Every time I use Google Maps, I feel so helpless, and frankly, stupid. On Desktop, I simply can't figure it out how to switch to A-B route mode, nor how to trigger street view. I literally just click randomly in a more and more frustrated way until suddenly the option appears.
And on Android I just avoid the app. I hate that I couldn't turn off the automatic compass. Every time I finally manage to orient myself when in a new place, the map starts spinning like crazy.
Well, it’s not built for you. Cows may not like milking machines either, but the farmer doesn’t care. Google Maps exists to further Google’s surveillance platform and search monopoly. User preference is incidental.
It’s just like Internet Explorer on Windows 20 years ago. Microsoft only needed to make a good product long enough to leverage it into their other monopoly products, then they no longer gave a shit. We can hope Google Maps suffers the same fate.
> Cows may not like milking machines either, but the farmer doesn’t care. Google Maps exists to further Google’s surveillance platform and search monopoly. User preference is incidental.
I can’t help but roll my eyes reading stuff like this. Cows have no choice in their lives, Google Maps users can switch to an (increasingly competitive) alternative with very little switching cost.
Of course it’s in Google’s interest to keep their product usable.
Google Maps exist(ed) to get the people who wrote Google Maps promoted. The other stuff doesn't really matter. Google is not well run enough to be able to care about those things!
Ok, off topic, but having grown up around cows, they will line up each day waiting for their chance to get on the milking machine. They very much do like them.
Oh, you’re totally right, of course :) It’s also not true that farmers don’t care— practically all of them do. I was reaching for a quick metaphor, even though it’s not an exact fit.
I'm skeptical that young people fare much better. Google Maps feels like it's in constant tension between all the super powerful features it has, and some PM who wants the UI to be as minimalistic as possible. End result is inscrutable.
And while you're carefully dragging the "man" over to the street you're interested in (an interesting multi-hand challenge with most trackpads), Maps starts wildly gyrating and sliding the map around in an infinite scroll because you didn't center the "man" within one second or whatever.
I hate that UI. Why can't we just click on the "man", and then click on a spot to drop it?
>I hate that UI. Why can't we just click on the "man", and then click on a spot to drop it?
You can, actually. When you click it, all of the roads that have street view are highlighted with blue color. In this mode you can just click on the roads to go to street view.
For years now I have dragged the man to the place, because there was no indication to me that just clicking the man and then the place would work. But it does! Thanks for sharing that.
They did a major redesign of the interface maybe ~8 years ago, and ever since I don't know where anything is.
Lately I'm particularly baffled by the bar at the top, which is a way to search without typing. I click "Transit" and I'm presented with a list filled mostly with bus stops, with no filters for rail etc. Great. Does it also switch me to the transit overlay, which might be helpful? No, of course not.
> Every time I finally manage to orient myself when in a new place, the map starts spinning like crazy.
There's a "Keep North up" option while navigating, and I think if you click the "center map on me" button while not navigating one of the states will keep north up.
IMO smartphone compasses and gps are still too noisy to use anything other than "keep north up" as the default. Trying to navigate while your pin spins and jumps around on a map is dangerous and difficult, having the entire map spin around at the same time is just madness. I wouldn't be surprised if this decision hasn't killed someone.
No, tapping the "centre map on me" button switches between auto-twirly and north-is-up-by-default, but even when in north-is-up-by-default mode, it'll still misinterpret you pinching to zoom as thinking you want the map rotated. I hate it. I'd turn on a setting to have North as up always, completely disabling the rotate-by-two-fingers "feature". I can't imagine anyone actually finding that feature useful for anything.
The other setting I'd love to see is to switch off re-framing. Let's say I select a destination, then I'm curious how long it will take to get there, so I select directions. Then I scroll around a bit to see other things nearby and spot something interesting. I tap on it, and try to get directions there too, except directions is already active, so I either have to go through the rigmarole of "add stop, delete the other one", or press the back button a few times to come out of directions. Except when I do, Maps first zooms out to show my entire route, then zooms back in to the original destination, and now I have to scroll around and try and find that second thing again. I'd rather it just left the zoom alone, and let me choose where I want to be looking. Sure, have a button to frame what you're currently looking at if you want, but stop jerking all over the place.
If your problem occurs because of accidental zooming with two fingers, then there’s a solution for you.
You can zoom map with just one finger (I use thumb) – do almost a double click but instead of releasing the second click, hold it pressed. Now as you hold it, just move thumb up and down to zoom in and out.
It’s a feature I discovered accidentally a few years ago, and in my experience pretty much no one knows about it, but once shown, everyone finds it extremely useful.
The other way to get streetview is to turn it on as a layer on top of the map. You do that by hovering over the square on the bottom left. The most used layer is probably satellite imagery, but I occasionally use traffic and altitude lines as well.
Love Apple Maps. It has progressively gotten so much better and awesome. I don’t think I ever use my iPhone and get frustrated. Leaving android in 2015 was the best decision I made.
I often open Apple Maps and google maps in the same location, just for fun. Google Maps is sinfully ugly and cluttered now in comparison. Whatever the merits or demerits of Material Design are, its cleanliness and elegance hasn’t made it down to Google Naps. And while I’d grant that maps is a hard problem to solve, Apple’s example has been out there for a bit now.
Apple Maps has a good UI and bad data. Their problem is the same problem people face when anyone tries to unseat an incumbent platform: they don't have the audience, so people don't contribute to their knowledge base. Apple Maps shows an Indian restaurant in my neighborhood as open on Saturdays, but they haven't been open on Saturdays in years. They didn't even update their hours on their own website, but the hours are correct on Google Maps. Why? Because business owners maintain their info on Google Maps, because it reaches their customers. And the customers do their own editing of business data as well. So Apple is stuck at a point with not enough users to edit the data, and they are either not climbing out of that rut or they are climbing out very slowly.
I just compared for my town. Popular cafe on Google maps has 844 reviews, 0 on Apple Maps. Another cafe, 202 reviews on Google, 1 on Apple Maps plus Apple hasn't updated the name. Also I quite like seeing the review text on Google, gives you a sense of what people like about a place and whether the review is genuine or just a grump. Apple seems to only show quite a simplified rating, although I've not used it enough to determine if there's more info in there.
Apple is probably better in the US where it has had a lot more use. It's pretty poor here for the main thing I use it for - finding businesses.
I want to use Apple Maps more, but in some parts of the world, the amount of info on Apple Maps (locations of places, restaurants, etc) is TINY compared to Google.
This is true, and it would be ideal if Apple Maps had more up-to-date business info.
But perhaps it’s okay for business directories to be separate tools from maps. Before the internet, you’d have Yellow Pages at home and a map in the car, right?
If we can’t accept that, then we might be stuck navigating with Google’s subpar app forever. I personally don’t mind looking up the business I’m interested in online before I navigate to it—in most cases I want to check their current hours on their own website or Facebook page anyway as even Google’s info can be out of date.
I find Apple Maps incredibly frustrating. The endless zooming-in and out when approaching turns. I want a consistent layout and structure when I glance down at a map. Not some gee-whiz-shiny display that only works well if you have been watching the entire animation.
It also seems to be deliberately obtuse when you want to zoom around the map. Like, how dare you not fully trust its routing.
I honestly love that zoom feature, because with Google Maps, I can't count how many times I've missed an exit due to thinking the blue line was just a little further up, and there's multiple exists clustered together.
I would switch to Apple Maps if there was a web-based version. I often search Google Maps in Firefox on Windows and then star map locations that I then pick up in the Google Maps app on my phone. I know the components of a web-based Apple Maps exist because sites like DuckDuckGo use them, but AFAICT there's no way to log into Apple Maps on the web.
Did you read the article? It is about the mobile experience....
One of the quotes was: "Google Maps still holds around 80% of the mobile market. But in recent years, I’ve found myself getting increasingly frustrated with the Google Maps experience, especially when it comes to general navigation and exploration of a map area."
And I wanted to say that overall, I barely feel any frustration as an iOS user. It is the truth for me, and my opinion. So I'm gonna say it.
What I don't understand is where there seem to be two versions of google maps. Sometimes I can get streetview, but if I access it about half the time I can't.
I feel there are a number of "modes", or, I don't know, "levels" maybe, that offer different features and are not intuitive (for me). I think a long time ago, you were either on the map, or you were in navigation, or you were in Street View. But now I get the impression that there's steps in between, like: you have maybe soft-selected a route, but you're not quite in navigation mode, yet you're unable to drop a pin somewhere else, so you have to go back without knowing how many steps exactly, that sort of funny business.
There are two web versions of Google Maps. There's the horrible one that you can reach from the search results page if you made a specifically commercial-local request, like [1]. There is the same thing on proper Google Maps[2].
Every time I encounter the first version I'm dumbfounded that it still exists.
Its nerfed features make for such a frustrating user experience. I can't think of a reason for it to exist as its own thing. I'd love to know the rationale.
Yes, the apps have not been merged yet, but the article notes that Waze no longer exists as an independent entity internally and just had major layoffs, so it certainly sounds like the writing is on the wall.
It would be great if they replaced the Waze search with Google. I really like the waze mapping and interface, but when I use voice to search for a destination, it is nearly useless here in Sydney.
For example, if I search for an exact local place to eat, the top result is some completely irrelevant store on the other side of the city, followed by a list of useless distant results that I have to scroll through to, maybe, find the place I want to go to.
Whereas, the Google voice search finds it first go and starts navigating to it.
It's inflammatory, but this website is worse. There's some video playing of a stranger eating mustard skittles taking up the bottom quarter of the screen.
Wow, I tried disabling ublock and it is pretty bad. There are exactly 0 words of the body of the article visible when first loading the page on a 1440p monitor, two thirds of the screen are ads...
That’s funny I did not notice it when I read the article. Had to go back to check again; I think my mind just blurred it all out and let me focus on the tiny scrollable section where the story is.
Vivaldi's ad blocker thankfully means I have no idea what you're referring to. Stay tuned though, by next year they'll have ads of your friends eating mustard skittles, whether they do or not.
I just had to check on my iPhone with Firefox and ProtonVPN (doing what it can at) filtering ads. and yes, I saw it, too. that's so fucked up. time to go back to some custom Android ROM with Firefox + uBlock.
Yeah, this pissed me off too. I’m currently combing through iOS safari settings trying to find out how “allow videos to autoplay” was ever enabled (there is a setting for this in “accessibility” but doesn’t seem to fix this website at least so I’m still looking)
Sadly, autoplay-blocking seems to be even more of an arms race than ad blocking.
Apart from that, as long as this garbage takes up screen space, it's still not enough.
I hope that the person who invented the "sticky video" idea has a long and happy life, in a completely different job, completely separated from anything that has to do with marketing.
This is the dark pattern that I hate most on mobile by a 1000 miles.
Really, if people here wouldn't use ad blockers and desktop computers in the majority, noone would be discussing the article at all.
It's not realistic to discuss UX while plastering your website with things like "mustard skittles hahaha" unless you want to deceive people and dumb them down.
Google Maps is actually one of the few Google properties that has not got bad. I appreciate their reviews since they don't have Yelp's problem of extorting businesses.
I find that it is often difficult/immpossible to get a sense of scale.
The width and detail of streets is adjusted such that it is not obvious if I'm looking at things a few hundred metres apart, or a few kilometers! And there is no scale indication on the screen! I guess they want a "clean" look but it's not so helpful.
Take a look at Garmin aviation maps. You're offered only a specific set of scales (not an infinitely adjustable range), there is always an indication of scale, and the detail appropriately hints at the scale.
The lack of street names unless you hit the zoom level just right (or seemingly never) reinforces the adage that systems focus on perpetuating themselves not providing the service they were built for.
Probably not a popular opinion here, but I like Google Maps. Sure there's some clutter, but it's pretty good at navigation, public transit and searching for places. I don't know any better alternative.
The 3D view is a hilariously bad anti feature imo. Like the demo screenshot showing the Golden Gate Bridge and obscuring the actual road on the map is kind of funny.
I also hate not being able to keep north fixed on the screen unless I'm in CarPlay. That just doesn't make sense.
I generally like the 3d view, but I had a hilarious experience up in Marin where I was cresting a hill and planning to take an exit, with a turn I didn't know coming right after the exit.
The entirety of the next 3 steps, precisely what I cared about the most, was totally obscured by the hill in the 3d view.
The exact same hill I was seeing out my windshield. The hill in my windshield was the reason I was glancing at my mapping app for further guidance. facepalm
Apple maps is the only mapping software that's taken me to the wrong place, and it's done it several times. It also tried to put me into a permanent loop once, in Branson. Luckily it was a very small loop, or I might not have noticed, being a tourist.
One time on a very long road trip across Canada, Apple Maps decided to route me two hours north of the main highway on a smaller (but paved) highway, and then across a 200km long gravel backroad, back to the main highway. I had been driving for about 10 hours at the point and didn't really notice until it told me to turn onto the gravel road. It's pretty much the only time I was afraid I'd be stranded in the middle of nowhere, since I was on about a quarter tank of gas at that point and out of cell service, so I was unsure if going back to the main highway or across the backroad would be closer to a gas station.
In the end I took the backroad and ended up just making it after driving on the "empty tank" light for about 80km (which is surprising how long it lasted!). My fault for zoning out and blindly trusting GPS!
I often find Apple Maps navigation frustrating. For instance, they don't show which platform a train is leaving from (in London). Knowing that there is a train leaving in 3 minutes somewhere on 15 platform train station isn't helpful.
what alternate reality is this? Google Maps has never stagnated ever. Tons of new features have been added every year since it was first created. Go read the maps blog posts, watch the google i/o videos, or just search for it and you'll see 10s of thousands of articles listing the new features from each year.
It's our lived reality, not the SWE-centric reality. We don't really want new features, we want the existing features to work better. The voice output on Google Maps is simply bad. It calls out turns when there are other available turns before the one you're supposed to take, and doesn't say anything to disambiguate. It draws which lane to be in for your exit but doesn't call it out. It doesn't say what you need to know for compound instructions (e.g., exit followed closely by fork). You must look at the map to be able to follow the instructions. Apple Maps does these things better and that's why we prefer to use it (with screen mirroring to the car).
And yes, we even like the 3D view. It helps provide context faster than the 2D view, even if it doesn't always render the best information. Every product has room for improvement, and Apple Maps has been improving. Google Maps isn't usefully better now than it was in 2015.
Compare it to the sheer readability of open street maps though, and you realise the vast white spaces next to the yellow lines are full of interesting buildings.
If anyone wants to try it, OrganicMaps on F-droid do a fantastic job delivering raster maps with navigation
Except I find OrganicMaps to have an even worse version of the problems of Google Maps for the exact reason you say it's good. I mostly don't care about all of the "interesting buildings". I care about the one interesting building that I'm trying to get to. Often, I literally cannot get it to show me the business I care about because it's the ground-floor coffee shop in a 10-story office building, and it would rather try to have 40 tiny pins for every legal firm and startup crammed onto the building than show me the ground-floor option that 95% of people would probably want.
