Google Maps Has Forsaken Us
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Because wow. I can speak about this. It's terrible. First and foremost, and they have their "reasons" of course, but my Samsung Rant (yeah just a feature phone) always had great maps. Just a simple Java app, built on the maps API. Well that doesn't work anymore. Like, nothing. Google basically says "Get an Android phone, sucker." F U Google. Is what I think of that.
Secondly, the desktop (and basically the tablet experience too is the same) has gotten terrible. It takes a really long time before my mouse event matters. By this time, the screen, since it's still resolving and moving things around the canvas or whatever the hell it's doing, well by the time my mouse event registers, the object I wanted has moved away. I'm now doing something else!
Directions. Just so retarded. The accordion shit on the left. Just show me the effing directions, like you used to. I don't want to tab around a widget in the upper left. Plus you have toggle it open in the first place, and it's not very responsive, either.
Also, just simple double-clicking to zoom. Extremely less useful than it used to be: just this one simple thing.
I could go on. How awful. What happened?
My second biggest pet peeve: In old Maps, clicking on the marker will bring out a popup providing you various choices (http://imgur.com/qeLhJSd). In new Maps, clicking on the marker centers it on the screen. What the F? What's the value add in bringing the marker to center when I click it?
Just like GMail, Maps has gone from being great software to mediocre. I don't know who is making these horrible design choices at Googleplex.
I loved it.
I am also sure that there is no way Google simply removed it. But they did.
The closest I can find is RIGHT CLICK/WHAT'S HERE.
I even gave feedback during the trial period as they asked. Never heard anything on it.
As for why UX disasters like this can happen, I think it generally comes down to one thing these days: "hipsters".
Those of us who've been in industry for a long time have no doubt seen this happen before. A relatively well-established product has a usable UI. It isn't perfect, and maybe even looks "dated" in some ways, but it generally works and is understood by its existing users.
So-called "hipsters" (that is, people who have an uncompromising view that they're talented "designers" or "UI experts", with a massive ego to back this up, and a fixation on being "trendy") get involved at some point. These people are often relatively young, often have limited experience, and are usually more focused on making designs look "pretty" and "modern" rather than usable.
Needing to create work for themselves, these hipsters, coupled with managers who need to appear to be leading something seen as "productive", start on a UI redesign. Often this is done without the involvement or insight offered by the existing developers of the product, nor any of the product's users. Changes are made purely to look "better", with limited to no consideration of how it'll impact the usability of the product.
The end result is a total cock-up like this, or like the poor UI of Chrome (and the imitations of it by Firefox, Opera and IE), or a project-killing release like GNOME 3, or an abysmal failure like Windows 8.
UIs were generally far more usable in the 1980s, 1990s, and the first half of the 2000s, before "hipsters" got involved with design. What we see today is a total jumble of inconsistent and incoherent UI design, where usability and efficiency are considered significantly less important than "looking trendy".
While it may be more of an issue with younger people due to a greater lack of experience and intuition, it's a phenomenon that's quite independent of age.
> "hipsters" in their 40s and 50s
These statements cancel each other out, so there's no reason to state either as supposedly providing information content.
A 40-year-old who got into web design after a lengthy career in print media design, if not some totally unrelated field, is often no more experienced than a 20-year-old who got directly into web design. I know this can be true, because I've worked with both types of people in the past.
And "often" does not mean "always", obviously.
It's usually about a class of people who have helped to design the systems we have at present and who are therefore heavily invested in those systems in a variety of ways reacting negatively to a class of people attempting to help design new systems that they will one day defend due to their investment in them.
The idea that UX was better in the 1980s kind of gives you away here.
It's hard to overstate how just plain awful Google Maps is now. It's amazing, in a way. I literally cannot understand how so many smart people can, all together, fail to observe the obvious. Manifestly obviously just shit awful. To observe this one only needs a few seconds with Google Maps. A few minutes cements it. Yet here we are...
It doesn't matter how many smart engineers and ux designers can see the obvious, if one person from upper management can't :( (See also: G+ real names policy)
The funny thing is that it's possible the UI could have been screwed while keeping the search stable, but as the article points out, the search is killing me. It's Apple Maps-ish in a way. I mean, if I'm zoomed in to a particular level and I do a search, there's a good bet that I'm only interested in results within those bounds, right? I'm not crazy to want that am I?
