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Comment by sharpercoder | Hacker News Reader

Google maps is improving since the day I first saw it - that must have been around 2003 or so. The improvement on the data is phenomenal if you look at it over then past 10+ years; The amount of times I blindly trust GM to go somewhere increase every year. I suspect the edgecases will be solved slowly, like navigating to a shop inside a mall, a market stall, an ad-hoc gathering, a planned building, et cetera.

Typing in an address, going there by directions, verifying the building front without extra time needed for travel is truly magic.

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This is all true, but of course there will always be a few missing features that seem so obvious and useful that you wonder why they still don't have them.

For me it's one or two announcements of the actual destination address at the end of the drive. If it's not an address I'm familiar with and not a business with a sign out front, by the time I get there I've usually forgotten the street number!

But when I arrive all I hear is "your destination is on the right."

It would be so great if the last two announcements were:

"Your destination, 123 Main Street, will be on the right in 800 feet."

"Your destination, 123 Main Street, is on the right."

For me the problem with Google Maps is how appallingly badly it fails when things go wrong. The offline mode is prone to silently getting locked in "rerouting" and just completely leaving me hanging for 10 minutes at a time. And if it loses gps signal, it doesn't seem to think the driver needs to know about this. A Silent failure is terrible.

I was driving once, with a Google Maps engineer giving directions. We had flown thousands of miles to visit a place, which we had visited the day before. During the second drive over, from the hotel, he expounded on the awesomeness of Maps (which is truly awesome, don't get me wrong) right up until his phone said "Your destination is on the left" and all we had was a fence with a grass field on the other side. We were looking for a complex of buildings we had seen before, so this was clearly not correct.

To his credit, he immediately started thinking through what had gone wrong, but it was so awesome to be a witness to that moment.

My Google Maps tells me every time when I lose GPS Signal.

The best is when it has GPS but spotty cell service and you miss a turn because "turn right onto $longname $state $many_syllable_route_number" is actually a yield that doesn't require you to stop and you need to turn left/right onto $other-street before it's done telling you to do what you just did. Then it tries to re-route you but 3g service is too spotty to do that but not to spotty to get so far along in the process that it discards the old route you just made a U-turn and got back onto.

That's what Apple Maps does (but only for the very last announcement):

"Your destination is on the right, 123 Main Street."

I usually hear "your destination is on the right", and become aware to having zoomed by the place. 5 minutes of U-turning ensues.

My biggest complaint about Google Maps is that it changes its scale as you get closer to a turn. You try to judge how close you are by how fast you've been approaching it, and suddenly you find you've zoomed past.

My best experience with google maps was actually finding a restaurant inside of Kyoto or Tokyo mainstation. Google maps navigated me perfectly across all floors and knew all stairs I had to take.

GM saved us from missing a wedding using an near obsolete razr i over 3G while the in-car GPS was directing us into oblivion.

Not only GM was generally right, the overal intertial refresh rate was smooth .. extremely surprising.

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