I get it - they have no information about me. They maybe don't even have a way to understand or even guess which one I may care about, but in a city with any amount of density you need some fairly strong heuristics on what pins you're showing to filter out the valid businesses that you're unlikely to care about.
It has the most up to date business data for any map provider, and by far, their location/points of interest search is the best, also by far, they have the best satellite images available for "free" and their StreetView integrated map product is way, way ahead of the competition. Which means that, yes, GMaps is the best out there.
For those purposes yes, I can't disagree and use it myself. However often enough I actually want a map to simply orient myself or get a sense of the geography of a place, and for that purpose Google Maps is rather useless.
When you zoom out, everything is just green, no matter if it's actually a forest or not (okay, some areas with agricultural usage have been mapped, but it's far from comprehensive where I live), and when you zoom in everything is just a featureless grey-on-grey, with no way to distinguish between built-up areas and various kinds of open spaces, tree-covered or not. (Only "parks" still get shown in green – and somehow in France Google has decided to include large scale "natural parks" covering hundreds of square kilometres or more in that category, in which case once you zoom in everything in that area is shown on a green background, which is equally useless.)
I've commented on this before[1] as have others[2] but Google Maps is willfully malicious software that I am certain has killed cyclists and motorcyclists by re-routing onto dangerous routes after navigation has started. Why this dangerous 'feature' cannot be disabled is infuriating.
Osmand should be on every single phone. It works when nothing else does including your cell connection. It's saved my butt a dozen times at this point.
I've been using on this trip to Norway and the detail is excellent.
(That said, the only place I found, including undersea tunnels, that I didn't get signal was in the lower car hold of the ferry. This place has infrastructure.)
I use it back home to label businesses and add other points to the map.
Organic Maps uses OSM data offline and is a little friendlier.
Big issue with Google Maps is that it doesn’t zoom in properly when you are complex turn. Number of times I miss the turn on Google Maps is so high compared to Apple Maps. Apple Maps even integrates with Apple Watch and taps on your wrist to ensure you don’t miss turn. More recently I also found Google Maps is not keeping up with closed roads in real time. Gradually but surely, I have moved on to Apple Maps. I never thought this would happen.
As I am as frustrated as you, there's no alternative unfortunately. Although Apple Maps are nice, they aren't that up to date as Google's in eastern Europe :(
I would add to this article that a major issue with Google Maps has been businesses trying to SEO-pad their business names on Google Maps, to the detriment of readability.
This is also against their TOS – the "business name" form is supposed to be their legally registered business name, the one that they probably have signage for. Moderators simply don't enforce this, and with Map Maker basically gone, the community of moderators is somewhat of a cloak and dagger group now.
I have tried to clean some of these up via submissions, because in spite of agreeing with the points of the article and using mostly Apple Maps for navigation, Google Maps still is better in terms of having a lot of community sourced data and overall place discoverability (along with Yelp, which Apple Maps seems to no longer source data from).
Examples of these business names:
- {name} - {city name} Axe Throwing
- {name} License Agency - (Vehicle/Vessel not drivers license)
- {name of a local chain} - {neighborhood or city name}
Some of this is a UX problem or perhaps data architecture problem – in the case of local chains, I imagine many are dealing with people calling in orders and showing up at the wrong place to pick up their order. Google Maps could do a better job showing the neighborhood/locality/"local name" of the area in the search results.
This would be solved by dividing it up on 2 distinct fields, a business name field and a title field. Then a business can put their SEO crap in the title field and google maps can decide how much of the info to display when.
Of course moderation would still be a thing, perhaps a character limit of 25 for the name should be enforced unless they can demonstrate why that is too little.
Coincidently the separate fields is how Apple Maps does it, although their title field appears made up of a category list item, presumably to keep it consistent and free of spam.
I was disappointed that apple took yelp stuff away from apple maps as well. For restaurants though, clicking on the "menu" link for restaurants takes me to the yelp page for that restaurant.
> {name of a local chain} - {neighborhood or city name}
Wait, what's wrong with this? This is just good practice. It's helpful to be able to, when communicating with someone, unambiguously refer to the exact location, e.g. Westville Chelsea v Westville East v Westville Hudson v Westville Wall Street.
Problem is the same name is also used for lists of search results – having a neighbourhood name being displayed there can definitively be helpful to distinguish multiple branches of the same company, while also having a higher chance of being at least roughly recognisable to people as compared to specific street names (which is what Google currently displays for POI listings).
Yes exactly, if you want to, say, meet at a specific Marriott hotel and put it in directions, this helps disambiguate. Google Maps does a good job of it without, but will still show you completely different ones if you don’t have the unique-ish name.
You're not always looking at a map at all times though. If I verbally tell a friend "Let's meet up for lunch at Westville Chelsea", they can then unambiguously locate the exact one later on on their own.
Also, lots of people (especially visitors!) don't know where the neighborhoods actually are. So having the names of the locations in the pins is better than them struggling to figure out exactly which of a series of identically named pins is actually the right one in an area they don't know about.
Business names have all this useless PTY LTD and not necessarily the differentiator that is required. E.g. two fast food chain places operated by the same franchise holder but are located on opposite sides of the highway. For me as map use I am interested in identifying the one on the lane Northbound in the list of search results while driving.
Obligatory business listing:
https://goo.gl/maps/nRH1hnjAkJKfpLcu8
(yes, this is real and apparently pretty decent)
(and yes, the name went viral which doubled the marketing win)
> {name of a local chain} - {neighborhood or city name}
What I'm starting to see a lot which is frustrating is:
{name of completely not local chain} - {neighborhood or city name}
Such as "Local Town Plumbing" with a national telephone number to some plumber referral service and will be located where there is an empty field or other non-business.
I worked on Google Maps monetization, and then on Maps itself.
Monetization was a dismal failure. I don't know how well they're doing now, but Maps was a gigantic money-loser, forever. I'd be a little surprised if it didn't still lose money, but maybe less. I don't what those "pin ads" cost, but I'd bet it's way less than a search ad.
If you don't believe that, that's fine. "What about indirect revenue?" you ask? Google consciously does not want to estimate that, because such a document could be discovered in patent litigation. As it is, there are tons of patent lawsuits about Maps, and the damage claims always tried to get at Ads revenue, because Maps revenue was nil.
Caveat: I could be way out of date here. I've been retired a while now.
As for the UX: "enshittification" and big-company bureaucracy describe it pretty well.
I personally think that ads on maps were a bad idea even for monetization. At glance, this seems to be a plausible ads inventory for local businesses but in reality this doesn't scale very well compared to Search or App ads (or even Display) since most of ads will be limited to a very narrow area so big advertisers don't feel as strongly as other channels. They could design ad campaigns specific to local areas but this increases overall complexity and makes it really hard to plan and optimize its budgets. Also, it's worth mentioning the difficulty of measuring offline conversions accurately... Some degree of automation might help, but at this state it's not really a great place for advertisers.
I hate ads as much as the next guy, but I actually think that if this were better implemented, it wouldn't be that bad.
One way I commonly use google maps is as a restaurant or bar finder. Like "show me open restaurants around me". I even do this when at home and feel like eating out for whatever reason. I don't want to walk too far away or take transit. I just want to see the restaurants in a 10-minute walk radius around where I am which are open and what they serve. Now, sure, I'd like to see all restaurants, not just those which took out ads. But I'd be fine with those being featured at the top of the list.
Instead, what I get, is ads for hotels down the street when I'm already home. Or ads for a carpet store chain, which was closed that particular day (national holiday), which you also can't really miss if you set foot in the square.
Regarding monetization, they could probably figure a way to tell that if I click on the restaurant's pin, then follow directions there and stop at the address, I'm likely dining there.
I do something similar when going around and about in the UK (and to a lesser degree Malta when I happen to be there). I like to visit random places, seeking out locations off the touristy paths. One particular search has helped me over the years: "pubs near me".
Local pubs, even those part of a large chain, tend to give a nice feel of the region and the people who live there. And you can learn interesting details about the local history.
The author notes that Google does seem to be leaning in to the sector where they really make a lot of sense, hotels. I'm going to Delhi for work next week and how I picked a hotel was going to maps, zooming out from the venue a bit, and letting hotel pins appear.
with giant data beast company like google, everything is about indirect revenue. Just because map doesn't make money, doesn't mean it won't drive up other ad revues.
Google uses maps to collect the location data from iOS devices.
So, Apple Maps are useful, because they prevent Google Maps from becoming "too many ads app".
I recently watched this show on netflix called "The Billion Dollar Code" that went into the details about maps beginnings and other companies claim to the idea. It was pretty interesting.
I can also recommend "Never Lost Again: The Google Mapping Revolution That Sparked New Industries and Augmented Our Reality" (https://amzn.com/0062673041) about the evolution of Google Earth, Maps, and Street View. Written by one of the founders of Keyhole (the company that built what became Google Earth), the book is mostly about the founding of Keyhole and its mapping technology, but has some insider info about the political maneuverings between Google's Search and Geo teams over owning the map ads because everyone knew it would be a big deal.
Ah you're probably right! I know they are separate things but ever since that update ~10 years ago where they brought many Earth features into Maps the product merged into one for me.
Brilliant show, though it is about Google Earth. Made me uninstall Google Earth from my phone though, the picture it paints of Google and their legal people is not pretty.
Google play services API's are deliberately designed to be hard to reimplement by third parties. In the case of maps, the placeId of every business or POI is internal to Google, and no other provider can give you a map for a matching placeId.
This isn't unique to Google. For example, the stripe PaymentMethod object is opaque and can't be moved to any other payment provider. That pretty much locks customers into stripe unless you want to force the customer to sign up to your service and enter their billing details again.
If google can't make money with maps, why isn't Maps taken out of google into a charity/non-profit backed thing. There's OpenStreetMap, and Wikipedia wouldn't mind having a Map I guess.
That way it'd help a bit with the monopoly heat and maintaining it could be slightly cheaper. I don't know the legal stuff, but I'd rather have a company supporting a non-profit than burning money internally, so I hope the incentives follow that (yeah, probably not true thanks to lobby and having rich people run governments)
This part is probably what keeps Maps valuable as an asset, and it's such a huge moat that letting it go would be irreversible. Building a similar product from scratch takes tremendous capital and local deals, we've seen how much of an effort it is for Apple to even have a viable product, coming up with a competitive offering would require double that.
Even if all counted for Maps was net 0 in the balance sheet, I feel there would be no Google CEO agreeing to let it go just for antitrust relief. They'd probably let Youtube become independant before that.
> If google can't make money with maps, why isn't map taken out of google into a charity/non-profit backed thing. There's OpenStreetMap, and Wikipedia wouldn't mind having a Map I guess.
Assuming maps still loses a good chunk of money, how would it survive as a charity or non-profit? Where would the money come from? Who would donate to the charity?
Without donations OpenStreetMap would also lose money. But obviously people (and companies) are much more willing to donate to a project when it's a charity/non-profit, instead of the product of one of the biggest companies in the world.
Maybe people are more willing to donate to a non-profit, but I am not so sure the same goes for companies. Today companies have to pay a license fee if they are using Google maps in their services. A non-profit can of course continue with licensing the service, but if they make that optional, 99% of the companies would stop paying.
It takes serious funding to make an excellent mapping app that contains worldwide business info, and a whole hell of a lot of paid review staff. A non-profit/charity can't really tackle this well. And since having a good mapping app is so important to the use of a smartphone generally, it makes sense for the two major smartphone OS vendors to each have a platform-standard mapping app.
Mapping is a data collection/sanitization and content moderation problem. You need a lot of data, much of it user-submitted, and you have a lot of bad actors constantly trying to feed in bad data. I don't see where AI comes in here except maybe for route optimization, which is a tiny percentage of what a mapping app actually does. A mapping app is mostly just a huge database of incredibly useful info that needs to be true (and LLMs cannot help there, they just make shit up).
So you already can use OpenStreetMap, but don't? Presumable because Google Maps is better? So maybe the answer is that "we" don't make Maps a non-profit majority of people (me and, apparently, you included) actually prefer superior ad-supported product?
But is Maps actually a net loss for Google, or are they using Hollywood-style accounting techniques to make it <i>appear</i> unprofitable as an additional disincentive to the lawsuits that AlbertCory mentioned?
It's a massive net loss for Google, where do you think there revenue there would come from? A few API users don't pay for a massive amount of people working on keeping the map data up to date.
It's also been downright unusable. While navigating it hides all the business names from me so I can't browse the stores are along my way. I constantly have to exit navigation, approximately remember the route, browse the stores, and then re-enter navigation mode. This is only one of many pain points.
Its assistant is also useless.
"OK Google, zoom in the map by a factor of 1.5"
"OK Google, stop hiding the businesses"
"OK Google, add a stop for the last Safeway before the turn onto route 120"
Yes the classic dance of “zoom in slightly further, but this time without arbitrarily removing 3/4’s of my search results that I know exist here, and showing me other random locations”
Or “good lord just show me the street name please”
I’d like to see a defence of the reason why it’s so often a bit of a job to be able to read the street name… on a map. If only for the laugh I would have.
They have a blog post about it from way back. Essentially the map changes depending on context so you don't need to see store names if you are zooming down the freeway by the side of it, you might see road names if walking and navigating, but not if you have gps in a car, you might see more restaurants if you came to maps from a restaurant search context etc etc
My personal hot take on this is that this is emblematic of present day design strategy: first, abdicate responsibility for meaningful customizability (meaningful = anything but maybe aesthetic theming). “UI is hard.” Once you’ve accepted that it would be impossible to create settings that would be useful and worthwhile, then you just make a bunch of static choices based on what you think the average dummy would want, or write an algorithm to decide it all non-deterministically, which gives a small chance that it will occasionally meet needs more complex than the most basic use case.
Without a trace of irony: thank you for explaining to me why I fucking hate Google Maps.
Don't change the context and try to outsmart me without giving me any indication of doing so. Don't attempt to outsmart me without giving any recourse if I don't like it. It only ever leads to information I want to see being hidden. You, Google Maps, do not know what I want better than I fucking well do.
Exactly. Like for example if I'm the passenger and I do want to see the store names along the intended route, and even the ratings and reviews, while the driver is zooming down the freeway to make a decision about where to eat, without taking it off navigation mode.
Oh and not to mention that it sometimes tries to translate street names to my phone's language setting. Leave street names in their original language so I can match it up to the physical signs, goddamnit.
Because Google always wants to have its cake and eat it too. Every one of their product tries to be "smart", and it inevitably miserably fails. Google Maps tries to both be a normal map, and then a list of events and places around you, then a shopping guide, then... then it fails at all of these.
Letting you specify on Google Maps a kind of context that would swap between these at will would be an infinitely better experience, but unfortunately it doesn't grant promotions, unlike a blog post about the _brand new smart experience_
The article complains about 'clutter' - but have you seen a traditional printed map like [1] ? Personally I find them beautiful, but it's a rather Jackson-Pollock-esque beauty.
One of the changes brought about by the digital mapping revolution was to allow much less visually complex maps.