6 more months of classic maps then they will probably phase it out, sadly.
Every time I start Google Maps again - it starts with crippled version.
Update: I just noticed that after switching to Classic, Google Maps is asking me if I want to remember that choice permanently.
The question is not prominent enough though.
For example, if you enable delay e-mail send in gMail, you get a tiny pop-up to undo your message... I guess you just have to learn to always look at the top middle for Google's hidden/minimally displayed functions.
That one's easy. It turns out that roles like management and marketing and customer support are actually important for developing good products, but the culture at "engineer"-led organisations doesn't always acknowledge or respect that.
But for people with large monitors and the need to push a web browser hard, they've merely managed to strip out or hide a lot of very useful functionality, with essentially no benefit. What's left over is non-standard and awkward to use (like Chrome's menu).
The vast majority of users.
Changing humanity on the kind of broad scale that requires is a much broader and longer term project than any commercial entity could survive in the short term if its commercial success relied on it.
Its certainly the kind of thing I can see Google being interested in, but not the kind of thing they would be around long enough to do if they didn't have a business strategy that did better at reaching the masses of people that actually exist now as they are than that could ever do.
A little more on topic: one person's "crappy hipster redesign" is another person's "wow this is so much better" and it's really difficult to guess ahead of time which will be the dominant reaction. Having said that, most of the frustrations about Maps here seem to be more on the implementation side than the design side.
Sure it is, as long as you only want to look at one page above the fold.
But sometimes I want to navigate between pages, and at that point I do want my bookmarks bar displayed.
Sometimes I want to scroll a page, and at that point I do want scrollbars that work the way my system is setup instead of some almost invisible, almost unclickable little rectangle at the edge of the window.
Sometimes I want to use developer tools, and that that point I do want concepts like whitespace and fonts larger than 5px and coloured icons that are easily recognisable to exist, instead of prioritising cramming so much information into the available space that all of it becomes almost illegible.
Ctrl+Shift+B.
> Sometimes I want to scroll a page, and at that point I do want scrollbars that work the way my system is setup instead of some almost invisible, almost unclickable little rectangle at the edge of the window.
Seems to use normal system scrollbars for me on KDE. Windows looks custom, but only wrt textures, sizes still seem to match.
Sure, or it's an option on the menu. I'm just trying to show that sometimes removing all possible chrome to maximise the content area isn't necessarily the most helpful thing to do.
Seems to use normal system scrollbars for me on KDE.
On Windows, they are just thin grey rectangles that don't even look like scrollbars (or anything else you might interact with) and don't even look the same between the main content window and supporting windows like the developer tools.
'Always show bookmark bar' is the top item on my View menu. Is it there for you?
> at that point I do want scrollbars that work the way my system is setup
I can't comment on this I've not used a scroll bar since I got trackpad scrolling. Just compared Chrome with Safari and the scrollbars seem identical to me.
> Sometimes I want to use developer tool
I'm not clear what your complaint is here. Dev tools is too crowded? I often need it to share space with content whilst I'm debugging. If you have dual monitors then I can understand you might prefer a less compact display. I work entirely on my laptop so I'm grateful for it's compactness.
Sure, you can change the default easily enough. I'm just giving an example where I do find it useful to have more Chrome displayed at the expense of a small amount of content area.
I can't comment on this I've not used a scroll bar since I got trackpad scrolling.
I'm usually working on a desktop PC, so I don't have a trackpad. I use a mouse scroll wheel all the time, but for long documents that's tedious (as is using a trackpad) and with most mice it's a one-dimensional scroll anyway.
I'm not clear what your complaint is here. Dev tools is too crowded?
Yes, and many things in it are far too small for comfortable use. The developer tools in both Chrome and Firefox are riddled with basic usability and design blunders, such as using tiny fonts and icons; using a flat design that blurs everything together and often gives no clues to what interactions are available; offering many different sets of tabs, icons and other controls; numerous inconsistencies in presentation, not just in the different behaviours from tab to tab but even from one set of tabs or icons to another that is visible at the same time; and forever moving things around, particularly making unnecessary minor changes every few weeks.
