. Supporting KML in the web maps was just a neat thing Google also did.
- wyck 12y ago
  Ah did not know that, it was for sure a neat thing they did. I manage a site that uses KML files extensively for bike and running paths and this switch did cause a minor bump.
alphakappa 12y ago
KML was created by Keyhole (the precursor to Google Earth)
- cynwoody 12y ago
  And Keyhole was named after the original US spy satellites, the KH series†, dating from 1959. High-res imagery download was via parachute-net. †http://fly.historicwings.com/2013/02/kh-1-the-first-spy-satellite/ http://fly.historicwings.com/2013/02/kh-1-the-first-spy-sate...

personZ 12y ago

Trivia, but Gleghorn-South Kilgore is in Arkansas (AR) rather than Arizona (AZ). It is an interesting case and I wonder how Google decided that location was important to him. Contextual search is really tough, and the same choices that might give great answers for most answers can yield infuriating answers for other questions. In this case he is searching for something that doesn't exist, and a forest that probably gets searched a dozen times in aggregate a day on Google Maps, likely contrived for effect. That doesn't excuse those cases, but it isn't correlated with the cases where people got surprisingly cogent answers to their questions.

chapel 12y ago

This blog post is way off. The issue isn't that Google Maps couldn't find Sambisa Forest, it is that it has an issue with how it handles auto complete and pressing enter without selecting the choices it brings up. It quite frankly looks like a bug. You can see for yourself here: http://i.imgur.com/vX1xqp2.gif http://i.imgur.com/vX1xqp2.gif

aeturnum 12y ago
I disagree that the blog post is way off and I think the issue is that google can't find Sambisa Forest (it can't - as your gif demonstrates). It can find, "Sambisa Forest Reserve," which is great, but not the point of the blog. They are saying that google's ability to take natural language requests (sambisa forest, in-n-out east bay) and come up with an answer that corresponds what you searched for has seriously degraded. Personally, that is consistent with my experience. What is causing the problem (bug, difference in focus, etc) is also worth discussing. Why does google have so much trouble finding answers to queries that seem straightforward? Why can it suggest "Sambisa Forest Reserve" (based on "sambisa forest") and then have no idea how to find "sambia forest?" The title might be a little grandiose, but I think it's a fair question.

ignostic 12y ago

I can't say that I've had problems figuring the UI out, but I have had problems with the algorithm lately. If I had to guess I'd say it's Google often failing to factor in the location at some points, because I can rarely repeat the errors. For example, I searched Maps for a Mexican restaurant with my phone recently. It directed me to a place in Florida (hundreds of miles away). Seriously, when there's a highly-rated place on Google Maps with the same name not 3 miles from where you've located me? When I returned home and searched, I had no such problems - it pointed straight at the place. I've had the reverse happen as well. Is it the fact that I'm blocking so many cookies that Google is relying on? Or is there just a signal somewhere that tells Maps to override reason and relevance? I have tried alternatives, but the top contenders - like Bing and OpenMaps - have their own very special set of problems.. I'm not sure what to use at this point.

bla2 12y ago

I think the new UI is much much nicer than the old one.

microcolonel 12y ago

http://pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=71064 http://pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=71064 http://pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=71065 http://pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=71065 Keep in mind that Mapquest, Yahoo maps, Bing maps, and Nokia HERE have no record of it at all. So this is really between Google Maps and OpenStreetMap.

Friedduck 12y ago

It's nice to hear that I'm not the only one that feels this way. Search for local businesses has become nearly impossible. Whether it's failing to return anything or results that are wholly irrelevant, search and particularly maps have taken a large step backward. There's a great market opportunity here. (Really) old guard companies like YP still haven't responded to the shift and I infer from Google's backslide that it's not a priority for them. We can't buy everything from Amazon (esp. Hachette books!)

takeda 12y ago

For me the most annoying thing is that apparently I no longer can see traffic and directions at the same time.

nailer 12y ago

Google knows: - Home is in London - Work is in London - My most recent restaurant reviews are in London - My IP address is in London - My location, if you ask my browser, is in London Stop showing me a map of the US when I open Maps.

maxerickson 12y ago
I'm in the U.S. If I open https://maps.google.co.uk/ https://maps.google.co.uk/ it shows the UK. I expect there are people in places outside the U.S. who would be frustrated by maps.google.com showing their current location, so it isn't an easy thing to solve for everyone.
dwb 12y ago
I agree, and this is just a workaround, but use http://maps.google.co.uk http://maps.google.co.uk instead.

lindablus 12y ago

What ever happened to layers? I can't seem to find a way to show bike routes + terrain or bike routes + traffic or any other combination.

nextstep 12y ago

I'm glad tha Apple maps is steadily improving. There needs to be competition so that free services will compete for users by improving the user experience. I think iOS 8 will include major updates to Apple maps that will integrate transit directions. Apple recently bought the mapping company Embark along with a few other transit-related acquisitions.

abruzzi 12y ago
The problem is Apple Maps isn't usable outside an iOS device or a specific "Maps" app on Macs only. Share links open google maps, unless you have the above machines. This makes it less than useful for general use.
mempko 12y ago
There has been free competition for ages. Google just has all the mind share.

ejain 12y ago

I blame the current state of Google Maps on micro-optimization, and overconfidence in the ability to predict what you want.

jhoechtl 12y ago

Frankly, I would not even stop at Maps. Since a year or so Google makes so intensely use of all sort of metadata (my browsing interests in the future, the places if have visited, my contacts on G+) that the internet has become a small world for me. I find myself increasingly using duckduckgo just because of this. Heck, as I use the public DNS servers of google, even deleting Cookies or using browser porn mode doesn't help much. It's an example that overly smartness actually degrades the experience for me rather than being and improvement.

andybak 12y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble

annapowellsmith 12y ago

https://www.google.com/maps?output=classic https://www.google.com/maps?output=classic

Mithaldu 12y ago

Interesting thing here: Reading the article i was wondering what's the fuss, because Google Maps looked and acted like it ever did. Turned out that, because i was using Opera 12, it was still giving me the old Google Maps. So if you really want the old one on the desktop, that's one workaround. :)

GigabyteCoin 12y ago

I concur. Google maps needs some serious work. It's as if it's running on auto-pilot right now or something. I can't quite put my finger on it, but something needs to be changed.

__david__ 12y ago

I can't get street view to work at all with the new maps. I just get a black screen whenever it tries. Is that happening to anyone else? I'm on Firefox beta (30).

keehun 12y ago

This is beyond creepy: http://www.theheraldng.com/us-marines-satellite-locate-missing-girls-sambisa-forest-bringbackourgirls/ http://www.theheraldng.com/us-marines-satellite-locate-missi... TechCrunch randomly chose a thing to search and that's where they are? Granted, it's a huge 60,000kmsq area... But of every place TechCrunch could've searched for on Google Maps, it's the same place?

mhartl 12y ago

I didn't understand what the big deal was until I drove to downtown LA last night. Google Maps turn-by-turn directions instructed me to make a U turn in the middle of the 110S freeway (which would have crashed me into the center divider). Then, on the 10W, it kept trying to have me get off the freeway and then get right back on. I don't know WTF happened, but this is an all-hands-on deck situation for Google: must fix ASAHP.

maxerickson 12y ago
In a small town I know, I think they switched their data provider (I guess to the Census TIGER data). I don't have a great memory of what they had, but I recently noticed some alignment problems that I hadn't noticed in the past. What I think I remember isn't a great point of reference, but a switch to a cheaper, lower quality data set would explain problems with routing.