Right but digital map allows you to zoom in and on street level of zoom there is no longer name clutter. There is no need to remove those details to just leave swathes of empty space
You can click the search icon while in navigation mode, to search along the route. It doesn’t work that great as you have to zoom to an aprox area and it seems somewhat arbitrary what comes up. It will show you how many minutes of detour a location would add, which is quite nice when choosing among a bunch
Sometimes I don't know what I'm searching for, I just want to browse what kind of businesses exist in an area along my route to see if it's worth stopping there and taking a break. Also if I use the search feature it auto-zooms out the map and then I have to fight it within hundreds of milliseconds to get back to where I was on the map. Once it auto-zooms fully I may have trouble remembering where exactly along the route I was looking. I may have been searching for food near a particular weirdly-shaped lake along the route that I spent 15 minutes tracing the 500km route at max zoom to find. Once the search auto-zooms back out, my 15 minutes of "work" is instantly wasted and I can't find that lake again.
Well, first world problems for sure. Its free app, you have some extremely specific use-case (even though I have no doubt 100 HN users can post in response that they do exactly same thing, its still fringe overall) and the app doesn't suit that narrow situation that well...
Not surprised, we can come up with probably thousands of similar scenarios when some popular free tool ain't the smoothest to use for 'when I do this but want also that and while doing something else that isn't so well integrated into the flow something happens/doesn't happen but should' situation.
Maybe take a laptop and a mouse next time, 100x more efficient to use. Or use it in browser in tabs, so you can have 20 different locations/views and switch between them.
The search-along-route is more of a 'search-around-my-current position'. If you e.g. need fuel, it lists options for busy towns in the wrong direction rather than the easiest path along your current route. If you need a given RON or niche fuel, you just have to memorise which suppliers sell it & hope that it shows up in the list. The utopian vision that it could figure out the range of the car it's connected to and use this information to decide where would be most efficient to fill up is a pipe dream.
Using Maps while driving for anything other than A-B navigation is generally poor. It seems designed by people who are accustomed to every destination having plentiful dedicated parking. If you want to go to B, then find local parking, you need to invoke dark voodoo.
The worst part is that the Apple & Google duopoly in maps supported by Android Auto and Apple Carplay means there's no way for a superior alternative to succeed in the market. Google even contributed to this by buying Waze. So Maps only needs to be just good enough.
>The worst part is that the Apple & Google duopoly in maps supported by Android Auto and Apple Carplay means there's no way for a superior alternative to succeed in the market.
What does Android Auto and Apple Carplay have to do with it? Aren't both of them available for third party apps to use?
The Apple one is available, theoretically, though you have to specify each time to tell Siri to get directions with something other than Apple, and it also won’t support any features such as the useful “share ETA” which is a real shame. They also thankfully opened up their split-screen mode to third party navigation apps a couple years ago (though, incidentally, that screen is utter trash in my humble opinion because of what it doesn’t include).
What kills me is I'd easily pay 50~100 eur a month if Maps had to be non ad subsidized.
This is to me Google's most everyday impacting product, and what makes the difference between me being stranded/lost or making it in time. The stories of people ending in a lake for blindly following directions are cheeky, but decent maps are just that important, and Google Maps, how flawed it can be, is currently the best for so many areas.
You'd pay 50-100 euro a month ? Why ? How did you arrive at this number ? Even before google maps, the standalone navigation devices didn't cost that much. To stretch this, if maps is 50-100 a month, how much is the total bill of all software you use ? Surely, the h/w, OS, browsers etc. should be orders of magnitude more than what they are today too.
Straight comparison to the other service I paid for for a while I gave up as it didn't seem worth it.
> Even before google maps, the standalone navigation devices didn't cost that much.
They costed a bunch and were a lot less useable in day to day life.
There was no device that would tell me the schedule of the next train departing from the station 10 min from where I am, when the store I am going will close, and how I'll get back when there's no train left for the day anymore. To your point there were service providing this info in part, in text format, on super small screen, and they'd cost around 5/10 bucks a month.
Now I get that with a mostly accurate map, end to end, automatically udpated as I start moving. And I also get other people's position, and don't need to text them every 5 min to know if they're lost or stuck.
The same thing goes for mountain maps, where I live the trail markers are relatively accurate and I can use it as a reference to check the official maps and on trail directions (and getting the other people's position is that much more valuable)
All in all it's a package that was never at hand before smarphones arised, and is currently only really working with Google Maps, even as we have OSM and Apple Maps at the distance.
> how much is the total bill of all software you use ? Surely, the h/w, OS, browsers etc. should be orders of magnitude more than what they are today too.
I actually think that keeping a worldwide map including cities street level details and natural paths up to date could cost a lot more that maintaining a browser or an OS.
> There was no device that would tell me a) the schedule of the next train departing from the station 10 min from where I am, b) when the store I am going will close, and c) how I'll get back when there's no train left for the day anymore. To your point there were service providing this info in part, in text format, on super small screen, and they'd cost around 5/10 bucks a month.
There is a free Android (+ iOS) app doing a) and c), it's Transit App, at least in 18 countries and 300 cities [0]. Gives you schedules and (multimodal) trip planning including car, bus, transit, train, subway, cycling, walking, rideshare, bikeshare, scooter rental. It has both scheduled and (near-)realtime information, detours, service interruptions etc. Shows you all the options you're interested in, rolled up by start time and total time, and includes cost(/estimated cost for rideshare).
In text format, on a super small screen, free.
> And I also get other people's position, and don't need to text them every 5 min to know if they're lost or stuck.
Well ok but very few people use that much. Why do you need it so much? Socializing? Hiking? Playing Pokemon?
Transit looks like a nice app. I assume it's based on the open data initiatives in places where it works (France etc.). There's similar iniatives in many places now (Japan has one as well) and I'm pretty much rooting for more of those.
You're still left patchworking all these apps, switching from one another at every point and assembling everything in notes by yourself. It's super nice it can be done at all, but I'd also pay for an app that has it all in one place if it wasn't free.
To note, the c) part is not just public transport but anything from private bus network/taxi/private bike networks/just walk. While Maps deals with that decently, I'd agree it would be way too much too ask from a free transit app.
Transit App works fantastic in urban US, Canada, Western Europe, Aus, NZ. (It's also great when visiting a new location for discovering which routes get you from A to B, speed/frequencey/cost, as opposed to commuters who already know which mode, route and stop they want, and primarily want real-time updates, ETAs. Obviously you can supplement it with the local transit app/website.)
There's not much patchworking/assembling once you bookmark your preferred locations, research what times they open/close, select favorite transit modes, bookmark specific lines, research which exact stops. Don't mentally lock into Google Maps as your primary thing.
I said the c) part is already done by Transit App and generally better than Google Maps (shows rideshare time-and-cost estimates, bikeshare/scooter pickup locations etc.) Where 'taxi' has generally been replaced by rideshare and by 'private bike networks' you mean bikeshare. Not sure if by 'private bus network' you mean coaches, or employee shuttles, but those are sometimes not open to the public. (Can you cite us an example location and name the private network companies?)
As mentioned, the amount of local detail depends on how much your municipality participates in open-date initatives; if it doesn't, ask them to. Transit App is adding new regions constantly.
I'm not the commenter you're replying to, but Google Maps was the sole reason I changed from a feature phone to a smart phone. For people who travel a lot, it's hard to compare life before and after digital maps. They are extremely useful.
That’s a stretch but I agree id pay 50 bucks a month for a total Google Subscription: gmail google maps docs and drive. All of it. No ads, personalized only to serve me. And bring back reader and I’ll pay 100.
The only case I can think of where google is the best is traffic updates. I use OSM primarily, osmand particularly for navigation, and I've tried going back to google a few times, every time I try it it's worse than the last time.
You may be willing to pay €50 a month for it, but most people can't afford that and wouldn't pay it.
Google Maps has its pitfalls, but it's by far the most up to date in the cities I've used it.
OSM lacks a lot of details that completely change how you'd move from point A to point B (I was missing overpass bridges and crossable paths in residential neighboorhoods), and point to point navigation is also not great. Then it completely lacks all the more commercial features Google has built on top of Maps (store details, position sharing, timeline etc.)
On sheer readability I also prefer Google Maps, but I've been using it so long that that might be just familiarity.
I wish I'd like OSM a lot more, but every time I ended up back to Maps for a reason or another.
Yes. On the more critical part when in the middle of nowhere I often use a traditional map as reference after getting my rough position through Google Maps. I wouldn't trust any of the mapping services more than the local entities to provide accurate trail info, especially as they're the own maintaining the paths.
Sadly I'm still not good with really basic compass and map positionning, and the GPS + average location info helped a ton in the past.
Depends on what you are looking for and what country you are in. When it comes to small 'unofficial' roads, bike paths and hiking trails then OSM is much better. When it comes to finding the location of rural buildings, addresses and companies I find Google Maps much much better and complete, at least here in Sweden.
> On sheer readability I also prefer Google Maps, but I've been using it so long that that might be just familiarity.
Interesting – personally I find Maps absolutely horrible for usage as an actual map for orienting myself (as opposed to just serving as a vague geographical background for displaying POIs or navigation information).
When you zoom out, it often doesn't really distinguish between forests and other open spaces (admittedly OSM's coverage in that regard varies regionally, though at least in Europe it seems quite comprehensive and definitively better than Google's).
Then, when you zoom in everything just turns into a featureless grey-on-grey with no distinction between built-up areas and everything else (only "parks" get shown, but e.g. in France that apparently even covers large scale "natural parks" covering hundreds or even thousands of square kilometres, so in that case everything, including any towns happening to lie in that area, just gets shown with a green background, which is equally useless), and buildings are only shown when you start zooming in really closely.
Yes, there is a lot to improve. I also have my gripes about what POI are kept from the detail view to the zoomed out view, or how I'll completely lose a location if I happen to misclick on some random POI that happens to fall under my finger on the edge of the screen.
On the rougher part of the maps, I often get back to satellite view and/or StreeView if available (even as they sometimes don't show the same info as they come from different points in time -_-;). It's a handy backup that I don't get on the open source map apps
> even as they sometimes don't show the same info as they come from different points in time
And for unfathomable reasons Google Earth (the desktop version) can show historic aerial imagery, but no historic street view pictures, whereas Google Maps works just the other way round – you can view historic street view photographs there, but no historic aerial/satellite imagery. (And the browser version of Google Earth apparently can't do either.)
For me in Europe, Google Maps coverage quality can be best described by this personal anecdote.
I used to live in Nürnberg, which is in top 10 German cities by population, and where are some major and well-recognized international companies are headquartered.
Nürnberg has a subway system (U-Bahn) since 1980s, and it's significant enough: a few dozen stations over three lines (one is fully driverless, btw).
Google didn't have any representation of U-Banh in Nürnberg till at least 2017.
I don't mean "wasn't supporting it in navigation and routing", I mean " stations weren't even marked and labelled on the general overview maps.
And it's not like they didn't have the into: there was a widely-used user layer which added at least station labels.
They just simply didn't care enough, and had other priorities.
In the meanwhile, the level of detail on OSM covered details as minor as every mailbox not only in Nürnberg, but in every small town around Frankonia (I used to participate in postcrossing and used this a lot from random places).
As a counter argument, here in Sweden I've yet to run into a place where Google maps has failed me when it comes to driving, public transport or address/POI search. OSM on the other hand is missing half the buildings once you get more then 15 km out from major city centers and even in major cities, things like house numbers and addresses is often wrong. The only scenario OSM is better than Google Maps is pedestrian and hiking routes.
France and Spain had a pretty good coverage, Japan cities are decent as well. I've only seen Munchen and Kolhn's most touristic areas but there were decent enough we didn't hit any critical issue. Commerce data and opening hours was abysmal on the other hand.
OSM was pretty good too in France but has different issues: they don't get the same access to up to date commerce data as exposed through local aggregators, and there's just not enough user data to have good heuristics on navigation times.
I don't know about "most" but many people can pay 50 Euros per month for a service they care about. The problem here is that very few people would pay a monthly fee for a maps service that was free for almost 20 years.
50 eur a month is insanity. I bet that i and all the other 'poors' like me would start buying $5 permanent paper maps and asking for directions again. That's the kind of hemorrhagic price that only someone who never thinks about the cost of groceries or gas could pay. I'm not trying to tell you that you're a rich asshole or anything, but i do want to communicate that those numbers are vastly detached from the reality of most people. I'd pay 50 eur one time but monthly is a lot. Just pin me to the version i paid for, don't update road closures or any of that other bullshit and let me opt out of the parasitic subscription pricing.
I get your point of view, and I think it comes down to how much you rely on the service
As you mention gas, for instance my gas cost are ridiculously low (less than 10 bucks a month) as the car is only for specific cases, and 99% of the time I'm not driving.
Same way I care a lot more about visiting new places than going to theaters, and I'd never end up with 5$ of paper maps (to dig my own grave, I also buy paper maps of the wilder areas I go and they sure cost way more than that...)
On the other had, getting lost somewhere I have no familiarity with, being stuck at a station that has an incident and not having any backup plans, looking for someone in a town for 30 min because they're describing places in a way that is too vague are situations that are highly stressful and can cost a lot more than 10 or 20 bucks. Have you ever missed the last train and thought how much it will cost you to do something about it ?
That's where I put the price of an app I actually use a ton, it could be one of the main reasons I have a smartphone and not a combination of a dumb modem and a tablet.
What kind of comment is this? You act like the commenter has insulted you personally, just because they appreciate the service and would pay a lot of money for it. You even go as far as calling the other person an asshole, in a weaselly way. Each one of us have different means and put different value on things. People pay €50 to do a bungee jump.
OpenStreetMap does hold opening hours of businesses. Here are the details (including opening hours) of my local cafe https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/485163917 I go round entering OSM data using the StreetComplete app. It's slightly awkward if a shop doesn't display their opening hours, because then you have to go in, and I feel I need to buy something and then ask their opening hours.
I do that too (in Germany), and I just… ask them if I may enter their opening hours into OSM. I've never been refused. Sometimes an employee takes an interest and then I take the chance to explain a bit. It's a win-win for both sides, after all—the map users and the shop owners.
Hopefully a few of them will realize it is easy and so start updating their own information as it changes. Everyone wins - their customers get up to date information and so come when they are open.
In a practical way (instead of just, why not be polite?), the information for permanently displaying to the public may be different than the information relevant to you at a single moment.
If you just ask it without context, "today we'll close at 16:00" is a perfectly reasonable response.
Sadly, they don't even attempt to have public transport schedules on the main maps, whereas Google has even added inter-city buses in some places, as well as having an integration with Bolt or other platforms I think.
That, in addition to the lack of business information, business hours, reviews and so on makes OSM a bit inadequate in comparison, which is unfortunate. There have been other maps that build on top of OSM data (which is great), but they're still pretty small in comparison.
