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Comment by shaicoleman | Hacker News Reader

The new version doesn't show most of the street names. Not even the major roads.

Screenshot: https://i.ibb.co/qszKNSm/google-maps-labels.png

Example URL: https://www.google.com/maps/@51.5041929,-0.111821,17.46z

I assume the thinking is as follows: street names mattered on early paper maps, and printouts of online maps, because people would navigate through areas by comparing the street name on the map to the street signs around them. That generation is now aging. Whole new generations have been brought up who instead navigate by searching for a POI or address, and then simply following the line or the voice guidance that the map app creates to lead them to that destination. The latter users may not know or care about the names of all the streets along the way.

Sure, some people want to look at a map with street names just to become familiar with the whole town. But those users are probably too few for a company focused on profit to care about, and such independent-minded users might be harder to monetize anyway.

The problem with that reasoning is that GPS/compasses in phones are often wrong, so it helps to have the spacial awareness to know that you're on the north west corner of Delancey facing north, so you need to turn left to start heading west on Broadway. This is especially true if you're in a dense area where GPS gets especially confused, or if you're trying to catch an Uber (since now there's two potentially faulty GPS's in play).

I often have to zoom in obnoxiously far to read the damn street names. It's quite frustrating and could easily be solved with some sort of tap to display name feature.

I don't particularly like the elision of street names myself, but is GPS on modern phones really often wrong? Perhaps it's more an issue in rural areas or super tightly packed areas like SF or New York? In LA, GPS is kind of crazily accurate, and other than routing choices that can seem strange, it seems to work perfectly.

Compasses on phones are definitely a crapshoot though.

GPS has issues near skyscrapers ("urban canyons") because the signals reflect off buildings and don't arrive at the proper times. You can correct for this with multiple frequencies or if you have an accurate map of nearby building heights.

The only place I’ve had severe gps issues was when visiting NYC. Too many tall buildings. Very little line of sight to a satellite. Plus reflections from buildings. It was frequently off by entire blocks. Found ourselves frequently ignoring the blue dot on the map.

I do encounter compass issues all of the time though. Almost always it starts perpendicular to where it should.

> so it helps to have the spacial awareness to know that you're on the north west corner of Delancey facing north

Most of the people I've questioned on this struggle to figure out where the north west corner is or what direction north is etc. And yet they can still navigate in dense urban environments perfectly fine.

How? Landmark based navigation. All you need to do know is [some big landmark, like central park, or the sea] is behind you. Now to get to your destination, you want store X on your right and move forward. Turn right at store Y, etc. This is the reality of how a lot of people navigate and I think the new map reflects this.

> Landmark based navigation. All you need to do know is [some big landmark, like central park, or the sea] is behind you. Now to get to your destination, you want store X on your right and move forward.

Yes, but one very important and ubiquitous landmark in urban environment is an intersection. Two roads intersecting create an unique point that's easy to find (follow one of the roads until an intersection, then verify by checking street name plates). It's exactly for this reason you'd want a map to always show you street names.

Google Maps doesn't. It also doesn't reliably show most other landmarks you'd care about, like stores or monuments. Google Maps just plain sucks at being a map.

Couldn't we have a toggle option somewhere? Just a checkbox for "show all street names"... it can not possibly be that difficult.

My spouse can testify, I get furious when I can't see the street names. :)

It is, in fact, extraordinarily difficult to format street names well, especially at ever-changing zoom levels. What would it look like if you look at the whole city with "all street names" enabled? If you can't actually show them all, how do you decide what streets to drop? What if there's a small but important street, or a street with a long name that doesn't fit? The edge cases are numerous.

Agreed, we don't need "show all level of details" when that's not tenable. I'd just prefer Google Maps to be a bit more "dense" when deciding what zoom level to show details at. This is particularly a problem with maps locations-- it's far too easy to get the incorrect impression that a building you are looking at is entirely a Denny's when in reality it's a strip mall with 5 businesses if you zoom in a little closer...

