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Comment by mfisher87 | Hacker News Reader

On my phone, if I type in the name of a store, it gives me the most popular store of that name in the United States instead of the nearest one, because I have wifi locaiton turned off. That's the only reason. If I turn it back on (I don't want it on), the results are sorted as expected.

This is clearly an intentional anti-pattern, and it's been there for over two years. I have to actually type, for example: "Fry's electronics, city, state" (remember, this is on a TOUCH KEYBOARD) to get where I want to go.

It shouldn't really be in debate that the UX of maps has gone way downhill. There's simply no comparison to the older version and I've never met anyone who wasn't disappointed by the changes.

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>On my phone, if I type in the name of a store, it gives me the most popular store of that name in the United States instead of the nearest one, because I have wifi locaiton turned off. That's the only reason. If I turn it back on (I don't want it on), the results are sorted as expected.

I'm assuming you do have GPS location turned on, and that you're allowing location access on that page and waiting for a GPS lock before searching, correct? (And if not, how do you expect it to know where you are?)

> if not, how do you expect it to know where you are?

IP addresses are usually enough to get to the right city.

Not on mobile carrier Internet, those can appear as very far from where you are

They know what cell tower you're connected to, don't they? The original iPhone didn't have a GPS receiver, so this was the only way Maps could infer your location.

Maps used to be much better at searching within the area I'd already focused on. Now whenever I search it seems to either search near my current location or zoom out and search my whole city. It makes it very hard to e.g. look for a bank branch on my route home from work.

This 100x. I don't get it: if I've zoomed in the map or panned, and then make a search -- why isn't it obvious that I want the store closest to the area I'm looking at, and not one 30 miles away?

So much this.

I also liked the one period of time I used to type in my US zip code for Movie Showtimes and somehow be routed to theatres and showtimes in a town outside Naples, Italy. This was on a desktop, not a phone.

Not the biggest deal in the world but it seems every useful thing Google comes up with seems to degrade in quality over time and increase in complexity.

My theory is that this has something to do with the average Googler's tenure lasting 3 years. With such a high turnover, the overwhelming majority of employees are probably much happier achieving the supposed glory of making something new rather than understanding and maintaining the old system.

Maybe another reason for the change is that, back in the Marissa Mayer days, hiring standards used to be much more brutal. Google was still reaping the rewards of bucking the trends of web portals jammed with ads, but eventually lost its confidence in nerd-driven products and instead began to imitate Apple, Facebook, and inexplicably, Microsoft...

Those are good theories.

My personal one is that they just can't stop tweaking. It's not like there aren't some fundamental improvements with a lot of their services but everything needs to get touched and then it ends up like that car Homer tries to design in that episode of The Simpsons.

I know that you're supposed to constantly iterate and try and improve performance, design, etc in software but is there anything in the general literature / case studies of 'improving' too much and degrading the core product(s)?

Not to mention that it's always funny to search for an issue on Google, find the links to the forum, see all the people that chime in with a similar issue, the few souls that try to help, then, as you scroll, the further desperate comments of "They don't care about us." Shouts in the wind.

Are you using the actual native app or just the mobile website? If you have wifi off, it should still have access to your GPS to get your location, unless that is either off or blocked/unavailable.

If the website then how would it know your location if you don't allow it?

There are several better failbacks than "most popular store in the US." Starting with "Store closest to the centroid of past N addresses that I have clicked."

Its actually worse. Only this Saturday I searched for a ice cream shop and it directed me 2.5 miles away. So now I am riding the prescribed route when I see a different branch of the same shop in 0.6 miles. Baffled I looked again at the search results and for some reason this nearest branch was listed at number 5 and I had to scroll down to find it. This when I had GPS and 3G on.

Google has very good geo-IP location detection, almost creepily good in some cases. Scroll down to the bottom of the search results on a desktop browser sometime and see for yourself.

On desktop perhaps but not mobile carrier internet. Those can sometimes show you as a few states away.

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