It would be interesting to see how OSM would fare if it actually tried to compete with Google: 1st party Android/iOS map with some open dataset for business information, integration with some review platform, aggregated public transport maps with an underlying open dataset and stuffing their pockets as much as possible with money from Bolt/Uber/whatever to ensure longevity of the platform, by adding helpful suggestions for trip routing, as well as aggregating traffic data.
> Sadly, they don't even attempt to have public transport schedules on the main maps, whereas Google has even added inter-city buses in some places
What Google is doing is to integrate public transport data (often in GTFS format). It is not mapped directly by Google, and unlikely that it would be doable in OSM (note that in many cities timetables change weekly, for example as result of construction).
There is some ongoing work to build similar things for OSM-using software, for example Organic Maps is at least trying: https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues?q=is%3Aiss... (I bet that pull requests would be welcome, especially if discussed with people developing it)
Just a couple weeks ago, Google announced they're going to re-photograph Street View in my country, though, which is still running on the initial 2007ish data. How would that be profitable? The idea of virtual ads placed onto pseudo 3D walls was already present when Street View started but apparently didn't deliver economically. Maybe they want to break resistance this time around as they had lots of data protection complaints/requests for blocking a particular lot from displaying unblurred at my place?
Are you talking about Germany? Google never stopped creating new images in Germany, they've just decided they would put the new images online (which they already did).
Mind that they don't only take pictures. The cars are full of sensors. From GPS to verify coordinates of roads, over Wifi to scan SSIDs for locating devices without GPS to LIDAR to scan 3D features and probably a lot more ...
They already know the photos have the objects they are interested in. Are they still working on motorcycles buses and signs?
The recaptcha part doesn't even depend on recognition, it's just a statistical comparison with what other humans clicked on given the same prompt + some pointer analysis and browser fingerprinting.
Currently working on multiple apps hitting anywhere between 5k and 150k maps loads a day, costs are zero because we do not do things outside of the free usage tier. The Maps Embed API (the one you see on websites) is pretty clear on that: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/embed/usage...
Pricing for the Maps Embed API
All Maps Embed API requests are available at no charge with unlimited usage.
Other usage limits
There are no short-term (queries per second) or long-term (queries per day) limits on the Maps Embed API.
Similar things apply to the Maps SDK for Android. Seeing the watermark means that there's either no API key being sent with the request or, in relatively new developments, that you haven't enabled billing/inputted a credit card. Which is a scary thing to do when you know that you're not doing anything out of the usage limits... but what if Google suddenly decided that ?
It’s an open-source system that is used worldwide, by a few thousand loosely-organized nonprofits.
When Google Maps suddenly required associated credit cards, it caused a great deal of trouble. It still causes problems.
That’s because most of these entities are not 501(c)(3) orgs, with bank accounts and debit/credit cards. In fact, the organization enforces deliberate poverty, amongst its chapters.
Someone needs to add their personal card to the Google Maps API. Since the maintenance people are constantly rotating, this is an issue.
Also, the API has a dashboard like a Space Shuttle cockpit. Most regular schlubs have a difficult time with it.
We use google maps for our non profit event and for the first time this year we had a small charge for our once a year event. We have the same credit card issue even though we’re a 501c3.
Google’s UI is a complete mystery to anyone outside google that doesn’t know the lingo. It seems to keep changing too.
Peole forget that millions of people submit data to Google Maps for free. I placed all the local postboxes on google maps, people sibmit information about their businesss, opening hours, etc. This is hugely valuable.
Also google grew laxy. Not tskes them a year to add a royal mail postbox
For sure, but for many people there's only Google Maps, and maybe Apple Maps. On the short term, catering to Google Maps makes sense. They'd add to another project if it were to be popular enough, and the network effect keeps Google Maps popular. Hence they get away with enshittification.
>They'd add to another project if it were to be popular enough, and the network effect keeps Google Maps popular. Hence they get away with enshittification.
Ah yes, the chicken and egg logic of network effect excuses all.
How about if people, idk, just evangelized more about the things they love to be smug about on HN?
People should be shamed off enshittified platforms. Be "that guy" - or be a hypocrite. For Google it might a little more complicated, but for each one of us it's exactly this simple.
Compare the experience of adding stuff to OSM and to Google Maps. Much easier.
OSM is for nerds. Very hard to add even basic info. Google Maps it’s trivial.
Same as uploading photo to Google Maps is easier than adding it to WikiMedia Commons. Such is life.
(Ironically one of the biggest sources of photos is commons is Panoramio; before Google merged it with Google Maps, the photos there defaulted to Creative Commons.)
How do I update stuff in Google Maps? For OSM, its a case of opening Street Complete and tapping on things.
To add new features I have to use SCEE, which is more nerdy mainly because it involves using FDroid to install it. But I've no idea how to add, say a park bench to Google Maps.
Just tried it on mobile and that is nice and easy, especially if you want to add a business. Not sure how you add a bench that way as I couldn't see the option, but I might be looking in the wrong place.
You're right though, installing another app store is a non starter.
OSM has a two-way data sharing agreements directly with (among others) Apple and Bing/Microsoft. Additionally, the "Overture Foundation" with members including AWS/Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and TomTom have a complicated indirect two-way data sharing agreement with OSM. (Overture Maps are a "curated" subset of OSM data and members are encouraged but not required to make contributions and updates to the maps directly upstream to OSM.)
Google probably sees their data as a moat and likely aren't interested in two-way data sharing. (Given how many of their competitors are now involved directly or indirectly with OSM or Overture, they may be correct.) OSM probably can't legally scrape it without an agreement in place.
Also, everybody by default shares their location when using it, no? So they get live feedback on traffic relatively for free (till some lawsuit will ban it). I can see it often changing and recalculating as I drive, albeit with some lag.
I don't think you can estimate overall worth of Maps to Google directly and easily. Its still #1 driving solution I use, its not perfect in dense traffic in cities but otherwise OK and for free, plus their estimates are pretty accurate.
Agreed. And not just that, but also the fact that people use Google Maps for car navigation means Google can derive the location of traffic jams by comparing current speed with the speed limit.
This is hugely useful for navigation since it means these bottlenecks can be avoided, some thing which is not possible unless this data is available.
If I present you the other side of the coin - we are a small country, where we cant keep up with number of cars of tourists traveling to the next country over summer.
Since the Google Maps is here, not only we have a completely congested highways but also all other roads that were free of tourists before are now blocked. Tourists that are traveling to the next country while their number has doubled as they dont stand in line from border to border but rather destroy any viable traffic for locals.
In some locations it has gone to the point where small villages with historically very narrow roads are literally blocked by **** (pardon my french), using google maps and see that there is a pass (while every road is the same, right) so the police needs to deter tourists to even head there. Wont even go into suffering of locals there.
This is a real issue, but it has nothing to do with Google specifically. You’re basically saying that information on road networks should be obscured or restricted so governments can indirectly control the flow of traffic.
Japan actually has some soft regulations in this space about routing and road visibility (e.g. residential roads are hidden when you’re on thoroughfares). But they’re just suggestions so only domestic companies follow them and Google, Apple, etc still provide their usual global algorithms.
Maybe there’s a good solution to this, but I don’t think it’s getting rid of mapping services and going back to security through obscurity.
No, I am saying that by diverting drivers to regional roads without taking into account local population, this is directly Google fault. Why? Before Google started messing with information about congestion, there was no issue. Regional roads swallowed without any problem those few adventurous tourists that decided to use them. Now you find an average Joe everywhere.
Wanna se another interesting example (use google translate), here are statistics of our volunteer based and taxes paid (for everyone in need, even tourists, including helicopter transport) mountain rescue service: https://www.grzs.si/resevanje/statistika-nesrec/
Check number of accidents since 2006 (google maps came out 2005) and constant rise to 2023 (more than twice the number of interventions). Freaking maps are showing the steepest mountain roads (Alps are not a joke), to parts without phone signal. Google gets you just far enough to get you into troubles, potentially fatal troubles.
The solution sounds simple. Force non-locals to buy a Swiss-like vignette to drive on those roads. And, make it damn expensive, like 1000 Euros. You can probably put a police checkpoint around a corner about 500 meters after the sign and fine people who are missing the vignette something like 2000 Euros. Finally, use social media and obnoxious free media (City AM and friends) to tell everyone about it. It should take care of itself in about 3 months.
I wonder if it would be possible to get a bunch of old phones and put them by the side of the road with Google maps on, simulating a traffic jam. Or something like that.
> this is directly Google fault.
> Check number of accidents since 2006
I believe it is a funnel of things: Slovenia became part of EU. GPS navigation in cars and smartphones became a thing. Google isn't even the only traffic data provider. Slovenia has RDS-TMC since 2009. So even a boring TomTom will show some form of congestion info.
But I agree with you, that navigation tools should not direct traffic away from the main roads (especial transit roads). Traffic planners should somehow be able to weight streets or routes.
Google maps doesn't do this, it's done by lower levels of software, specifically Google Location Service which is built into Google Play Services. You can tinker with maps settings all you want, but the data is coming from the rootkit they bundle on nearly all devices. Many android apps use GLS APIs and won't work without it.
I've been saved from tickets by Google maps several times now, mostly because when it warns of a speed trap it reminds me to look at the speedometer and realize the prevailing traffic speed had been more than 10 km over the limit.
Google Maps design is becoming less detailed over the years. It's really apparent when compared to OSM.
It is necessary to search for a lot of things in Google maps as they are otherwise not visible.
You can't really navigate off Google maps without turn-by-turn navigation.
I wonder whether this is a strategic drive from Google to make maps more like search to enable advertising or whether they truly think this is the superior user interface.
Yeah it's weird, very often a venue on a street is simply not visible unless zoomed in TO THE MAX. And then it's not any weird obscure thing, it's a restaurant or coffeeshop that's been there for years.
What's even worse is that often I'll click "restaurants", zoom in all the way, and then click "Search this area", yet Google will still refuse to show some popular restaurant, even when there are no other restaurants displayed in the window.
The only way to get those restaurants to show up is to search them by name.
Not sure if they're intentionally penalizing certain restaurants, but it's pretty bad.
I get much better results by clicking on the text input field and pressing enter every time after moving/zooming instead of clicking on "search this area".
FWIW Apple does the same thing to me in my neighborhood. I live in Brooklyn where there are restaurants on every block but it'll zoom out and show ~15 restaurants scattered over a mile with half in Manhattan. Pretty unusable.
I love OSM and use it all the time for hiking, but even though their restaurant and hotel listings have good coverage, they're sadly not much use to me without the reviews.
Short of scraping reviews from Google and importing them into OSM for the area in which I'm traveling, I'm not sure there is a good short-term solution.
Also the "cuisine" filters for restaurants appears to be completely irrelevant. You will still get results for Chinese restaurants even though you have selected "Pizza".
It would seem that the revenue-optimizing ML has learned that the median user could really go for Chinese take-out right about now (for all values of now), no matter what sort of food they started out looking for, so it's always going to show up.
I know median and mediocrity already share a common root, but I wish there were a clever portmanteau describing ML-optimizing for the median user leading to a mediocre experience. "Medianocre" just sounds like an eggcorn, so I presume 99% of readers would take it as a mistake instead of a neologism.
Been noticing this, myself. E.g. for a local used bookstore that's reasonably popular and has been there for decades. I know the owner and can guess -- though I haven't asked -- that they aren't giving Google much if any money.
So, no Maps presence for you! (Except via direct search within Maps.) Just my anecdotal experience, but one of several similar on Maps that leave me thinking they "have that feel" to them.
There was some articles on here about how maps have been changing over the years (also other map apps). The gist is that why would you need to show street names anymore? On printed maps that's the only thing you have, but that's not how most people navigate anymore. They search for a place or POIs and then use navigation.
So the things most people care about have changed, streets are less important now and things like attractions or "active areas" are more important. Yeah, some people still read maps the "old way", but now probably those are in the minority so catering to them isn't worth it anymore.
Of course that's only one aspect next to the question of what makes the most ad money.
Perhaps not a large use case, but I use street names regularly when discussing bicycle routes. "How to get from Town A to Town B by bicycle" often relies on street names - take Rt 123 for 2 miles, turn left on Fancy Farm Lane, etc. The route-finding often keeps you on Rt 123 for the whole route, but it's a busy dual carriageway and really not suitable for bikes.
I think a big problem is that Maps' bicycle routing would prefer to send you down a 55mph 4-lane street with a "sharrow" in the right lane, because that's a "bike friendly street", instead of the 25mph quiet residential street that parallels it.
If you haven't read 1984, this is really confusing, but a "memory hole" is a hole into which you place something you don't want to have any memory of, destroying it forever. The ironic name is an example of "doublethink."
And those who've actually read it also know that Newspeak is also a term he coined and that since we don't actually
have newspeak, the natural extrapolation of the term Doublethink into a spoken application is the term Doublespeak....
Right?
On the flipside digital maps can progressively show layers on user demand. You can pull up the OSM map with all the street names. If you've got a bit of patience to learn tools like QGIS (or ArcGIS) you have more power than ever to build personal maps that work best for how you personally navigate spaces beyond the lowest-common denominator that used to be print maps.
It's maybe a bit of a shame that the raw tools (like OSM, QGIS, ArcGIS, even what is left of Google Earth) aren't easy to learn and equally accessible to everyone and the incentives of the big maps (Google Maps, Apple Maps, etc) is its own drive to a different lowest common denominator, but digital maps have such tools in the first place. (It was far more expensive to get custom printed maps. AAA triptychs are interesting thing to compare here.)
I've sometimes noticed friends navigating (on foot) in a residential area staring at their phone until the blue dot is on the turn they need to make.
I would usually look at the map briefly, see "we need Farm Lane, should be 4th on the right" and then look at the street name signs. In a non-residential area I'll often do this on foot, but if I'm cycling I'm more likely to think "Right after the paint shop" or similar.
You need street names as I see the name on a map on iPhone plan in my head a route and see the street name so as to know where I turn - or how far you are along a road. GPS is not that accurate.
There were always people who were like that it's just that it was harder with paper maps, at least that's my view.
For those old enough, just think back to all the times your "navigator" wouldn't just tell you the street name or even "turn at the third intersection after this one " and instead waited until just moments before you reached it and said "Here" like a jack hole.
> The gist is that why would you need to show street names anymore?
I need the street names. They're authoritative. Landmarks (or, worse, businesses used as landmarks) are things that are occasionally useful to me in the right circumstance, but they're too dynamic to really rely on.
If a map application doesn't make it easy to know the street names, then it's one that isn't useful to me.
I'm not sure why they could add "personalities" or "modes" like simple, tourist, night-life, etc. Seems rather obvious to just about anyone who thinks more than 30 seconds about it
Yea it's got some really odd behaviors that I can only attribute to Yelp style behavior from Google.
I was literally on the same block as a restaurant and it wouldn't show in maps at all, though the other 3 restaurants on the block were, and the only way to get it to show up was to Google it then click on the maps link. As soon as I took focus off the restaurant it disappeared again.
