Go back in time with Street View | Hacker News Reader

Go back in time with Street View

googleblog.blogspot.com

106 pointsruchir_21hj40 comments

It's frustrating to see feature announcements for features that aren't live yet - especially when they aren't framed as a "coming soon" feature.

If you're doing a slow roll-out, or announcing an upcoming feature, be explicit about that. Without setting expectations, you've completely lost the point of announcing. I won't just remember to check back later, and I won't share the news with anyone else since there's nothing to see.

Double checked if this announcement was written in the future.

Agreed. Google does this to me regularly. "Hooray, you can X" and then I spend a while poking around, trying to do X, before eventually realizing they've probably punked me again and giving up.

I don't understand why they do it. Instead of being amused by their new feature, I'm annoyed that they've wasted my time again.

So absurd, especially when they link you to specific things they claim you should be able to see.

I'm surprised they went forward with the fullscreen Google Maps experience. I can't believe how awful the performance is. I can't count how many times I've followed a link, including ones off this blog post, where the map will hang (on some js query I'm assuming) and won't respond to user input or do anything until the page is reloaded.

I also can't believe how tricky the UI is. Finding directions from one place to another is unbelievably difficult.

The only thing I can think of is that their desktop usage has just plummeted so they decided to go out the door with experimental features up to wazoo for the tinkerers who love to waste time exploring the map.

Maybe these are personal problems? I use Google Maps on the web all the time, and have never seen it hang.

As for finding directions: there's a search box, you type in an address, hit the 'directions' button that pops up, and enter another address. I literally can't think of a way to make this simpler.

I happen to agree that the new interface is incredibly difficult to use, UI-wise. In fact, I switched back to old maps for this reason. Unfortunately, I don't recall the specifics which got me frustrated. I do recall that I would very often be wandering with my mouse trying to figure out what to click next.

Haven't noticed the performance problems though. I'm on a Macbook Pro, using Chrome.

It could definitely be an issue with network speed. I don't have the greatest connection, sure, but I think 10mb/s should be able to handle it.

I understand how the directions work and I agree it's super simple, but the intended UX and what I actually experience is different. The contextual search box doesn't consistently change in relation to what I'm clicking on so that I cannot click / type / directions as I know I'm supposed to.

What kind of computer do you use?

I have a 13' macbook pro w/ 8gb of ram.

One thought is that I browse in incognito mode, and i have ghostery running.

Hmm, that computer should be powerful enough.

Do things improve if you disable Ghostery?

Are you using the same Google Maps as everyone else? At least for me, the experience has never been better or easier to use. I absolutely love the new desktop maps and the performance has been better in my experience, not worse.

Ha! Maybe I'm stuck on a beta version from when I opted in early. I could hope. I really can't imagine the performance being better, but I guess it's ymmv.

I also find the new maps extremely slow on desktop, though the interface is reasonably fast on mobile. Tried both Firefox and Safari on my mid-2010 Macbook Pro, and everything is pretty wonky and unreliable. I actually use Bing Maps now by default on desktop due to the speed issue, unless I need something that Bing doesn't have (Google has much better transit coverage, for example).

I, too find the new maps occasionally frustrating (although I prefer it to the old version.

To answer other's questions. It's a game of "who moved my cheese" in which Google changes the way some feature works (for example - creating a link to a location), and when I try to find out how to do it "the new way", I only get results for "the old way".

I just discovered recently that you can show the sidebar (with the "Print" and "Link" buttons) in new maps by clicking the gear icon and select "My Places" in the lower right corner of the screen. This is non-obvious behavior.

Am I stupid? Perhaps. Can a case be made for the fact that moving navigational elements is bad UX? I think so.

I do agree that the new maps are sometimes frustrating. However, I feel the need to point out two things with respect to your particular objections to it.

1. "Gear > My Places" appears to do basically the same thing as "Help > Return to Classic Google Maps", which has a significantly more obvious name.

2. In the new Google Maps, the Print and Link buttons are mostly redundant.

If you want to print the map, use your browser's Print command. In some situations (e.g. step-by-step directions) there is a print button on the Google Maps button-bar (under Google's global navigation) which offers more options (e.g. print with maps or print text only).

