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Comment by helsinkiandrew | Hacker News Reader

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.

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