I can only presume it's because they hadn't paid Google or were being punished for some reason. It lead to me looking for more examples and found many places, including some major ones in the city I'm visiting, were excluded for no apparent reason, even ones with 4.9 ratings, and the only correlation between them was that they either were inherently more "indy" than the rest and thus likely to avoid engaging in certain aspects of Google or were close to a more powerful competitor.
This was particularly shocking when Wendy's wasn't being shown at a strip mall but the Burger King was....
If it’s not making money anyway it’s strange they pull tricks that are just another thing to make Google look greedy and bad, where they very clearly hide businesses to punish them for not taking out an ad.
It makes Google look like the mob and everyone sees it. Everyone would understand if they would show businesses that pay at the top of the list but somehow instead they went this way, incomprehensible.
> "What about indirect revenue?" you ask? Google consciously does not want to estimate that, because such a document could be discovered in patent litigation.
Could you tell us more how you came to this conclusion? Did someone high up ever literally tell you "we're not doing that because it could show up in discovery"? And if not, why have you concluded that?
Given your firsthand experience and the industry's evolving nature, do you think there have been any significant shifts in Google Maps' monetization approach since your time working on it?
Maybe. They have (or have as of 10 years ago when I signed up) a checkmark for I consider this public domain. If you don't check that OSM cannot freely use the data. I only edit OSM so that people can find my house, so I consider it a feature that google can freely use my changes, but not everyone agrees.
I know, because they tried to sell it to me when I was at a megacorp, they resell the real time location and local data correlated to user characteristics, as data service to large discrete customers. This includes constant real time information about where people are traveling to, businesses being frequented by demographics, with a sophisticated query interface for asking relatively complex questions of maps derived data. It has some differential privacy layers but we suspected it could be attacked to suss out individuals with sufficient care and effort. Our impression was “holy shit that’s creepy” and it convinced us to never put our sensitive workloads or data in any Google product, cloud or other.
It seems like the person you're responding to has a problem with them selling their data in real-time to 3rd parties, rather than just any Google employee knowing where they are heading.
Yes that’s the specific issue. We didn’t fear specifically they could read our data; the key management systems available appeared sufficient at some level (although the gcp audit system had some issues, particularly access audit is available as a IAM decision log rather than point of use, so any access bypassing IAM or that failed in the service but succeeded in an IAM call would appear a positive access, etc - aws does the right thing here). More of concern is they appeared more than happy to harvest utilization information for the profit of others, and in our business that was a potentially serious side channel.
Surely they can. Who would be locking them out? Another google employee. So the useful questions are which google employees can look up people's locations, and through what process?
Some people need to be able to do that as part of their job. Either directly for some good reason, or indirectly (they are a DB admin). The question is what controls they have to ensure only those people can look such things up and that they don't abuse those rights.
that's completely different. Can an accountant or marketing person look up a persons location vs can any developer vs can any map developer vs specific people with proper access controls
From what I've heard that type of information is only held on a special higher-security "logs" cluster and the code accessing that data is subject to additional review by Google's privacy division before it is allowed access to the data. I think there may be special ways to manually access some of that data, but even requesting that capability would automatically trigger an audit after the fact.
This seems wrong. I don't think the average business owner has the capability to reverse engineer the anonymous tokens that represent hash IDs. Also, it's good to go in and reset that occasionally with Google. I gave up on it and switched to apple, tho. Far as I can tell, they don't ever sell that info, even in anonymous hash # form. I'm happy to be proven wrong other than "wHy wOuLd yOu tRuSt aPPle?" .
However it wasn’t clear how high quality the differential privacy algorithm was or if it was attackable. But the nefariousness of its use against groups and demographics was fairly apparent.
Technically I don’t think it’s resold, as google hasn’t bought the data from anyone. But I think what the author meant is that Google also uses the data for ads, etc and then sells it.
Not directly related but last time I was this creeped out is when a antivirus company wanted to sell us crazy amount of data on our customers.
Apparently AV companies lose money on the customer endpoint protection (it’s basically for free!) but make it up on selling users data. Also on the business licenses though
GeForce experience tracks every single window you have open, sending the title and window information, along with every single spot that you click on your screen to Nvidia, tied to your now mandatory account.
That was a couple years back. Who knows how much more invasive it’s gotten since.
Oh. And this data is considered to be “valuable debugging information”, so is not prevented by opting out of analytics.
Good to know! Uninstalling when I get home. Windows has really become a big bag of certified malware and adware. I always feel a bit dirty when I play a game on my windows pc, and now I know why.
>Windows has really become a big bag of certified malware and adware.
This 100%. I would include Azure too.
I actively try not to use Windows every time I get a chance. I am so glad a company like Apple exists. I agree Apple might not be 100% right on privacy but they are pretty darn close that I a live with.
The irony here is that you will get NVIDIA (and AMD) drivers vendored through Windows Update automatically by default. These work fine for 3D acceleration, and don't install GFE or require an account.
You'll just be a few versions behind, not sure what their release cadence is for this. But as far as I know this is a net positive to the Windows PC user and potentially eliminates needing to deal with GFE/Adrenalin as long as you are satisfied with the builds Microsoft is shipping you.
There is absolutely no benefit to me the user to force me to create an account. What a deeply frustrating user experience (especially when I have to dig around for my password just to update a graphics driver?!) I hope someone wakes up at Nvidia and removes the account requirement. Why do they even do it?
The one thing that I like about mandatory accounts like this is that they're a strong indication that the company is abusive and you should remove any of their software immediately. It makes the problem obvious.
Nvidia is on top of the world right now and companies on the rise often make really stupid long-term customer alienating decisions. Nvidia won't miss any on of as an individual customer at all. For these types of situations, usually at some point the things that were pushing the company upwards slow or stop while the damage from their arrogance accumulates enough to start causing real harm. After some foot dragging and false reforms, the company eventually has to do something to repair the damage and by then, those who enacted those policies are usually gone.
How I was wrong is was in the “valuable debugging information”. Because you can actually disable the sending of debug and crash statistics, but you cannot disable the collection of tracking everything you do except for password boxes!
The original source on the telemetry was a print magazine, CanardPC, but this is referenced quite a bit.
I was additionally wrong the GeForce Experience matters. This is currently untrue. After the original article was released of how much spying Nvidia does, the telemetry package was moved to the driver rather than GeForce experience.
Long story short: if you have an Nvidia video card and have not actively disabled nvtmmon then Nvidia is tracking every window you open, how long it’s open, which windows have focus and for how long, window locations titles etc, along with clicks (but not keyboard strokes) etc. *It is not only tracking games. It tracks everything. It does this with just the driver*. If you have GeForce experience, then that information is tied to your sensitive personal information. If you do not opt out, they sell that to advertisers. If you do opt out, the collection happens anyway, but they claim they’re not sending it to third parties.
I’ve just learned: you don’t. I thought this was limited to just GeForce experience, but it’s not.
You need to kill Nvidia telemetry services (one site has it listed as nmtvmon).
Another option would be to block traffic to Nvidia from leaving your network (pihole captures at least some Nvidia telemetry, not sure if it blocks all). I don’t have a list of urls or IPs to look out for.
Where does your link support what you are claiming? Clicking "see more" on all the sections and searching, there is no mention of "valuable debubbing information". Under "Using NVIDIA Products" section it lists GeForce experience, but not plain graphics cards or their drivers. I have no nvtmmon.exe running and the folder
I use glasswire firewall and I just checked nvidia's activity and it doesn't even amount to a megabyte (uploaded) in the last week. I'm thinking this is tinfoil hat stuff.
Assuming they're using halfway decent cryptography, then doing this is nontrivial. But there are probably people working on it, and if so, they may eventually succeed.
I was working on web maps before google maps steamrolled (effectively killed) the competition. The big thing for us was that we couldn't compete with the storage and licensing requirements for satellite imagery. I suspect it was the same for other local competitors at the time: our local data was objectively better, but google's was just sexier, and you couldn't compete with free.
I've long since switched fields, but the irony is that the company I was working for survived and I heard maps for various business use is now much more expensive than our offer used to be and several large clients eventually switched back.
As a user, I loved maps when it came out. The pre-rendered tiled maps were clean and fast. The web UI was clean and responsive. Streetview was (and still is) absolutely mind boggling. Heck, I even applied to work for google maps at the time.
Nowdays maps is an absolute shitshow. I find it utterly unusable for almost any purpose except for streetview, which is the only reason I still know how it looks like.
Ads and Search use the data from maps to make up the difference.
Even just the ability of search to serve local seeking queries is a huge defensive moat, but the marginal revenue from having a model of the world is worth it.
From my perspective as an advertiser, mobile/local PPC has taken over, be it Local Service Ads or regular search ads listings that show up in maps.
SMART ads that use your GMB profile instead of your website go GANGBUSTERS for brick and mortar clients, who love them.
I wonder how long you have been gone, and if it's possible that they have taken over so much since you left that your statements here are no longer true.
speaking of monetization, i’d happily pay a $10 monthly fee for these features as a biker:
- weather along route
Google knows the weather, it knows the route… Just add a layer! better yet suggest a reroute. i pay for a separate app for this currently.
- motorcycle friendly features
bigger buttons for usage with gloves; selection of straight, curvy, unpaved etc roads; right now it’s just Highway or non Highway
- ability to create a group and show their live locations on the map.
Something better than WhatsApp live location. The current approach that Google maps uses is cumbersome and non-intuitive. also if a route is updated, an option to update everyone else’s shared route.
- local info, POI, etc
you know my location and interests, tell me some interesting stuff over Bluetooth about the city or POI’s i’m passing by.
One of my biggest peeves with Google Maps is its lack of respect for my zoom level. When I tap the centering button, NO, I don't want to zoom in. If I wanted to zoom in, I'd zoom in!
Couple that with the roughly decade-old removal of the +/- zoom buttons, and I basically don't bother with Google Maps any more except for turn-by-turn navigation.
Why do you need +/- zoom buttons? You can just double-tap the screen but hold down the second tap, then slide your finger up or down to zoom in/out as an alternative to pinch-zooming.
Turning off _all_ notifications and Google Maps on Android is pretty okay, except that unnecessary "Latest in..." bottom sheet that takes up space. Wish I could disable that.
And that it's an absolute battery drainer when using GPS navigation.
Some locals in Brisbane succeeded in getting a brief historical name for the central business district ("Frogs Hollow") boosted up as a locality name which shows up in several zoom levels. It's more prominent than the real name of the location (Gardens Point) sometimes.
Nobody appears able to get this rescinded. Either its being contested, or the process boundaries on "this is graffiti") are limiting. I do quite a lot of maps related input, I don't claim to be high status but I am sure I would have multi year searchable "is a bona fide person" status.
Sure, I get it: it's funny. Once. It's really annoying explaining to visitors that its not actually a common name, not used, won't work with Uber or any other mechanistic "where is..." approach with real people.
I can't actually see it anymore at any zoom level on mobile or desktop. Maybe somebody finally did fix it (or maybe on a different sized screen or something it would still show?)... You can still search for it though.
Phew! the licenced bar which named itself "frogs hollow saloon" isn't a problem, its just the common or garden maps graffiti the article complains about!
Google Maps creating new neighborhood names has been such a problem that it got a New York Times article: "As Google Maps Renames Neighborhoods, Residents Fume" (2018). One example: Google Maps renamed San Francisco's SoMa neighbor (South of Market) to the "East Cut".
You just reminded me of my own mapping annoyance. Apple Maps, while navigating, will keep zooming the map as I approach my destination. The scale keeps changing! For a lot of areas, this makes it possible to glance at the map, see that my dot is 32 millimeters away from the destination, drive for a bit, glance again… still 32 mm away. The same unit length on my screen represents 3 miles or 300 feet.
I wish there was some visual indication of the scale, other than a tiny line in the bottom right corner.
Something that catches me out when driving is the scale adjusting for speed. It makes sense, but a junction that looks quite close suddenly starts moving further away from you as you slow down for it and the maps zooms in. It's an odd UI quirk.
It's really bad in London. Instead of telling you the road is called Oxford Street (quite a famous road!) it shows instead the road number, A40, which is not known by 95% of the local population, nor by 100% of visitors.
A population of 9 million but big tech's allergy to scaling customer support means they don't pay a local person to adjust things for local expectations.
They have a large office in London, so their own staff put up with it.
I once met a Googler who had previously worked on maps. I made a few grumbles (railway lines at the time were almost invisible, but very useful for orienting yourself when you exit a station, gardens were grey yet parks were green, "Transit" only shows the London Underground so it misses most of the local rail travel routes in South London, etc).
He agreed with everything, but said the staff working on Maps were all in California and wouldn't care, if they could even be made to understand the issues.
Actually the teams that would implement those fixes are not really in California (rather Seattle, Sydney, Tokyo, among others), but the problem is more the diffusion of responsibility and lack of ownership. Teams all have different metrics they're trying to drive or features they're focused on, but no one is responsible for the overall quality and user experience of "Google Maps" as a whole.
All of the things you mentioned have internal bugs, pitch decks, or maybe even patches pushed by individuals or whole teams. Likely even directors or VPs agree. But the organizational friction is massive and it's very hard to ship anything unless it's crystal clear that it is going to directly move a metric that is a focus for this year. And even then, if launching this feature touches multiple divisions, it still might not happen just because of the massive coordination effort.
That said, the green coloring was probably fixed in 2020. Transit has had a lot of work in the past five years, so maybe a chance London overground rail is fixed? The transit line rendering is still terrible, so you should probably use Apple Maps for that—theirs is beautiful.
The discussion was around 8-10 years ago, so I'm probably mixing it up with Seattle.
Scrolling around the UK with the transit layer active, I only see the complete metro/light rail/tram systems of London and Sheffield (incomplete/missing "heavy rail" for both). Newcastle has one metro line, but not the others. No other city's lines are shown even though the stations/stops are often mapped. (I checked Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham, Nottingham, Blackpool.)
In much of South London "normal" trains are the primary public transport. The stations are marked, the railways shown in light grey, and there are usually even timetables listed [1] but there's no "Transit" line shown. These lines and services aren't shown anywhere in the country.
[2] is a public transport view of OSM. The colours are poor, but the orange lines are mostly missing in Google.
[3] is easier to read but only a railway map, though over 90% of lines in Britain will have passenger service. I generally use this if I'm planning a flexible trip somewhere unfamiliar.
I see some long-distance lines are shown in Japan, though surely only a fraction of what exists. They also get a darker shade of grey, so there's been some local effort there. There are still missing local lines in Tokyo though. I know Copenhagen, and there's been a significant improvement recently! The city/suburban trains are now shown. The regional trains are still missing though, which includes the train from the airport to the city centre.
Native SE Londoner here. IMO Google is accurately reporting the transport in the area, it's not their fault that there is a shocking lack of it.
Lines like Victoria-Orpington and CharingX-Hayes are not the metro and probably shouldn't be highlighted in the transport layer in my opinion.
The solution you are looking for is TFL taking over the suburban southeastern lines. That's what happened in my adopted home of NE London and today they are orange lines on the map. We also got brand new trains and 4tph on Sundays!