As to making links to things, there's a perfectly good URL in the address bar. If that isn't good enough (it's really long, so maybe you want a short URL), you can do "Gear > Share and embed map". Yes, this really ought to be named "Share or embed map", since those are actually separate features.

Thanks, but the example I listed (wanting to link to a specific location, not printing) was just that - an example. I find that there are many things that IMHO should be "obvious" yet there is no obvious way to do them. This is my primary frustration.

Googling "how to do X" results in the old way which no longer works. This is my secondary frustration.

> Googling "how to do X" results in the old way which no longer works. This is my secondary frustration.

For 3rd-party posts there's not much Google can do about this (besides avoiding major UI changes), but I'm often frustrated by finding the wild-goose-chase obsolete information actually located on google.com, in un-updated help pages. One thing they could do to at least make it easier for people to recognize that is to date help pages with the last-updated date, so I can tell at a glance whether a given page is from 2014 or 2010.

I have similar problems. I prefer the old maps.

probably a WebGL issue.

I miss being able to type "from:X to:Y" to get directions.

Typing just "X to Y" usually works for me.

Thanks! That does seem to work as expected :)

It took me a while to figure it out also! A 2nd way is you can type the destination, hit enter, then click "directions", then fill in the "from" location (which defaults to your geolocated current location). More steps, but this way might work better if you want to search for the from/to addresses and select them from the results, or if you often want to use your current location as the source. But if you know the from/to with enough precision that Google can guess at your meaning, just searching for something like "Copenhagen to Malmö" does save some clicks.

This is a truly exciting gift from our friends in the GooglePlex.

I guess that Microsoft, Apple and others in the mapping game must be disappointed by this announcement. This back-in-time feature is not necessarily 'must have' but it certainly is something that a lot of people are going to like. It also makes Google the only choice for the serious 'maps user'.

Personally I envy those born in the last few years. When they get to my age they will be able to explore the streets they grew up in rather than rely on hazy black and white memories.

This is similar, but maybe even cooler than Google Earth's time slide. I hope one day Google gives users the ability to filter Google News and Google search results by date.

One of my side projects is location based video sharing using the Google Map API. One of the first things I incorporated was a video search/filter by time/date. See: http://112.196.33.85/solitaire/demo/will_brown_new/login.php

> I hope one day Google gives users the ability to filter Google News and Google search results by date.

Haven't those options been in "search tools" for a long time (starting back when the search tools were more prominent), and in advanced options even before that?

Google News allows search by date, but unless there is an option I am unaware of it is capped at the last 30 days. Also, I think the filter is based on the date something was crawled, which is not necessarily the date of publication.

Edit: I can set the range past 30 days, the actual function is a little tricky for older articles because again I believe it is based on crawl date not publication date. Example I set date 1939-1944 and search "World War 2", no results.

They actually used to have a more full-featured date search in Google News, but it was temporarily discontinued in December: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/news/Gl23RwnTIl...

I've been waiting for this feature to come about. I have to admit I've often taken a spin around street view in urban areas where there was major upheaval (devastation, rapid gentrification) and zoomed up and down streets hoping to get a glimpse of before / after street view photos. Pretty exciting to have it become featurized

Doesn't seem to be active yet. Will be interesting when it is.

Indeed. No clock icon for me on the links they provide, even in Chrome.

It kinda remind me of the old Google that before Larry Page takes over: offers that may be not profitable in its nature but interesting and really enlighten your imagination.

Prime example of what you call having an upper hand.

Great on Google for providing this. Its not really a Maps application anymore. Its an archive.

Extremely poor performance for me at the moment. The update rate is so slow as to be virtually unusable.

Naver had this for some time now for Seoul street view.

"This device isn't a spaceship... it's a time machine."

Google Street View already lets me go back in time to a time when Flash was required to use the web...

You're wrong, Street View doesn't use Flash.

(At least not on modern browsers, I can't speak as to whether or not there's a flash fallback for older browsers.)

Only Classic Google Maps uses Flash for street view; recent versions use HTML5. If you haven't migrated yet, see http://www.google.com/maps/about/explore/

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