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Comment by kstenerud | Hacker News Reader

This August while traveling from Dnipro to Sloviansk, Google maps kept trying to reroute me towards the M03, which would have taken me through Bakhmut.

"Bingly-bingly beep! I've adjusted for a faster route! It will save you 12 minutes!"

"Goddammit, for the hundredth time, NO!!!" (feeling a bit like Samuel Vimes)

Later, I discovered that you can drop fake waypoints to force it to stick to the original (safe) route.

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That happened to me in iceland. I wanted to get to this famous black sand beach, and maps sent me to a cliff ACROSS the sea from it, with the intention that I would then descend ~30m vertically down a cliff, and drive across the sea, to get to the beach.

Nope.

Yeah had this with it in Iceland too. Tried to send me through a river when I had a shitty hire van. Ended up using Organic Maps instead.

This is one of those cases where I think tech makes people switch their brains off. Reynisfjara is just off the ring road, is well signposted and the correct route is obvious on the map! Although the cliff top there is worth a visit as well.

Hopefully you noticed that in advance though!

I find using GPS easy. I find navigating by signs easy.

I find doing both difficult, GPS very much encourages my brain to shut off.

If I may recommend OsmAnd~ (https://f-droid.org/packages/net.osmand.plus/) on F-Droid if you're on Android (unlimited free maps), or Osmand+ (10 free maps) on iOS. It allows setting roads that you want to avoid generally.

It's a FOSS alternative to Google Maps, it uses OpenStreetMap for cartography data, in my experience it's pretty reliable and actually much better for certain use cases (like forest paths, in my region). It also has much better offline abilities.

I'm a happy paying OsmAND user, and can confirm that it works great in Ukraine.

Drove from Kraków to Kyiv and then to Chișinău Aug-Sep 2023, Kraków to Odesa and back in 2022, and never had a single issue.

Wow. Seriously, can't Google add to the route planning costs or gradient vectors to point people away from battlefronts unless explicitly requested to allow it, i.e., legitimate nav uses like ambulances and fire trucks? "No, fucking stupid Google Maps, I don't want to visit any Russian tanks, landmines, or rapist prison conscripts."

EDIT: Are you a medic or war correspondent by chance?

I was just delivering an off-road vehicle. It's a real beauty, too. A souped up '97 Cherokee with heavy duty tires and a monster winch that I bought in Poland, perfect for nasty evacs :)

Noisy as hell on asphalt, though.

BTW anyone who has the means to buy or send offroad vehicles to Ukraine, please do! They really need them!

Ouch. The base vehicle of that year wasn't very good, so I hope they changed the engine to a Subaru or something reliable. My grandfather was a Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep dealer mechanic.

Also, you just described every other vehicle in Texas: jacked up, souped-up, with mud tires, and glasspacks.

In a war zone, low-observable, quiet, and high performance are better ideas.

Also, I'm hoping for quick COTUS 2024 aid package to UA. Slava Ukraini!

PS: What the heck is a Canadian SWE doing delivering vehicles in UA? Must be really, really good $$$. ;@]

Does google even have any perspective on active warzones/frontlines? I would have thought natural disasters are common enough that they would have modeled that into their route algo, and warzones are kind of like one big natural disaster like a hurricane or a flood.

I guess there is not a lot of money in it for them - disaster areas probably don’t generate a lot of revenue from maps, still though could lead to some unfortunate PR problems so there must be some incentive for them to add it.

Wondering if waze is doing better there.

You think the PR problems come from not trying to route around war zones? “Google told me it would plan a route around this war zone, now I’m a prisoner in Russia. 0/5 stars”

Does avoiding warzones in Maps help drive ad revenue?

There's your answer.

Yes, indirectly. You cannot advertise to a dead person.

Our Finance Department (i.e. AI powered BI engine running in a datacenter on a VM on a 6 year old server cluster) told us that the difference would be negligible when the FY ends, so we reduced the priority of the feature to 0.

To continue your chain of thought, if ad revenue is the primary goal, why does it show me hotels in my home town?

Or why any ecommerce keeps recommending more and more products like the one you just bought and you'll never buy again for the next few years?