I've nothing against providing for developers who are using smaller screens, but I have a powerful computer on a real desk with nice big screens to make me as productive as possible, and the idea that everything must be crammed in to maximise the content area at all costs just isn't helpful in that context. Rather like the perversion of the original "mobile first" design idea to become "over-simplified least common denominator behaviour is good enough", it's throwing the baby out with the bathwater and actually making the software worse for some users. Of course the developers of these browsers are perfectly entitled to do that, but it's equally fair to point out the problems they are creating.
In Chrome, you take what Google gives you and you better like it. I'll admit, it's not a bad default.
Firefox, however, allows addons to fundamentally alter the appearance of the webbrowser. I can add stylish themes that do all sorts of awesome things. I can use vimperator with "set gui=nonavigation" and reclaim even more space for content.
This fundamental difference is the reason I think Chrome's UI is bad. Firefox, you can customize the gui to be good for any definition of good. Chrome's only works if your definition of good aligns with Google's.
Also, for an example of when Chrome's UI fails, simply try and half-screen it on a 1080p screen with 30+ tabs open. All the tab favicons vanish. There's no way to search for an existing open tab (akin to firefox's % Location Bar Search character[0]).
If you'd like, I could show you my firefox and chrome running side by side with firefox having dozen's of more pixels of content-viewing area. Even if you don't like my setup, the fact that I can change it at all makes it an obvious win for me.
[0]: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Location_Bar_search#Location_Bar_s...
All functionality I need to access quickly is accessible through shortcuts, so I don't typically need to access the "hamburger-menu" very often. The only thing I really use it for is to open the settings tab.
I mostly use web browser for browsing. Not for staying in this on that setup menu, not for looking at tabs and windows.
Chrome managed to move the bloat away and move the important thing to front.
I don't really see the parallel with the new Google Maps.
I was once in love with Chrome, but over the past few months I've started looking back at FireFox.
Most people do not want nor need fancy weird functionality.
They just want the maps, or maybe the directions.
Usability is 'appealing' just as much as visual button styling, maybe moreso.
You remember that horrible WM everybody seemed to be running 10-15 years ago, 'enlightenment'? Completely unusable but it looked cool with all the shapes and transparencies and etc.
It's more the "hipster" mindset and attitude that's the problem. This attitude involves fashion and trends trumping all other considerations. Maybe that's okay when it comes to something like clothing. It isn't acceptable, however, when it comes to tools that are supposed to be productive, including software.
If you've got a better term than "hipster", I'm willing to consider using it. I'm just not aware of any other term that better describes the particular attitude that puts vanity, arrogance, ego, smugness and focus on appearance over everything else.
I don't think that these people, or more specifically their attitude and their approach toward software UI design, are "nebulous" nor "ill-defined". It's extremely easy to identify incidents involving them: Windows 8, GNOME 3, Firefox 4 and later, this new version of Google Maps, and the Slashdot beta website, among others.
There are some common traits we see with these cases:
1. They hijack an existing, well-established software product.
2. They throw out years, if not decades, of accumulated knowledge and experience.
3. They usually come in with little to no relevant experience themselves.
4. They consider appearance far more important than usability, efficiency or productivity.
5. They create a design that's obviously flawed in many different ways.
6. They refuse to accept or even acknowledge these many flaws in their designs, no matter how loudly long-time users point them out.
7. They release their changes into the wild, often forcing them upon users who absolutely abhor the changes.
8. Their design efforts drive away more users than they could ever hope to bring in.
The fourth and sixth points are the key ones here. They are the very essence of the "hipster" attitude, regardless of whether we're talking about clothing, food, software UI design, or pretty much anything else they're involved with.
90% of the complaints I see about things being bad now because of "fashion and trends trumping all other considerations" seem to just be people applying who are themselves putting fashions and trends above all other considerations -- its just that they found a fashion or trend that they favored several years ago and are upset that the rest of the world doesn't still favor that fashion/trend.
And that's not entirely unreasonable -- or necessarily detached from personal productivity. Something that is a common trend in a field where productivity is relevant is almost certainly also useful to some subset of the market. Likewise, compatibility with expectations driven by trends external to the field can make new fashions also more productive to the mass market, even if they aren't more productive to the subset that the prior fashion "clicked" with well on a deeper level.
Have been using it for a long while now and really don't have any major complaints. Granted, I don't use many desktop programs (browsers, terminal, chat programs and nuvola player).
If I had to come up with a reason why the new Google Maps feels worse in many ways, my guess would be second-system syndrome.