Every OSM-based mapping programming I’ve used handles it basically fine. Considering the amount of resources Google has, I find your claim pretty ridiculous. Google is actively choosing to hide street names and actively choosing not to provide an option to override that. This is quite clearly a business decision of some kind. They could certainly do this if they chose to.

Let's start with the simple rule: if a street name is big enough / important enough that Google Maps would consider showing it, it should show it. Always.

Unless you're pulling up to meet someone and need to tell them where you are, or calling 911 and need to tell them where you are. In those situations I want a street name fast and these issues can be quite frustrating.

Or in short: Google Maps isn't a map, it's a turn-by-turn nav that pretends to be a map.

A good digital map is a stellar tool for orientation and discovery. Google Maps isn't, because orientation and discovery goes against pushing you recommendations (read: ads). They don't want you to have spatial awareness - they want you to blindly follow paths that make them money.

Especially in more rural areas, you're often given directions where to go based on things that aren't addresses that Google Maps would understand. Being able to open a good map and ask questions like "is that the one after Midler Avenue?" helps you drop a pin on the map, and then use the new-school navigation.

I've noticed that. I zoom and zoom and zoom, yet the street name is not appearing!

I guess there is no money in it?

Can't Google just show a damned ad when the street is zoomed in far enough to have room for a video and the name?

I worked at a mapping sw company (not Google Maps, but a 3p competitor) and the designers hated street name labels. I think they thought street names uglied up their carefully beautified cartography. Every time there was a conflict between a street label and say a POI icon, they wanted the algorithm to choose the icon. The PM also favored POIs, especially if the icon was $ponsored and brought in revenue.

All the map apps seem to be bad this way. Use Apple Maps and pick a spot with a lot of businesses like the Las Vegas strip. You’re not going to see too many street names winning the algorithmic decision of what to display.

Maps has been pretty transparent over the years of transforming Maps into a destionation for Places, not just to browse, or look around, or sightsee. You open maps, find a Place, and go to it.

> I worked at a mapping sw company (not Google Maps, but a 3p competitor) and the designers hated street name labels. I think they thought street names uglied up their carefully beautified cartography.

Why the hell don’t they just expose an option “show as many street names as possible”?

> the designers hated street name labels. I think they thought street names uglied up their carefully beautified cartography.

This is the part where they should be reminded they're designing a product that should be useful, not a work of art. Label-less street names are fine on posters or those metal-engraving sheets you can hang in your living room and marvel at the grid structure.

> The PM also favored POIs, especially if the icon was $ponsored and brought in revenue.

Oh I see why the designers aren't reminded of the above.

Funnily enough you inspired me to try Apple Maps and it did a better job. The last time I ran into this issue I didn‘t even think about Apple Maps since it’s much worse in the things I use Google Maps for in my location. But now I know where to look up street and river names.

Sometimes you can see some street names, but not others. So you have to play this game of constantly zooming in and out in different locations to figure out the names of all the streets.

Here‘s the same spot in Apple Maps: https://imgur.com/a/PBFIP1d

It seems to do a better job at always showing street names if you are zoomed in. I didn‘t even think about using Apple Maps when I ran into this issue but it seems to do a better job at this.

Also, it used to be that if you search "[street name] map" in Google Search a very helpful Google Maps image appears with the street nicely highlighted. At around the time of the Bard rollout they completely broke this functionality. Now it's returned only in a much inferior form not least because of the lack of street names. Some screenshots for comparison:

https://imgur.com/a/K4oAbZs

That doesn’t look so bad to me. The old one looks more precise but the new one is perhaps easier to take in at a glance.

More street names would be good in both versions, but it doesn’t look like that has regressed, at least.

The new one hides that the street is one way.

I came here to complain about the old version often not showing street names, forcing me to scroll a few miles down some streets to see the name. Amazing that they managed to make that worse.

If you zoom in, the map shows the street names. I suspect it's only a change in "what resolution should show which names".

That is decidedly not always true. It would be cool if there were some zoom level below which names were always displayed, but there isn’t. Especially in dense PoI places.

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