Looking at Google Maps you get the feeling it's optimized for being a road atlas for long-distance driving. There's so few details on the maps and basically the only thing visible is the road network (and businesses) until about zoom level 17.
Another stupid thing they've done is to use local language for street and place names. Why the hell even have a phone language then? Just switch everything over to whatever language people are speaking in my immediate vicinity then! There is a reason I have chosen English as the language of my phone, because that's what I can read properly.
Not sure if I understand your point. If you're in Spain you want to see Street names written in Kanji or Greek? Or do you want the street name translated to your phone language?
I want the names as they would appear in the language I can read, in my case that is English. Otherwise it is literally useless for me to show the names at all.
At some point I noticed someone had "helpfully" translated some concert venue names in Copenhagen into English, so Krudtønden became "The Powder Keg", etc. That's not useful, as locals might well not understand what it means if you ask directions or search for a website. It's on Østerfælled Torv, would you have that read as Eastern Commons Market?
Places with other alphabets seem to vary. Greece shows me only Latin transliterations, but Syria shows me both Latin and Arabic in many cases, which is useful — I can read one, and match the shape of the letters for the other.
Not furnishing your users with knowledge that could reduce their reliance on your service is Marketing 101.
Google maps does not want help people gain awareness of their surroundings or improve their navigation skills. It wants users to depend on Google maps.
It's been like that for a frustratingly long time. I've tried Open Street Map, but it doesn't quite cut the mustard (skittles). I think I'm going to have to try again, OSM fits my ideology better.
There's a streetsign in a small country town in NSW "ignore google maps" which is a reflection of how strongly mistaken belief about route-finding can require locals to act. (this is not a piece of cardboard, its a full on enamel finish legit sign. The road is a giant U-turn and the road above which it APPEARS on maps to connect to, cannot be reached.
I wouldn't be surprised if pretty much every economy has one.
Still happens though. https://www.herefordtimes.com/news/23399093.plea-google-satn... is from earlier this year, complaining about satnav sending people between Ruxton Green, Ross-on-Wye HR9 6EJ, UK and Llangarron, Ross-on-Wye, UK. Though they were going to "ask Google Maps to remove the road from their data", compared to a 2016 solution where Lyonshall Parish Council 'decided to try supplementing the existing sign with their own large red road sign reading 'HGV drivers - ignore satnav - you will get stuck!'
Google Street View shows some very narrow roads, with a last visit date of 2011.
Eyesore issues are an aside to the reckless behavior of GMaps' navigation. I don't want to always take a one lane back-country road to save maybe 5 minutes of my life - and if there's no suggested alternative route at the onset there's not really an easy way to compare the times between usual("fastest") and "safest" routes.
Also that 'feature' where it suddenly wants to completely change my route to 'a faster route' unless I interact with the UI in a time pressure WHILE I'M DRIVING or on a motorcycle. And that's the default setting!!! Who thought that was OK?
Entropy or corporate greed and mismanagement - don't know. But Google is in a slow process to become a Yahoo! or Yelp it seems across all its properties.
I wasn't sure if I was imagining it but this seemed to change in the last year or so for restaurants on my phone. I used to zoom into the local area when travelling, and click the food icon to see what's around. Now it zooms out and shows a 25km radius. Useless when I want to pick up lunch within a 5 minute drive.
I have to zoom in and pan around like a bird pecking for crumbs.
At least Google has this feature. I'd like to use Apple Maps sometimes, but the search is terrible and you can't even coerce it with a feature like "search in this area".
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 394 ms ] threadAnd on Android I just avoid the app. I hate that I couldn't turn off the automatic compass. Every time I finally manage to orient myself when in a new place, the map starts spinning like crazy.
I truly feel old when using Google Maps.
It’s just like Internet Explorer on Windows 20 years ago. Microsoft only needed to make a good product long enough to leverage it into their other monopoly products, then they no longer gave a shit. We can hope Google Maps suffers the same fate.
I can’t help but roll my eyes reading stuff like this. Cows have no choice in their lives, Google Maps users can switch to an (increasingly competitive) alternative with very little switching cost.
Of course it’s in Google’s interest to keep their product usable.
Ok, off topic, but having grown up around cows, they will line up each day waiting for their chance to get on the milking machine. They very much do like them.
You need to drag the "man" icon and drop it on the map.
I had to google that.
I hate that UI. Why can't we just click on the "man", and then click on a spot to drop it?
You can, actually. When you click it, all of the roads that have street view are highlighted with blue color. In this mode you can just click on the roads to go to street view.
That's exactly how it works.
Click the man, roads with street view data are highlighted, click a road.
Buckingham Palace used to have a little Queen, but that is no longer the case.
Lately I'm particularly baffled by the bar at the top, which is a way to search without typing. I click "Transit" and I'm presented with a list filled mostly with bus stops, with no filters for rail etc. Great. Does it also switch me to the transit overlay, which might be helpful? No, of course not.
There's a "Keep North up" option while navigating, and I think if you click the "center map on me" button while not navigating one of the states will keep north up.
IMO smartphone compasses and gps are still too noisy to use anything other than "keep north up" as the default. Trying to navigate while your pin spins and jumps around on a map is dangerous and difficult, having the entire map spin around at the same time is just madness. I wouldn't be surprised if this decision hasn't killed someone.
The other setting I'd love to see is to switch off re-framing. Let's say I select a destination, then I'm curious how long it will take to get there, so I select directions. Then I scroll around a bit to see other things nearby and spot something interesting. I tap on it, and try to get directions there too, except directions is already active, so I either have to go through the rigmarole of "add stop, delete the other one", or press the back button a few times to come out of directions. Except when I do, Maps first zooms out to show my entire route, then zooms back in to the original destination, and now I have to scroll around and try and find that second thing again. I'd rather it just left the zoom alone, and let me choose where I want to be looking. Sure, have a button to frame what you're currently looking at if you want, but stop jerking all over the place.
You can zoom map with just one finger (I use thumb) – do almost a double click but instead of releasing the second click, hold it pressed. Now as you hold it, just move thumb up and down to zoom in and out.
It’s a feature I discovered accidentally a few years ago, and in my experience pretty much no one knows about it, but once shown, everyone finds it extremely useful.
E.g. "from Berlin to Rome"
Apple is probably better in the US where it has had a lot more use. It's pretty poor here for the main thing I use it for - finding businesses.
But perhaps it’s okay for business directories to be separate tools from maps. Before the internet, you’d have Yellow Pages at home and a map in the car, right?
If we can’t accept that, then we might be stuck navigating with Google’s subpar app forever. I personally don’t mind looking up the business I’m interested in online before I navigate to it—in most cases I want to check their current hours on their own website or Facebook page anyway as even Google’s info can be out of date.
It also seems to be deliberately obtuse when you want to zoom around the map. Like, how dare you not fully trust its routing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVq1wgIN62E
One of the quotes was: "Google Maps still holds around 80% of the mobile market. But in recent years, I’ve found myself getting increasingly frustrated with the Google Maps experience, especially when it comes to general navigation and exploration of a map area."
And I wanted to say that overall, I barely feel any frustration as an iOS user. It is the truth for me, and my opinion. So I'm gonna say it.
Going to take a wild guess and say you didn't.
1: https://www.google.com/search?sa=X&tbs=lf:1,lf_ui:9&tbm=lcl&...
2: https://www.google.com/maps/search/lunch+downtown+berkeley/@...
Its nerfed features make for such a frustrating user experience. I can't think of a reason for it to exist as its own thing. I'd love to know the rationale.
on mobile the interface of waze is just cleaner.
https://arstechnica.com/google/2023/06/waze-googles-other-ma...
For example, if I search for an exact local place to eat, the top result is some completely irrelevant store on the other side of the city, followed by a list of useless distant results that I have to scroll through to, maybe, find the place I want to go to.
Whereas, the Google voice search finds it first go and starts navigating to it.
https://github.com/uazo/cromite
Glad its just a work phone.
I'm on firefox with uBO and have no video playing.
Seems like people with uBlock are split between getting it and not, so maybe it's just not served to everyone?
A/B testing or regional variants maybe.
Firefox + PiHole + no extensions = dumbass video, blank top banner ad (all the space is taken up but no content)
The choice of browser just represents what I had available to test with where different results were shown.
Maybe Brave has extra visual filters that block this specific div?
The pedant in me says: that's an ad.
It's just one of the rare ones not delivered by a gigantic network, so it's far less likely to be a scam or malware. Still an ad though.
Apart from that, as long as this garbage takes up screen space, it's still not enough.
I hope that the person who invented the "sticky video" idea has a long and happy life, in a completely different job, completely separated from anything that has to do with marketing.
This is the dark pattern that I hate most on mobile by a 1000 miles.
It's not realistic to discuss UX while plastering your website with things like "mustard skittles hahaha" unless you want to deceive people and dumb them down.
You can check with the Nvidia activity monitor.
Maps is mostly going to be CPU bound though.
Maybe it's your OS or browser?
edit: also this one made me chuckle https://www.google.com/maps/place/Tim+Hortons/@82.4982691,-6...
The width and detail of streets is adjusted such that it is not obvious if I'm looking at things a few hundred metres apart, or a few kilometers! And there is no scale indication on the screen! I guess they want a "clean" look but it's not so helpful.
Take a look at Garmin aviation maps. You're offered only a specific set of scales (not an infinitely adjustable range), there is always an indication of scale, and the detail appropriately hints at the scale.
eg the US and Australia now have built-in reviews.
I also hate not being able to keep north fixed on the screen unless I'm in CarPlay. That just doesn't make sense.
The entirety of the next 3 steps, precisely what I cared about the most, was totally obscured by the hill in the 3d view.
The exact same hill I was seeing out my windshield. The hill in my windshield was the reason I was glancing at my mapping app for further guidance. facepalm
In the end I took the backroad and ended up just making it after driving on the "empty tank" light for about 80km (which is surprising how long it lasted!). My fault for zoning out and blindly trusting GPS!
And yes, we even like the 3D view. It helps provide context faster than the 2D view, even if it doesn't always render the best information. Every product has room for improvement, and Apple Maps has been improving. Google Maps isn't usefully better now than it was in 2015.
If anyone wants to try it, OrganicMaps on F-droid do a fantastic job delivering raster maps with navigation
I get it - they have no information about me. They maybe don't even have a way to understand or even guess which one I may care about, but in a city with any amount of density you need some fairly strong heuristics on what pins you're showing to filter out the valid businesses that you're unlikely to care about.
When you zoom out, everything is just green, no matter if it's actually a forest or not (okay, some areas with agricultural usage have been mapped, but it's far from comprehensive where I live), and when you zoom in everything is just a featureless grey-on-grey, with no way to distinguish between built-up areas and various kinds of open spaces, tree-covered or not. (Only "parks" still get shown in green – and somehow in France Google has decided to include large scale "natural parks" covering hundreds of square kilometres or more in that category, in which case once you zoom in everything in that area is shown on a green background, which is equally useless.)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31333754
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Also, as a cyclist and a bit of nerd, it's fun to update OSM around my bike routes I know best.
(That said, the only place I found, including undersea tunnels, that I didn't get signal was in the lower car hold of the ferry. This place has infrastructure.)
I use it back home to label businesses and add other points to the map.
Organic Maps uses OSM data offline and is a little friendlier.
This is also against their TOS – the "business name" form is supposed to be their legally registered business name, the one that they probably have signage for. Moderators simply don't enforce this, and with Map Maker basically gone, the community of moderators is somewhat of a cloak and dagger group now.
I have tried to clean some of these up via submissions, because in spite of agreeing with the points of the article and using mostly Apple Maps for navigation, Google Maps still is better in terms of having a lot of community sourced data and overall place discoverability (along with Yelp, which Apple Maps seems to no longer source data from).
Examples of these business names:
- {name} - {city name} Axe Throwing
- {name} License Agency - (Vehicle/Vessel not drivers license)
- {name} - Lunch Buffet (Friday-Sunday) - {cuisine} Restaurant - {city name}
And many now have:
- {name of a local chain} - {neighborhood or city name}
Some of this is a UX problem or perhaps data architecture problem – in the case of local chains, I imagine many are dealing with people calling in orders and showing up at the wrong place to pick up their order. Google Maps could do a better job showing the neighborhood/locality/"local name" of the area in the search results.
Others are just a lack of consistent moderation.
Of course moderation would still be a thing, perhaps a character limit of 25 for the name should be enforced unless they can demonstrate why that is too little.
Coincidently the separate fields is how Apple Maps does it, although their title field appears made up of a category list item, presumably to keep it consistent and free of spam.
Wait, what's wrong with this? This is just good practice. It's helpful to be able to, when communicating with someone, unambiguously refer to the exact location, e.g. Westville Chelsea v Westville East v Westville Hudson v Westville Wall Street.
Also, lots of people (especially visitors!) don't know where the neighborhoods actually are. So having the names of the locations in the pins is better than them struggling to figure out exactly which of a series of identically named pins is actually the right one in an area they don't know about.
And the map TOS state it should be the business name.
I pointed this out as a UX problem, which it is.
You do, because you're native to the area. The person you're talking to, possibly not.
What I'm starting to see a lot which is frustrating is:
{name of completely not local chain} - {neighborhood or city name}
Such as "Local Town Plumbing" with a national telephone number to some plumber referral service and will be located where there is an empty field or other non-business.
Monetization was a dismal failure. I don't know how well they're doing now, but Maps was a gigantic money-loser, forever. I'd be a little surprised if it didn't still lose money, but maybe less. I don't what those "pin ads" cost, but I'd bet it's way less than a search ad.
If you don't believe that, that's fine. "What about indirect revenue?" you ask? Google consciously does not want to estimate that, because such a document could be discovered in patent litigation. As it is, there are tons of patent lawsuits about Maps, and the damage claims always tried to get at Ads revenue, because Maps revenue was nil.
Caveat: I could be way out of date here. I've been retired a while now.
As for the UX: "enshittification" and big-company bureaucracy describe it pretty well.
One way I commonly use google maps is as a restaurant or bar finder. Like "show me open restaurants around me". I even do this when at home and feel like eating out for whatever reason. I don't want to walk too far away or take transit. I just want to see the restaurants in a 10-minute walk radius around where I am which are open and what they serve. Now, sure, I'd like to see all restaurants, not just those which took out ads. But I'd be fine with those being featured at the top of the list.
Instead, what I get, is ads for hotels down the street when I'm already home. Or ads for a carpet store chain, which was closed that particular day (national holiday), which you also can't really miss if you set foot in the square.
Regarding monetization, they could probably figure a way to tell that if I click on the restaurant's pin, then follow directions there and stop at the address, I'm likely dining there.
Local pubs, even those part of a large chain, tend to give a nice feel of the region and the people who live there. And you can learn interesting details about the local history.
Google decision makers must know of its importance as a moat, a data collection pipe, a vehicle for other services and so on.
