Is it just me or has the usefulness of Google Maps declined substantially over the past year or so? A miscellaneous listing of complaints:
* It supports double-tap to zoom, but the first tap always causes it to lose context and open whatever I happened to tap on. This is extremely annoying when searching for restaurants in an area with one hand because that first tap will always cause me to lose my search context.
* Places I know are there don't show up, even when I zoom in to the point where the only thing in the viewport is the block where the store is located.
* Street names are still impossible to discover. In NYC, whenever I find a place that's on an avenue I have to scroll blocks left and right just to find out what street the place is on because street labels aren't automatically placed in the viewport.
* I routinely make a journey to places that turn out to be closed. I'm not talking about little mom and pop shops, although plenty of those are reported as open right now despite being permanently closed. I'm talking about major, newsworthy bankruptcies. I used to see Toy 'R Us on my map for months after the stores themselves shut down. It's gotten to the point where I call ahead whenever I want to go to a store I've never been to.
* Automatically generated markers obscuring mass transit markers. I recently spent ten minutes trying desperately to find a subway station that I knew was close to me because its marker was hidden underneath a Dunkin' Donuts. I've literally never set foot in a Dunkin' Donuts, something which Google literally knows for a fact, and yet it decided that notifying me of that store's location was more important than the entrance to the mass transit system I use every single day.
* While we're at it, let's talk about the little store markers. Google is running an ad auction on each impression, and that the reason you see useless stores that have nothing to offer you is because they decided to pay their way into your map. It's hard to believe Google is "organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible" when they shove Dunkin' Donuts in my face.
If I seem mad, I'm not. I'm disappointed. So disappointed that I did the unthinkable and installed Apple Maps, and I have to say, I'm very glad I did.
It's not just you. Google Maps seems to be stuck in this sad state of being almost, but not quite, good at being a map. Street names in particular seem like a low-hanging fruit that would vastly improve the UX, but for some reason, they don't do anything about it.
I don't know for sure, but I think that's a problem that they had previously solved - I remember being impressed years ago by the fact that the street names always moved on zoom or scroll so they were always in view.
Update: I did some testing and this still works for me - every time I zoom or scroll, the street labels move to remain in frame. Tried on Chrome desktop, iOS native app, and iOS Safari, same behavior in all three.
Just tried it in Chrome, Firefox, and on my phone.
Can't get the street name for the office that I work in. It's a big street here...but nada. Have to shift over a few screens to get the name to finally show up.
Obviously, I know what street I work on. But the problem is that this happens consistently whenever I have a location pin in GMaps (i.e., destination, etc.)--the street of the pin rarely shows up unless I play around with the view.
I've never understood these street name complaints on Hacker News either. It's always kept the street names in the frame for me. If I zoom in a lot, it even starts repeating the street name over and over[1], getting denser and denser as I zoom in more.
I'm not sure why or when. But I often find no matter how far I zoom into a street, it refuses to show me any street name. This is even if it's literally the only street visible on my screen.
I had this happen roughly two weeks ago on my iPad with multiple people around me all scratching their heads. I look at the same location today and I see the street name....
It happens when there are other points or an overlay. I think the buffer they put around text boxes suppresses the street.
In notice this on my street, as there’s a business, park and firehouse. Most of the time the street name is blocked. Also see it a lot in places like Queens with irregular streets with lots of points.
+1 for street names in view port. I tend to research the route and then put away the phone when I'm on my bike. What is the name of the street where I need to turn right?
Also, if I have to go straight ahead for a long time, the street names might change several times, but I don't care much. I'd rather know I need to go straight for 5km, than go straight for 100m, then go straight again for 800m ....
Google doesn't need to go for any of the low-hanging fruit because their PoI data is still the best of the Google Maps / Apple Maps / Maps.me trifecta. Apple Maps is slowly improving their PoI and other data, but for mobile devices is only available on iOS.
"Google Maps seems to be stuck in this sad state of being almost, but not quite, good at being a map"
Perhaps this is a general phenomenon of our society that is increasing, being almost but not quite competent, because producing the "minimum viable product" is the most economically efficient approach and due to general improvement in data analysis and optimization, companies are getting better at substituting some exploitation of cognitive biases for unnecessary competence.
Some more stuff that never seems to be getting fixed:
- When making turns in complex road netwrok, they don't zoom in. I can't tell you how many times I have taken wrong turns because zoom level is too coarse while making turns.
- They often give routes with way too many turnings as if making a turn has no cost. Combine this with above and in many places Google Maps is a hell to use.
- No one is still bothering to add select scenic route option. European map service like viamichelin.com does this very nicely. So many wasted road trips.
