Her most basic point about the water and parks says it all. There’s a lot of existing visual language around this stuff that could be drawn from. Things going back hundreds of years. But I guess a fucking pin for Aldi speaks volumes about where the real priority is for this „product”.
The goal isn’t creating a historical representation of where things were.
It’s supposed to be functional.
For whom? Aldi who is highlighted? Google who is paid? Or the poor suckers trying to find something?
A subtle dark pattern that Google uses is that they have roughly one size of POI, so there isn't enough space to show everything, or most things, it has to pick and choose. That artificial scarcity is tied to the profit motive (pay for prominence) and is user hostile.
Sure, grocery stores are most common, but often you're looking for something else. Using small icons, smaller text, or some other UI affordance to facilitate finding what you need nearby, quickly and without text searching, would be great, but isn't in Google's interest.
How many useful sizes could they have on a phone?
> the profit motive (pay for prominence)
Can you pay for this?
Yes - https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9934637?hl=en
Point being - Aldi is paying for this service. The map is skewering reality.
It’s not about historical representation, it’s about the fact that map-making has been around for awhile, and there are some great existing techniques for presenting that information that could be drawn on. But no, let’s melt colors together and highlight corporate chain stores with pins.
But it's 100% fine that Google Maps isn't the all-singing all-dancing maps app for everyone. Other maps are available. Plurality is good.
For example they decide which hotels/restaurants to show in an area when you search. They won't show all of the nearby ones. They might show one that is 5km away and not one that is 100m away.
Once I was in a restaurant that was not in maps. I decided to add it to the map when I was home.
Turned out the place was in their database, but they just decided to NOT show it, even at maximum zoom level over it. But when I added it, they asked if it wasn't that other one that already existed.
Moral of the story: use openstreetmaps.
I have the same problem with my barber shop of all places. Even though I've been there probably a hundred times maps never shows it no matter the zoom level, I have to search it by name to find it.
My cynical view is they once said no to a promo offer for ads and are now punished for it.
This is my suspicion as well. In the end it is very dangerous to let google decide which venues get business and which get hidden completely. Eventually paying google maps becomes akin to protection racket.
Is it possible that Google legitimately thought there was only one business at that location?
edit: to be fair I just tried searching openstreetmap for "flowers" in a small town I'm familiar with and the results were bad. It zoomed into a two block area with a single flower shop even though many others exist outside of that area. Even in that zoomed in area I could barely see the flower shop on the map because there is no label/pin.
No such thing exists.