No offense, but trying to squeeze direct revenue out seems kinda laughable. Or maybe even a way to plausibly deny the indirect revenue importance.
https://duckduckgo.com/?hps=1&q=maps&ia=web&iaxm=maps
Just noticed it recently.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0062673041
(I don't know to what extent the tech stack is shared between the two.)
I’m not sure who that drives revenue for, though.
I switched back to iPhone over this. I strongly prefer Here We Go to Apple Maps, and it is available on Android.
(Open platform, my ass…)
It's no accident.
That way it'd help a bit with the monopoly heat and maintaining it could be slightly cheaper. I don't know the legal stuff, but I'd rather have a company supporting a non-profit than burning money internally, so I hope the incentives follow that (yeah, probably not true thanks to lobby and having rich people run governments)
This part is probably what keeps Maps valuable as an asset, and it's such a huge moat that letting it go would be irreversible. Building a similar product from scratch takes tremendous capital and local deals, we've seen how much of an effort it is for Apple to even have a viable product, coming up with a competitive offering would require double that.
Even if all counted for Maps was net 0 in the balance sheet, I feel there would be no Google CEO agreeing to let it go just for antitrust relief. They'd probably let Youtube become independant before that.
Assuming maps still loses a good chunk of money, how would it survive as a charity or non-profit? Where would the money come from? Who would donate to the charity?
And there isn't a paid review staff, people who filter maybe, but Google doesn't review anything.
Mapping is a data collection/sanitization and content moderation problem. You need a lot of data, much of it user-submitted, and you have a lot of bad actors constantly trying to feed in bad data. I don't see where AI comes in here except maybe for route optimization, which is a tiny percentage of what a mapping app actually does. A mapping app is mostly just a huge database of incredibly useful info that needs to be true (and LLMs cannot help there, they just make shit up).
there's no need. Whereas individual movies do need a fake P&L, Google doesn't report Maps P&L at all. AFAIK.
Its assistant is also useless.
"OK Google, zoom in the map by a factor of 1.5"
"OK Google, stop hiding the businesses"
"OK Google, add a stop for the last Safeway before the turn onto route 120"
None of this stuff works.
Or “good lord just show me the street name please”
Don't change the context and try to outsmart me without giving me any indication of doing so. Don't attempt to outsmart me without giving any recourse if I don't like it. It only ever leads to information I want to see being hidden. You, Google Maps, do not know what I want better than I fucking well do.
Oh and not to mention that it sometimes tries to translate street names to my phone's language setting. Leave street names in their original language so I can match it up to the physical signs, goddamnit.
Letting you specify on Google Maps a kind of context that would swap between these at will would be an infinitely better experience, but unfortunately it doesn't grant promotions, unlike a blog post about the _brand new smart experience_
One of the changes brought about by the digital mapping revolution was to allow much less visually complex maps.
[1] https://blog.az.co.uk/z-map-company-supplies-london-emergenc...
Not surprised, we can come up with probably thousands of similar scenarios when some popular free tool ain't the smoothest to use for 'when I do this but want also that and while doing something else that isn't so well integrated into the flow something happens/doesn't happen but should' situation.
Maybe take a laptop and a mouse next time, 100x more efficient to use. Or use it in browser in tabs, so you can have 20 different locations/views and switch between them.
Using Maps while driving for anything other than A-B navigation is generally poor. It seems designed by people who are accustomed to every destination having plentiful dedicated parking. If you want to go to B, then find local parking, you need to invoke dark voodoo.
The worst part is that the Apple & Google duopoly in maps supported by Android Auto and Apple Carplay means there's no way for a superior alternative to succeed in the market. Google even contributed to this by buying Waze. So Maps only needs to be just good enough.
What does Android Auto and Apple Carplay have to do with it? Aren't both of them available for third party apps to use?
This is to me Google's most everyday impacting product, and what makes the difference between me being stranded/lost or making it in time. The stories of people ending in a lake for blindly following directions are cheeky, but decent maps are just that important, and Google Maps, how flawed it can be, is currently the best for so many areas.
Straight comparison to the other service I paid for for a while I gave up as it didn't seem worth it.
> Even before google maps, the standalone navigation devices didn't cost that much.
They costed a bunch and were a lot less useable in day to day life.
There was no device that would tell me the schedule of the next train departing from the station 10 min from where I am, when the store I am going will close, and how I'll get back when there's no train left for the day anymore. To your point there were service providing this info in part, in text format, on super small screen, and they'd cost around 5/10 bucks a month.
Now I get that with a mostly accurate map, end to end, automatically udpated as I start moving. And I also get other people's position, and don't need to text them every 5 min to know if they're lost or stuck.
The same thing goes for mountain maps, where I live the trail markers are relatively accurate and I can use it as a reference to check the official maps and on trail directions (and getting the other people's position is that much more valuable)
All in all it's a package that was never at hand before smarphones arised, and is currently only really working with Google Maps, even as we have OSM and Apple Maps at the distance.
> how much is the total bill of all software you use ? Surely, the h/w, OS, browsers etc. should be orders of magnitude more than what they are today too.
I actually think that keeping a worldwide map including cities street level details and natural paths up to date could cost a lot more that maintaining a browser or an OS.
There is a free Android (+ iOS) app doing a) and c), it's Transit App, at least in 18 countries and 300 cities [0]. Gives you schedules and (multimodal) trip planning including car, bus, transit, train, subway, cycling, walking, rideshare, bikeshare, scooter rental. It has both scheduled and (near-)realtime information, detours, service interruptions etc. Shows you all the options you're interested in, rolled up by start time and total time, and includes cost(/estimated cost for rideshare).
In text format, on a super small screen, free.
> And I also get other people's position, and don't need to text them every 5 min to know if they're lost or stuck.
Well ok but very few people use that much. Why do you need it so much? Socializing? Hiking? Playing Pokemon?
[0]: https://transitapp.com/region
You're still left patchworking all these apps, switching from one another at every point and assembling everything in notes by yourself. It's super nice it can be done at all, but I'd also pay for an app that has it all in one place if it wasn't free.
To note, the c) part is not just public transport but anything from private bus network/taxi/private bike networks/just walk. While Maps deals with that decently, I'd agree it would be way too much too ask from a free transit app.
There's not much patchworking/assembling once you bookmark your preferred locations, research what times they open/close, select favorite transit modes, bookmark specific lines, research which exact stops. Don't mentally lock into Google Maps as your primary thing.
I said the c) part is already done by Transit App and generally better than Google Maps (shows rideshare time-and-cost estimates, bikeshare/scooter pickup locations etc.) Where 'taxi' has generally been replaced by rideshare and by 'private bike networks' you mean bikeshare. Not sure if by 'private bus network' you mean coaches, or employee shuttles, but those are sometimes not open to the public. (Can you cite us an example location and name the private network companies?)
As mentioned, the amount of local detail depends on how much your municipality participates in open-date initatives; if it doesn't, ask them to. Transit App is adding new regions constantly.
Are you running a package delivery service, or taxi service? I don't understand this statement in other contexts.
You may be willing to pay €50 a month for it, but most people can't afford that and wouldn't pay it.
OSM lacks a lot of details that completely change how you'd move from point A to point B (I was missing overpass bridges and crossable paths in residential neighboorhoods), and point to point navigation is also not great. Then it completely lacks all the more commercial features Google has built on top of Maps (store details, position sharing, timeline etc.)
On sheer readability I also prefer Google Maps, but I've been using it so long that that might be just familiarity.
I wish I'd like OSM a lot more, but every time I ended up back to Maps for a reason or another.
Sadly I'm still not good with really basic compass and map positionning, and the GPS + average location info helped a ton in the past.
Interesting – personally I find Maps absolutely horrible for usage as an actual map for orienting myself (as opposed to just serving as a vague geographical background for displaying POIs or navigation information).
When you zoom out, it often doesn't really distinguish between forests and other open spaces (admittedly OSM's coverage in that regard varies regionally, though at least in Europe it seems quite comprehensive and definitively better than Google's).
Then, when you zoom in everything just turns into a featureless grey-on-grey with no distinction between built-up areas and everything else (only "parks" get shown, but e.g. in France that apparently even covers large scale "natural parks" covering hundreds or even thousands of square kilometres, so in that case everything, including any towns happening to lie in that area, just gets shown with a green background, which is equally useless), and buildings are only shown when you start zooming in really closely.
On the rougher part of the maps, I often get back to satellite view and/or StreeView if available (even as they sometimes don't show the same info as they come from different points in time -_-;). It's a handy backup that I don't get on the open source map apps
And for unfathomable reasons Google Earth (the desktop version) can show historic aerial imagery, but no historic street view pictures, whereas Google Maps works just the other way round – you can view historic street view photographs there, but no historic aerial/satellite imagery. (And the browser version of Google Earth apparently can't do either.)
For me in Europe, Google Maps coverage quality can be best described by this personal anecdote. I used to live in Nürnberg, which is in top 10 German cities by population, and where are some major and well-recognized international companies are headquartered. Nürnberg has a subway system (U-Bahn) since 1980s, and it's significant enough: a few dozen stations over three lines (one is fully driverless, btw).
Google didn't have any representation of U-Banh in Nürnberg till at least 2017. I don't mean "wasn't supporting it in navigation and routing", I mean " stations weren't even marked and labelled on the general overview maps. And it's not like they didn't have the into: there was a widely-used user layer which added at least station labels. They just simply didn't care enough, and had other priorities.
In the meanwhile, the level of detail on OSM covered details as minor as every mailbox not only in Nürnberg, but in every small town around Frankonia (I used to participate in postcrossing and used this a lot from random places).
OSM was pretty good too in France but has different issues: they don't get the same access to up to date commerce data as exposed through local aggregators, and there's just not enough user data to have good heuristics on navigation times.
As you mention gas, for instance my gas cost are ridiculously low (less than 10 bucks a month) as the car is only for specific cases, and 99% of the time I'm not driving.
Same way I care a lot more about visiting new places than going to theaters, and I'd never end up with 5$ of paper maps (to dig my own grave, I also buy paper maps of the wilder areas I go and they sure cost way more than that...)
On the other had, getting lost somewhere I have no familiarity with, being stuck at a station that has an incident and not having any backup plans, looking for someone in a town for 30 min because they're describing places in a way that is too vague are situations that are highly stressful and can cost a lot more than 10 or 20 bucks. Have you ever missed the last train and thought how much it will cost you to do something about it ?
That's where I put the price of an app I actually use a ton, it could be one of the main reasons I have a smartphone and not a combination of a dumb modem and a tablet.
But for mapping lots of POIs this is a PITA and doesnt scale. What if the owner declines? This is non-copyrightable info anyway.
Shall one ask house owners if one can map their address or their house' outline?
If you just ask it without context, "today we'll close at 16:00" is a perfectly reasonable response.
Unfortunately there's nothing to aggregate current traffic information (traffic jams etc.) as far as I know.
The maps themselves support all sorts of routing options for walking/bikes/cars, at least: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Routing#End_users:_routi...
They also have a Wiki page on public transport: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Public_transport
Sadly, they don't even attempt to have public transport schedules on the main maps, whereas Google has even added inter-city buses in some places, as well as having an integration with Bolt or other platforms I think.
That, in addition to the lack of business information, business hours, reviews and so on makes OSM a bit inadequate in comparison, which is unfortunate. There have been other maps that build on top of OSM data (which is great), but they're still pretty small in comparison.
It would be interesting to see how OSM would fare if it actually tried to compete with Google: 1st party Android/iOS map with some open dataset for business information, integration with some review platform, aggregated public transport maps with an underlying open dataset and stuffing their pockets as much as possible with money from Bolt/Uber/whatever to ensure longevity of the platform, by adding helpful suggestions for trip routing, as well as aggregating traffic data.
What Google is doing is to integrate public transport data (often in GTFS format). It is not mapped directly by Google, and unlikely that it would be doable in OSM (note that in many cities timetables change weekly, for example as result of construction).
There is some ongoing work to build similar things for OSM-using software, for example Organic Maps is at least trying: https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues?q=is%3Aiss... (I bet that pull requests would be welcome, especially if discussed with people developing it)
They already know the photos have the objects they are interested in. Are they still working on motorcycles buses and signs?
The recaptcha part doesn't even depend on recognition, it's just a statistical comparison with what other humans clicked on given the same prompt + some pointer analysis and browser fingerprinting.
Aren't they charging big money for the API?
Make one of those pins move because it's actually a car, and suddenly your cheeks are getting clapped with 6+-figure bills.
Some sites we added it as an image to avoid this. Some sites got flagged as weren't allowed to do this and others have been ignored.
It’s an open-source system that is used worldwide, by a few thousand loosely-organized nonprofits.
When Google Maps suddenly required associated credit cards, it caused a great deal of trouble. It still causes problems.
That’s because most of these entities are not 501(c)(3) orgs, with bank accounts and debit/credit cards. In fact, the organization enforces deliberate poverty, amongst its chapters.
Someone needs to add their personal card to the Google Maps API. Since the maintenance people are constantly rotating, this is an issue.
Also, the API has a dashboard like a Space Shuttle cockpit. Most regular schlubs have a difficult time with it.
Google’s UI is a complete mystery to anyone outside google that doesn’t know the lingo. It seems to keep changing too.
I’d be terrified of a situation like AWS, where suddenly my card is charged thousands of dollars for some unexpected situation.
And, unlike AWS, I wouldn’t expect to be able to reach someone at Google to cancel the charge.
You mean a cult. This isn't a real issue for properly run 501c3, it's a tax registration for a reason.
Well, isn't that special?
Have a great day!
Also google grew laxy. Not tskes them a year to add a royal mail postbox
Ah yes, the chicken and egg logic of network effect excuses all.
How about if people, idk, just evangelized more about the things they love to be smug about on HN?
People should be shamed off enshittified platforms. Be "that guy" - or be a hypocrite. For Google it might a little more complicated, but for each one of us it's exactly this simple.
OSM is for nerds. Very hard to add even basic info. Google Maps it’s trivial.
Same as uploading photo to Google Maps is easier than adding it to WikiMedia Commons. Such is life.
(Ironically one of the biggest sources of photos is commons is Panoramio; before Google merged it with Google Maps, the photos there defaulted to Creative Commons.)
To add new features I have to use SCEE, which is more nerdy mainly because it involves using FDroid to install it. But I've no idea how to add, say a park bench to Google Maps.
On desktop, right click on the map and choose "Add a missing place." On mobile, long-press to drop a pin, then scroll down to "Add a missing place."
Does OSM require installing a parallel app store to add a park bench? Sounds like a UX-killer :/
You're right though, installing another app store is a non starter.
Google probably sees their data as a moat and likely aren't interested in two-way data sharing. (Given how many of their competitors are now involved directly or indirectly with OSM or Overture, they may be correct.) OSM probably can't legally scrape it without an agreement in place.
I don't think you can estimate overall worth of Maps to Google directly and easily. Its still #1 driving solution I use, its not perfect in dense traffic in cities but otherwise OK and for free, plus their estimates are pretty accurate.
Google does not need maps to have traffic data.