- Little things like after trip is "complete", they suddenly zoom out all the way. This is utterly nonsensical. Most of the time I still actually need to find the place in dense urban area after parking.
- The "Save" feature allows no annotation, icons, coloring. They even chose default color and icon so that its hard to distinguish.
- No way to find restaurants or businesses using more useful filters like most reviewed as opposed to stupid highest rating.
Not totally related to your point, but it seems to me that Google doesn't care about the quality of Google Maps as much as Apple cares about the quality of Apple Maps.
For example, my house had its address changed by our county in late November when a new street was cut nearby and the location of our driveway changed due to right of way. Our address was updated in the USPS AMS database back in January. As you can imagine, I wanted Map providers to have my most updated information as soon as possible so that people could easily find my address when I gave it to them and so when UPS or Fedex people look up my address on their phones, they can find it.
In Google Maps, I've attempted to contribute an edit several times: each time with links to county tax data, county records, county maps, city maps, and a personal statement explaining the situation. Every time Google rejects it without action or any message other than "not applied". I'm pretty sure there is someone manually reviewing these requests as it always takes a variable amount of time before I get the rejection. It's really disappointing to put so much effort into editing someone else's data - for free - and have it be rejected outright without any sort of explanation.
Now, I went and I did the exact same thing with Apple Maps! My edit was applied within a week and the Map is updated - iPhone users can easily find my house. It seems to me that while maybe Apple spent several years playing catch up with Google, at this point they are hungry to do well by their customers and are extremely responsive to quality concerns. I've not personally had a problem with Apple Maps in several years and don't see myself leaving Apple's platform any time soon
Also a pain-point -- 2.6 million people live in Queens, NY, but Google Maps gets the city wrong for the vast majority of them, and it causes major headaches for residents (since so many services rely on Google Maps), and they have yet to fix it, and reject any edits that attempt to do so for them.
Picking a random example -- "1880 Willoughby" is in the neighborhood of Ridgewood in Queens. Either "Queens" or "Ridgewood" are acceptable as the city.
However, Google Maps calls it "Flushing", which is a totally different neighborhood 10 miles away. Apparently this has to do with the history of where the central post offices were located for given areas in Queens, but no other online map provider struggles with this distinction.
Queens isn’t a city, it’s a borough/county that used to be a bunch of little towns. It’s like asking for directions in Boston using Suffolk, MA.
Queens was like Long Island of the 1950s... the house I grew up in had been a 250 acre farm, with 50 acres left as late as 1898. There are also plenty of dupe street addresses in Queens, especially if you leave a hyphen out. The reference to “Flushing” is a legacy left over from the pre-zipcode era.
Not the OP, but I'd much rather contribute that information to OpenStreetMap so that it's freely available to anyone who wants to use it (including Google!).
Google's data is copyrighted and open street maps is not per their policy "If you alter or build upon our data, you may distribute the result only under the same licence" [0]. They even mention google maps in their privacy policy: "OSM contributors are reminded never to add data from any copyrighted sources (e.g. Google Maps or printed maps) without explicit permission from the copyright holders."
So no they cannot use it and a quick search looks like apple still relies on Tomtom which is also copyrighted [1] and thus they cannot use it either.
Why should they work for Google for free? Google Maps is a business and should pay for the accuracy of its data. Or OP can contribute to OpenstreetMap to the point it will contain enough and accurate data to be a preferred source for this kind of information. It won't automatically solve the problem with scammers, but with several users policing the accuracy of the data, instead of only Google being the gatekeeper, several solutions become possible. For instance, the Wikipedia model.
I understand your point, but Google maps is also a useful and free. I think contributions to both OSM and Google is worthy and helps everyone. I personally use Google maps in most cases and contribute back to it, I see no issues with this.
This is just an anecdote, but I've alerted Google to a particular mistake in Maps multiple times and it's never been fixed.
A light rail station in Portland is accessed from the bridge above it, but Google Maps is unaware that they're connected. Because of that Maps leaves it out of directions; commuting options are completely incorrect. If you manually select it as a destination it will give you ludicrous directions like this: https://goo.gl/maps/XYTZwNiRkipzNHse9
Stranger still, the northbound side of the same station connects just fine.
That's worse than weird, that's downright dangerous. There are no sidewalks on that street, and cars travel at 55-75 mph on it. There's also no way to get from the street to the station; the overhead bridge is the only way.
That's pretty shocking, that station has been there for three years.
Lol. And google ignores those edits and requests. As I said in a prior comment, I live seconds away from Google on Moffett Field and my address is still wrong on Google maps, but correct in Apple Maps. The building I live in was built decades ago with a street that was there when Moffett was a blimp base in the 1930s.
