You'd say that Google Maps hasn't improved much in the last 20 years?
It's correct everywhere else. The road sign, the municipal tax parcel GIS, the post office, Apple Maps, MapQuest, OpenStreetMaps. All of them had the correct name, except Google Maps. So she reported it through Google Maps. And reported it. And reported it. Every few months she reports it again. She's asked friends to report it as well.
It's still wrong.
She bought her house in 2015.
This was definitely true 4-5 years ago. I looked now and it's mostly better at most levels of zoom.
You can be browsing the area and suddenly, yep, there's a glacial valley there in the middle of the river. According to Google.
This is a large-scale geographical feature that crosses most of Germany and Poland. But actually it's in the river next to Friedrichstraße station.
The difference between small business success and insolvency was based on the shier luck of being graced with the presence of someone in contact with the priesthood of Google, where no real contact from the plebian citizenry is allowed.
Exactly this kind of thing is why the EU feels the need to regulate the shit out of U.S. big tech.
Now they are this big, they have become quasi public record for many other organizations who rely on this data.
Since they want to keep costs low, if their data is wrong, it can have significant impacts on your life and getting someone to correct it is almost impossible.
This is something U.S.-Americans often do not (want to) understand. The misconception often is that just because their legislative efforts are an ineffective, lobby-ridden crapshoot, that the free market is automatically the best answer to everything.
You can affect really good and positive change through lawmaking, the entire point of it is to regulate and intervene when the wellbeing of the populous and fair competition is in jeopardy.
Same argument for the living wage.
Eventually, these systems will be mostly artificially generated, and perhaps the machines will have fewer error rates than the humans. Perhaps not. But how many humans will understand the machines well enough to ask these questions in the first place?
Machines were supposed to free us from bureaucracy. Not freeze it everywhere with few avenues for escape.
I have had an encounter with something like this via Wise / Transferwise. It has been half a decade and nada. And I estimate that it has cost me north of $20k+ over that time.
Google, Wise and heck Maps were started with the ambition of adding something to the world — e.g. Google's original "organize all knowledge" mission - but over time cruft accrues and these companies rapidly accumulate negative side effects / drift away from their core mission.
When was the last time Google / Alphabet / whatever did something that involved improving access to the world's knowledge? They've degraded their search to the point of uselessness and beyond. Slowly alienated their best researchers and engineers. And done their best to turn away from the entity that made Google Books — "we'll scan all the books for the good of all humankind."
What happened? I also use Wise.
Despite my building existing for over 10 years, putting in “flat number, building name” into that system will be rewritten to “house number, building name road” which is an address on a he other side of town (and London ain’t exactly small).
I’ve had multiple orders go missing as a result.
More concretely, a postcode is usually specific to between 7 and 30 dwellings, in the usual case it's about 15 houses.
Contrary to common belief, they're not always on the same street, but in the vast majority of cases (like maybe 99%) house number + postcode is sufficient. Definitely flat number + building name/number + postcode should get your stuff there.
The only universal address input is a freeform text box. Optionally with a country, which should also be a freeform text box because countries get created and destroyed and you won't remember to update it. City or district is probably okay - as a freeform text box - addresses without one can write (no district). But street addresses are different everywhere and must be freeform unless you're the government of that region.
Regards"
I see things when I'm out and about all the time that just never appear on Google Maps -- cafes for instance. You can search cafe, coffee, restaurant, etc and they won't appear. Search the exact name and it comes up with 300 reviews. Sometimes, they'll come up in general search in week 1, disappear in week 2, and reappear in week 3.
Google is not good at consumer software and not a responsible company in many ways; Maps really deserves to be replaced with something, but unfortunately there's no competitor to speak of. Apple Maps is nice but listings don't come up because they're literally not in the database.
But yes, they could serve well as ad space.
For instance: there's no way to get it to stop killing directions on reaching the destination. Apple Maps puts you into "parking" mode where you can still see the route to the destination—extremely useful for cities where you might have to drive around a bit to find a space.
That said; of course Google Maps has improved and is likely better than alternatives in lots of ways, but it’s actually not great or anywhere near the detail and granularity of OSM when it comes to the actual map part.
After Apple Maps being one of my favorite reasons for having an iPhone for the last 7ish years, I’m back to OpenStreetMaps mostly, or still Google to look up business hours. Sad… but having downloaded maps will probably be a good thing long-term
More overlays and popups More needlessly verbose navigation instructions Less predictable routes.
Thats just the start
You ever try to navigate the highway systems in either DC or Houston with verbal instructions enabled? It sounds like someone is having a stroke.
"Perform Immelmann turn in 200 feet"
I've switched to OsmAnd for driving because it'll give a sensible main road following route.
Google Maps reliably sends me down residential roads and adds a whole bunch of turns and then winds up with idiot ideas like "turn right into this two way 4 lane road we tried to slightly avoid".
I would claim it has indeed become worse.
Google Maps feels like I’m constantly in an A B test for how bad it can be and I’m always getting the bad side. It repeatedly doesn’t update in CarPlay, showing the same miles to destination as I progress.
It doesn’t label streets well either. I try to manually find routes in SF and I have to switch to Apple Maps because not enough streets are labeled no matter how much or little I zoom.
Or, the incessant "police activity" shit from Waze. That creates all kinds of rear ending hazards as morons try to slow down.
I had a Keyhole account long before Google was in the business, and it worked about like Google Earth does now.
ER Mapper was the first software I dog fooded that transferred images without the dial up scan line by scan line top down process that existed to that point in time.
The same discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and variation techniques occurred to several entities at much the same time .. some US patent pettiness killed a lot of development for a couple of years from 1999 forward:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LizardTech,_Inc._v._Earth_Reso....
Lmao