This is hugely useful for navigation since it means these bottlenecks can be avoided, some thing which is not possible unless this data is available.
Since the Google Maps is here, not only we have a completely congested highways but also all other roads that were free of tourists before are now blocked. Tourists that are traveling to the next country while their number has doubled as they dont stand in line from border to border but rather destroy any viable traffic for locals.
In some locations it has gone to the point where small villages with historically very narrow roads are literally blocked by **** (pardon my french), using google maps and see that there is a pass (while every road is the same, right) so the police needs to deter tourists to even head there. Wont even go into suffering of locals there.
Japan actually has some soft regulations in this space about routing and road visibility (e.g. residential roads are hidden when you’re on thoroughfares). But they’re just suggestions so only domestic companies follow them and Google, Apple, etc still provide their usual global algorithms.
Maybe there’s a good solution to this, but I don’t think it’s getting rid of mapping services and going back to security through obscurity.
Wanna se another interesting example (use google translate), here are statistics of our volunteer based and taxes paid (for everyone in need, even tourists, including helicopter transport) mountain rescue service: https://www.grzs.si/resevanje/statistika-nesrec/
Check number of accidents since 2006 (google maps came out 2005) and constant rise to 2023 (more than twice the number of interventions). Freaking maps are showing the steepest mountain roads (Alps are not a joke), to parts without phone signal. Google gets you just far enough to get you into troubles, potentially fatal troubles.
Edit:
https://www.wired.com/story/99-phones-fake-google-maps-traff...
Somebody did it.
I believe it is a funnel of things: Slovenia became part of EU. GPS navigation in cars and smartphones became a thing. Google isn't even the only traffic data provider. Slovenia has RDS-TMC since 2009. So even a boring TomTom will show some form of congestion info.
But I agree with you, that navigation tools should not direct traffic away from the main roads (especial transit roads). Traffic planners should somehow be able to weight streets or routes.
What is your take on that?
The only way to get those restaurants to show up is to search them by name.
Not sure if they're intentionally penalizing certain restaurants, but it's pretty bad.
so an interface could be made to present it better: without being zoomed in so much, with filters and so on.
I know of https://www.toiletmap.org.uk/ which does this for public toilets.
I just found this which has an example for restaurants in one town: http://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/where-to-eat-in-middlebu...
Short of scraping reviews from Google and importing them into OSM for the area in which I'm traveling, I'm not sure there is a good short-term solution.
I know median and mediocrity already share a common root, but I wish there were a clever portmanteau describing ML-optimizing for the median user leading to a mediocre experience. "Medianocre" just sounds like an eggcorn, so I presume 99% of readers would take it as a mistake instead of a neologism.
So, no Maps presence for you! (Except via direct search within Maps.) Just my anecdotal experience, but one of several similar on Maps that leave me thinking they "have that feel" to them.
I specifically had an area selected for a reason. I know there are plenty of restaurants there. I don't need it to tell me to look somewhere else.
So the things most people care about have changed, streets are less important now and things like attractions or "active areas" are more important. Yeah, some people still read maps the "old way", but now probably those are in the minority so catering to them isn't worth it anymore.
Of course that's only one aspect next to the question of what makes the most ad money.
In big cities, there is construction happening everywhere, POIs have closed down or changed location after the pandemic.
Street names are the only thing that stays the same.
It's maybe a bit of a shame that the raw tools (like OSM, QGIS, ArcGIS, even what is left of Google Earth) aren't easy to learn and equally accessible to everyone and the incentives of the big maps (Google Maps, Apple Maps, etc) is its own drive to a different lowest common denominator, but digital maps have such tools in the first place. (It was far more expensive to get custom printed maps. AAA triptychs are interesting thing to compare here.)
I would usually look at the map briefly, see "we need Farm Lane, should be 4th on the right" and then look at the street name signs. In a non-residential area I'll often do this on foot, but if I'm cycling I'm more likely to think "Right after the paint shop" or similar.
For those old enough, just think back to all the times your "navigator" wouldn't just tell you the street name or even "turn at the third intersection after this one " and instead waited until just moments before you reached it and said "Here" like a jack hole.
I need the street names. They're authoritative. Landmarks (or, worse, businesses used as landmarks) are things that are occasionally useful to me in the right circumstance, but they're too dynamic to really rely on.
If a map application doesn't make it easy to know the street names, then it's one that isn't useful to me.
I was literally on the same block as a restaurant and it wouldn't show in maps at all, though the other 3 restaurants on the block were, and the only way to get it to show up was to Google it then click on the maps link. As soon as I took focus off the restaurant it disappeared again.
I can only presume it's because they hadn't paid Google or were being punished for some reason. It lead to me looking for more examples and found many places, including some major ones in the city I'm visiting, were excluded for no apparent reason, even ones with 4.9 ratings, and the only correlation between them was that they either were inherently more "indy" than the rest and thus likely to avoid engaging in certain aspects of Google or were close to a more powerful competitor.
This was particularly shocking when Wendy's wasn't being shown at a strip mall but the Burger King was....
It makes Google look like the mob and everyone sees it. Everyone would understand if they would show businesses that pay at the top of the list but somehow instead they went this way, incomprehensible.
Could you tell us more how you came to this conclusion? Did someone high up ever literally tell you "we're not doing that because it could show up in discovery"? And if not, why have you concluded that?
But I think open street maps has a killer feature that Google doesn't have: the community.
De-anonymizing a Gaia ID is about as secure as it gets.
Disclosure: this is 6 year old info. YMMV.
I do not understand what resell means here. Who is google selling to first?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_re-identification
That said:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy
However it wasn’t clear how high quality the differential privacy algorithm was or if it was attackable. But the nefariousness of its use against groups and demographics was fairly apparent.
Apparently AV companies lose money on the customer endpoint protection (it’s basically for free!) but make it up on selling users data. Also on the business licenses though
That was a couple years back. Who knows how much more invasive it’s gotten since.
Oh. And this data is considered to be “valuable debugging information”, so is not prevented by opting out of analytics.
This 100%. I would include Azure too.
I actively try not to use Windows every time I get a chance. I am so glad a company like Apple exists. I agree Apple might not be 100% right on privacy but they are pretty darn close that I a live with.
You'll just be a few versions behind, not sure what their release cadence is for this. But as far as I know this is a net positive to the Windows PC user and potentially eliminates needing to deal with GFE/Adrenalin as long as you are satisfied with the builds Microsoft is shipping you.
:-/
Then I remembered I game in linux, on steam.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/about-nvidia/privacy-policy/
How I was wrong is was in the “valuable debugging information”. Because you can actually disable the sending of debug and crash statistics, but you cannot disable the collection of tracking everything you do except for password boxes!
The original source on the telemetry was a print magazine, CanardPC, but this is referenced quite a bit.
I was additionally wrong the GeForce Experience matters. This is currently untrue. After the original article was released of how much spying Nvidia does, the telemetry package was moved to the driver rather than GeForce experience.
Long story short: if you have an Nvidia video card and have not actively disabled nvtmmon then Nvidia is tracking every window you open, how long it’s open, which windows have focus and for how long, window locations titles etc, along with clicks (but not keyboard strokes) etc. *It is not only tracking games. It tracks everything. It does this with just the driver*. If you have GeForce experience, then that information is tied to your sensitive personal information. If you do not opt out, they sell that to advertisers. If you do opt out, the collection happens anyway, but they claim they’re not sending it to third parties.
You need to kill Nvidia telemetry services (one site has it listed as nmtvmon).
Another option would be to block traffic to Nvidia from leaving your network (pihole captures at least some Nvidia telemetry, not sure if it blocks all). I don’t have a list of urls or IPs to look out for.
For EU-based customers, how can this be GDPR-compliant?
https://www.glasswire.com
Capturing window titles and how long they have focus over a weeks logging takes a couple bytes of text…
That seems like a lot for a piece of software that doesn't have to send anything whatsoever in order to do its job.
And in the monetization meetings it was never even discussed.
I've long since switched fields, but the irony is that the company I was working for survived and I heard maps for various business use is now much more expensive than our offer used to be and several large clients eventually switched back.
As a user, I loved maps when it came out. The pre-rendered tiled maps were clean and fast. The web UI was clean and responsive. Streetview was (and still is) absolutely mind boggling. Heck, I even applied to work for google maps at the time.
Nowdays maps is an absolute shitshow. I find it utterly unusable for almost any purpose except for streetview, which is the only reason I still know how it looks like.
Even just the ability of search to serve local seeking queries is a huge defensive moat, but the marginal revenue from having a model of the world is worth it.
From my perspective as an advertiser, mobile/local PPC has taken over, be it Local Service Ads or regular search ads listings that show up in maps.
SMART ads that use your GMB profile instead of your website go GANGBUSTERS for brick and mortar clients, who love them.
I wonder how long you have been gone, and if it's possible that they have taken over so much since you left that your statements here are no longer true.
- weather along route
Google knows the weather, it knows the route… Just add a layer! better yet suggest a reroute. i pay for a separate app for this currently.
- motorcycle friendly features
bigger buttons for usage with gloves; selection of straight, curvy, unpaved etc roads; right now it’s just Highway or non Highway
- ability to create a group and show their live locations on the map.
Something better than WhatsApp live location. The current approach that Google maps uses is cumbersome and non-intuitive. also if a route is updated, an option to update everyone else’s shared route.
- local info, POI, etc
you know my location and interests, tell me some interesting stuff over Bluetooth about the city or POI’s i’m passing by.
Couple that with the roughly decade-old removal of the +/- zoom buttons, and I basically don't bother with Google Maps any more except for turn-by-turn navigation.
And that it's an absolute battery drainer when using GPS navigation.
Nobody appears able to get this rescinded. Either its being contested, or the process boundaries on "this is graffiti") are limiting. I do quite a lot of maps related input, I don't claim to be high status but I am sure I would have multi year searchable "is a bona fide person" status.
Sure, I get it: it's funny. Once. It's really annoying explaining to visitors that its not actually a common name, not used, won't work with Uber or any other mechanistic "where is..." approach with real people.
(amazed it's gone. Thanks for pointing it out)
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/02/technology/google-maps-ne...
(But just checked again and they refreshed it finally.)
I've been running into this a lot lately. No matter how much I zoom -- no street name. This is Mapping 101.
A for everyone telling me I can enable it always in settings, I will answer that it still gets removed when you start navigation with 'Directions'.
But I still agree street omission is pretty bad.
I wish there was some visual indication of the scale, other than a tiny line in the bottom right corner.
But why would they? We have to use it anyway.
I once met a Googler who had previously worked on maps. I made a few grumbles (railway lines at the time were almost invisible, but very useful for orienting yourself when you exit a station, gardens were grey yet parks were green, "Transit" only shows the London Underground so it misses most of the local rail travel routes in South London, etc).
He agreed with everything, but said the staff working on Maps were all in California and wouldn't care, if they could even be made to understand the issues.
All of the things you mentioned have internal bugs, pitch decks, or maybe even patches pushed by individuals or whole teams. Likely even directors or VPs agree. But the organizational friction is massive and it's very hard to ship anything unless it's crystal clear that it is going to directly move a metric that is a focus for this year. And even then, if launching this feature touches multiple divisions, it still might not happen just because of the massive coordination effort.
That said, the green coloring was probably fixed in 2020. Transit has had a lot of work in the past five years, so maybe a chance London overground rail is fixed? The transit line rendering is still terrible, so you should probably use Apple Maps for that—theirs is beautiful.
Scrolling around the UK with the transit layer active, I only see the complete metro/light rail/tram systems of London and Sheffield (incomplete/missing "heavy rail" for both). Newcastle has one metro line, but not the others. No other city's lines are shown even though the stations/stops are often mapped. (I checked Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham, Nottingham, Blackpool.)
In much of South London "normal" trains are the primary public transport. The stations are marked, the railways shown in light grey, and there are usually even timetables listed [1] but there's no "Transit" line shown. These lines and services aren't shown anywhere in the country.
[2] is a public transport view of OSM. The colours are poor, but the orange lines are mostly missing in Google.
[3] is easier to read but only a railway map, though over 90% of lines in Britain will have passenger service. I generally use this if I'm planning a flexible trip somewhere unfamiliar.
I see some long-distance lines are shown in Japan, though surely only a fraction of what exists. They also get a darker shade of grey, so there's been some local effort there. There are still missing local lines in Tokyo though. I know Copenhagen, and there's been a significant improvement recently! The city/suburban trains are now shown. The regional trains are still missing though, which includes the train from the airport to the city centre.
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Herne+Hill/@51.4521063,-0....
[2] https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=10/51.4095/-0.1868&layers...
[3] https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=10/51.4095/-0.1868&layers...
Lines like Victoria-Orpington and CharingX-Hayes are not the metro and probably shouldn't be highlighted in the transport layer in my opinion.
The solution you are looking for is TFL taking over the suburban southeastern lines. That's what happened in my adopted home of NE London and today they are orange lines on the map. We also got brand new trains and 4tph on Sundays!
If you need that, you can try https://www.magicearth.com
>I've been running into this a lot lately. No matter how much I zoom -- no street name. This is Mapping 101.
Google Maps does this all over Belgium, showing hotels and restaurants and shops and never the street name. Very frustrating indeed.
I use OSM for street names, because it just works.
At some point I noticed someone had "helpfully" translated some concert venue names in Copenhagen into English, so Krudtønden became "The Powder Keg", etc. That's not useful, as locals might well not understand what it means if you ask directions or search for a website. It's on Østerfælled Torv, would you have that read as Eastern Commons Market?
Places with other alphabets seem to vary. Greece shows me only Latin transliterations, but Syria shows me both Latin and Arabic in many cases, which is useful — I can read one, and match the shape of the letters for the other.
Google maps does not want help people gain awareness of their surroundings or improve their navigation skills. It wants users to depend on Google maps.
I wouldn't be surprised if pretty much every economy has one.
"Disregard GPS instruction to proceed further" in the NJ pine barrens from 2019: https://forums.njpinebarrens.com/threads/in-the-blazing-hot-...
Plus a number which warn off larger vehicles, like https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-ford-do-not-follow-sat-nav... and https://innway.blogspot.com/2012/11/do-not-follow-sat-nav-ju... . Both are from 10 years ago so hopefully things have gotten better.
Still happens though. https://www.herefordtimes.com/news/23399093.plea-google-satn... is from earlier this year, complaining about satnav sending people between Ruxton Green, Ross-on-Wye HR9 6EJ, UK and Llangarron, Ross-on-Wye, UK. Though they were going to "ask Google Maps to remove the road from their data", compared to a 2016 solution where Lyonshall Parish Council 'decided to try supplementing the existing sign with their own large red road sign reading 'HGV drivers - ignore satnav - you will get stuck!'
Google Street View shows some very narrow roads, with a last visit date of 2011.
Google Maps usually shows far too much stuff, so I zoom into the area where I am and want to just search that square so I can browse the list easier.
But then it'll zoom out and auto-select the first ad miles away - completely defeating the purpose.
I have to zoom in and pan around like a bird pecking for crumbs.