It's a map. Street names should be first class citizens. But alas. Google knows better than I do.
> I routinely make a journey to places that turn out to be closed. I'm not talking about little mom and pop shops, although plenty of those are reported as open right now despite being permanently closed. I'm talking about major, newsworthy bankruptcies.
I made the trip out to Coney Island from Manhattan only to find it closed that day....
Agreed. Furthermore, Google Maps is full of fake reviews with only the option to "Flag as inappropriate" and no option to properly report a fake review with supporting evidence - which I would do, if the option was there!
Let's not forget State Routes and similar. Okay, so Main Street is also State Route 434, but 99.9999% of people call it Main Street and may not even be aware it's SR 434.
I just finished a 2 month road trip and used a mixture of Google Maps and Apple Maps and have to agree, Google Maps was surprisingly sub par. This really surprised me.
The largest offender was routing from an Airbnb in Northern California to a restaurant nearby about 14 miles away. Google put us on a path that would take 3 hours! I had to double check to make sure it wasn't on walking or public transit mode. It was the most convoluted thing I've ever seen. Every time I re-entered it gave the same ridiculous route.
Very strange routing like this happened with regularity. Apple Maps had no such issues (and routed properly around closures). Add on the fact that the reviews in Google Maps are worthless because everything gets 5 stars, as we got further into the trip we pretty just only used Apple Maps.
It's not just the maps. The signal to noise ratio on search has gotten worse too. It used to be you'd get your good results buried underneath obviously bullshit content farms doing absurd SEO.
Now it's buried underneath somewhat relevant content that is either manipulative/sensationalist, actively trying to spread disinformation, or just hosts a very generic pabulum version of what you're looking for. Instead of trying to find useful information amidst irrelevant nonsense I feel like I spend a lot more time now trying to sift out useful information for relevant nonsense, which is much harder.
This has been seriously grinding at me lately. Google is pretty much useless for me personally as a search engine lately. I find it so frustrating that I just end up not wanting to search for things.
- It ignores that I tick "Australia Only", and shows me endless US results and international results despite me KNOWING there's Australian results for the thing I'm searching for, eg products in a store. I have to use site:.au in nearly every search.
- It insists I mean some other word that my query was close to, and doesn't give any way to say otherwise. Sometimes it shows a "Did you mean ____?" but a lot of the time it just doesn't.
- The sheer amount of spam in the results now is mind boggling. Searching for lots of common products or projects now is like trying to find that one email you know is in your spam folder in Gmail. Pages and pages of crap until you get the page you're after.
- and so much more I could write a book
I feel like Google Search is no longer about giving a user the page they want as quickly as possible, but to get a user to click through as many bullshit ad-filled content farms as they can BEFORE giving them the real result purely to make more money for Google. Or at least some point somewhere between Hanlon's Razor and "We know it's broken but we won't fix it because we make more money this way"... and closer to the later.
> It insists I mean some other word that my query was close to, and doesn't give any way to say otherwise. Sometimes it shows a "Did you mean ____?" but a lot of the time it just doesn't.
I noticed a large uptick in this kind of behavior for the queries I was making a year or two ago, and it's what finally spurred me to make the switch over to DuckDuckGo. It's extremely frustrating how Google search will ignore a quoted term and instead return useless results for a different, but more popular, term.
A lot of things have changed in this team since its long gone golden days. Previously it was run by Marissa Mayer and she was given essentially a blank check (being ex-girlfriend of founder also didn't hurt). She went out in massive spending spree and bought tons of startups, started streetview project, got much better aerial data and so on. Thanks to her aggressive investment and ambition, she managed to make Google Maps better than maps many government themselves had at the time. After she had to report to Huber and she left, the team had been in turmoil with not much of ambition and just usual executives thinking about how to make profits. So vast amount of affort in recent years has gone into those stuff and less into making maps unconditionally better. There is also no competition now that Apple Maps have pretty much given up matching the coverage and details of Google Maps.
This is exactly the kind of things we need to worry about when monopoly invest in making super good "free stuff". They will put ton of money to leapfrog but then they will realize that they have created massive capital barrier for others to enter the market. So they will now just loiter and squeeze the customers out for profits.
I've almost completely switched to Apple maps. I have to say, right now, my biggest annoyance is no matter how far I zoom in, the street text keeps getting smaller so I can read it!
Maybe this isn't ideal, but setting the system text size in Settings should make the street labels larger. You can put text size adjustment in Control Center too for easier access.
My experience mirrors yours exactly. And as of about two years ago, Apple maps has been more than sufficient as a replacement - they’re actually better now, in my opinion.