Either everybody actually buys more and more of the same stuff until they fill their houses or the algorithm designers are following the easy road and not the one that models reality.

> Or why any ecommerce keeps recommending more and more products like the one you just bought and you'll never buy again for the next few years?

Next few years? They recommend getting more stuff like couches or washing machines that you're going to keep for 10+ years :)

Having never stayed in a hotel in my hometown, I don't really know what there is or how they compare. If I have a visitor, and I have to suggest a place to stay (my flat is small), I am reliant on online services.

Are you on Ashley Madison?

Waze is famous here in Latvia for routing people through overgrown forest tracks meant for offroaders and tractors

Interesting, in Estonia it is quite the opposite. Waze is almost always better at routing than google maps. Just this summer I had a car trip to one of our islands where google maps directed me down a road that got increasingly worse. We almost reached the coast but got stuck 50m before the campsite when the road turned to sand.

I don't know about routing, but in conflict areas they do add generic disclaimers / warnings that information may be outdated, conditions may be rapidly changing and that users should pay attention to "real-world conditions".

>Wondering if waze is doing better there.

Waze is owned by Google. It might use the same engine for routing.

Just for reference, Bakhmut is an active warzone.

There is so much more to this story that I would love to hear.

Switching to a much-related app: Does waze have any buttons for 'Russian infantry', or 'minefield'?, I may be unaware of?

There's a LOT more to it, but I'm not prepared to talk about it for a number of important reasons. There will be a book coming out eventually, though.

To be fair I don't think many map products have active warzone avoidance.

That was my general take as well. My main issue was that it kept automatically re-routing me every 20 minutes or so without my consent.

And so I developed a paranoia, compulsively checking the map to restart navigation again (manually choosing the safe route) every time it betrayed me.

it's horrifying how much software operates in defiance of consent.

huge overlap with how much software provides "conveniences" which undermine utility.

Google search now does this. The only way now to search Google for the actual terms you want matched is to put them all in double-quotes. Otherwise Google will ignore terms you provided even in the first result in order to show you some SEO-optimized content that matches synonyms or fewer terms.

Use "verbatim", under search tools. It forces precise word matching, so Robert doesn't match Bob and Ubuntu doesn't match Debian, for example.

Google is utterly useless without verbatim.

Recently, some asshat at Google munged things up. When I do verbatim searches, I have to do -hotel, otherwise I get ridiculous local hotels.

Search for Debian, get pages of hotel advertising... makes perfect sense.

Few things make me more furious than the constant „computer says no/knows better“ one has to deal with on so many occasions these days, be it mobile apps, websites or other

Many have ways for users to define routes more specifically than a couple of basic options though, and arguably 'user safety' should be a critical feature of all of them.

Also, thinking "we don't need this feature because none of our less popular rivals have it" is not how you build a world class product. This is Google. They have the resources to be better than the other ones.

This past summer Waze routed me through one of the most dangerous areas in the US, for 30 minutes. To save maybe a few minutes. Tight side streets with "obstacles", at 10-15 mph.

I was on the highway when the re-route happened, and so wasn't in a position to examine the map and argue with it.

This type of thing is a major problem.

I was under the impression that this was the whole purpose of waze, to find out-of-the-box routes as an alternative to traditional navigation apps that don't do that kind of thing.

I wasn't aware that Waze was "alternative" vs "traditional", nor do I know the difference. I suspect that almost no one does, if the categories exist.

I am specifically responding to a post that details that Google Maps reroutes. What is the difference between an "out of the box" reroute and a regular one? Danger?

Waze is more likely to use what transport engineers call "Rat runs"

Diverting you via side streets and alternatives to highways when the major roads show congestion, roadworks or other issues.

Google maps tends to prefer freeways/highways above all other options and its often a fight to get it to take an alternative, You have to toggle the 'avoid freeways' and then even sometimes enter waypoints to guarantee bypassing the motorway.

Got it. Thank you.

https://organicmaps.app/ is well suited for (completely) offline routing. Based on OpenStreetMap data, which can be updated yourself.

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