The new iOS 13 street view is vastly better than Google now in terms of quality and fidelity. Apple isn’t playing around when it comes to improving Maps.
A very simple feature they're missing is filtering by what is open now (or by the time I can arrive). Would be super useful when searching for a restaurant or store.
I live at Moffett Field, literally a stone’s throw from Google HQ and my street address doesn’t show up on Google maps despite repeated attempts to contact and correct. My street shows up, but not the actual number. Apple Maps however, is perfectly accurate for my address. Essentially in Google’s backyard and they can’t get it right. So it makes me suspicious of the quality of the entire system.
My experience has been very similar, and to this day I'm still dismayed at the negative opinion people have of Apple Maps. Most of the people I've asked haven't used it in years, instead just defaulting to Google Maps.
I've also encountered a surprising number of people that just assume all maps are Google Maps. Kind of like the ones that don't know there's email besides Gmail.
Shows how important first impressions are. Apple maps was terrible on release and Apple deleted google maps from people’s phones when it came out.
I was visiting Costa Rica at the time and the small town I was in which was thoroughly mapped in google maps didn’t exist in Apple maps at all. An infuriating experience that made me never want to use Apple maps again.
Apple didn’t “delete Google Maps” when Apple maps came out.
The Maps app was written by Apple from day one. It used Google’s data. Google wouldn’t allow Apple to do turn by turn directions without Apple giving Google more user data. Apple had to either find other sources for map data or give up user privacy.
Yeah, I remember when, just after release, on a trip between Woodland, CA, and Davis, CA, it decided to route me through Woodland Hills, CA. (Not “it mistook a Woodland address for Woodland Hills, but it routed from Woodland to Davis by way of Woodland Hills, adding ~800 miles to an ~12 mile trip.)
If only you'd followed its directions, you'd have gone on an amazing days-long adventure that ended in your finding a fortune in buried gold. Alas, you second-guessed the navigation genie.
It was terrible when it first came out. Has it really changed?
For instance, a nearby road intersects with another road at a cloverleaf. The exits are marked road2 North and road2 South just a short distance from each other.
But apple maps directions just said "exit right road2" or something like that. I submitted a change at the very beginning and it never changed. I could probably check again.
In general dedicated systems are WAY better at these things, probably because you don't want to piss off a paying customer (who may be a car manufacturer)
I recently bought a garmin portable gps for a car without nav and it's really quite good.
Very clear directions when navigating, shows you and tells you which lane to be in, live traffic, touchscreen interface, voice command. Everything is offline so it's more private than apple :)
I've got a positive opinion of Apple Maps, and would preferentially use it (I'd even pay a subscription fee for it) if it were available on Android. I can't use iPhones for various reasons.
The permanently closed point is the most salient in my mind. There was a business that was closed for, what I was told, over 6 months in my area; Google said it was still open. Later I checked out the business on Google maps, but this time the hours were updated to say closed every day.
This rant about a mobile app seems only tangentially (at best) related to the article/topic. You don't actually discuss anything in the article, but seemed to have keyed off of 'google maps' in the title to inspire your off topic rant.
* It supports double-tap to zoom, but the first tap always causes it to lose context and open whatever I happened to tap on. This is extremely annoying when searching for restaurants in an area with one hand because that first tap will always cause me to lose my search context.
* Places I know are there don't show up, even when I zoom in to the point where the only thing in the viewport is the block where the store is located.
* Street names are still impossible to discover. In NYC, whenever I find a place that's on an avenue I have to scroll blocks left and right just to find out what street the place is on because street labels aren't automatically placed in the viewport.
* I routinely make a journey to places that turn out to be closed. I'm not talking about little mom and pop shops, although plenty of those are reported as open right now despite being permanently closed. I'm talking about major, newsworthy bankruptcies. I used to see Toy 'R Us on my map for months after the stores themselves shut down. It's gotten to the point where I call ahead whenever I want to go to a store I've never been to.
* Automatically generated markers obscuring mass transit markers. I recently spent ten minutes trying desperately to find a subway station that I knew was close to me because its marker was hidden underneath a Dunkin' Donuts. I've literally never set foot in a Dunkin' Donuts, something which Google literally knows for a fact, and yet it decided that notifying me of that store's location was more important than the entrance to the mass transit system I use every single day.
* While we're at it, let's talk about the little store markers. Google is running an ad auction on each impression, and that the reason you see useless stores that have nothing to offer you is because they decided to pay their way into your map. It's hard to believe Google is "organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible" when they shove Dunkin' Donuts in my face.
If I seem mad, I'm not. I'm disappointed. So disappointed that I did the unthinkable and installed Apple Maps, and I have to say, I'm very glad I did.