Several months ago Google releases totally new version of Google Maps. Google Maps consistently stays as a poor product since then. I think that even first version of Google maps (introduced in 2005) was better.
[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
When you throw away code and start from scratch,
you are throwing away all that knowledge.
All those collected bug fixes.
Years of programming work.I think it's more of a constant churn; those who would "modernize" or "update" all sorts of designs - from software UI to software architecture to real architecture to interior decorating to graphic design and brand identity work - always have (arguably need to have) an unjustified level of self-confidence, a high opinion of their ability relative to the task they've got before them. They're always blind to the tweaking and tuning that was required to produce the thing they've set out to replace.
Most of the time, if they had an accurate idea of how monumental a task they were facing, they'd look for something else to do.
They get caught up in all these little details and studies, and on paper they can rationalize everything as being perfect. Then, it's a turd in reality, and everyone is left wondering what went wrong, the studies showed B was greater than A, and C was even better than B, and D surpassed C. So, how in the world can the original A be better than D? I don't know, but anyone in the design or development world can verify that it happens.
The Simpsons sum it up well in this episode...
http://i.imgur.com/VLgpw4L.jpg
The car is perfect, big windows and lots of sunlight, a giant cupholder, a horn that plays a catchy tune. Everything is great, until you look at things as a whole.
Now, my least favorite aspects of the new Google maps. I use it on almost a daily basis because I travel often, but I'll be trying to experiment with OpenStreetMaps, or Bing.
1. The search input box hides itself. Why in the world is the search hidden, forcing me to X out of directions to see it again?
2. The blue lines for directions make it nearly impossible to tell if the road offers street view. Mousing down on the little man produces blue availability lines, but you can't see them under the directions.
3. I don't believe it's possible to split directions and street view on the screen. This was the view I used most often. Splitting them side by side would make the most sense with widescreen monitors. Now, you just get a little map in the lower left, and it does a weird expanding animation when you hover over. Previously you could drag the little man to pan around the map, but now you have to keep clicking locations to move.
4. Images at the bottom. I'm here for maps, not images, so this makes absolutely no sense. The three little images at the bottom look like buttons for terrain, map, satellite view, bit instead they open these thumbnails. Now, you have to click the earth button to get satellite images, and the weird part, the image thumbnails at the bottom have separate visible/hidden settings depending on the view. If you close the thumbnail bar when viewing a map, then switch to satellite view, you would think it would stay closed. Nope, it'll open itself, because it's enabled on satellite view. You have to toggle it off on each view.
5. The top left dropdown. Way too many boxes expanding, collapsing, etc as I try to navigate.
My wishlist...
I'm just going to mention one thing, because this has bothered me for ages. Why the heck can't I customize the level of detail? There have been countless times where I just want to see countries and their names, or countries and capital cities. I'm looking at Europe right now, and it's not displaying half of the countries, but displaying city names all over the place. If I zoom in to see all the country names, the map is crowded with hundreds of cities and roads. I always end up doing an image search online for maps, because they achieve this most basic goal. Look at the below image. Google maps on the left. It still doesn't label the Czech Republic in that image. If I zoom out one level, it'll show the Czech Republic, but hide other country names, like Montenegro. Right is just a random map I pulled off an image search. The right map is 100x easier to see the borders and countries. Google maps is an absolute disaster in these situations. If I ask someone that isn't familiar with European geography to find the Czech Republic in the below images, they'll be scratching their heads with Google maps, unless they start zooming in and out hoping the name of the desired country pops into view.
http://i.imgur.com/skpNOyd.jpg
You can show me street view from a coral reef, or roads in some obscure village on a small island, but you can't show me a simple world map with country names? Where are the priorities here?
Edit: Switched my homepage to DuckDuckGo instead of Google search, and updated by bookmarks to OpenStreetMap. I'm honestly getting tired of supporting Google, since the list of things they do right gets smaller on a weekly basis. It's time I give someone else a turn.
Also, I can assert with some confidence, that the number of people choosing the Classic view (from the small question mark at the bottom), is being tracked as a metric of success or failure of the new UI high up on the chain of decision-making inside google.
I have an iPhone 4, still running iOS 6. The Google Maps app has one of the best user experience I have on my phone, hands down. Turn-by-turn navigation works flawlessly. Traffic information is almost real-time, no doubt thanks to their acquisition of Waze. The app gets the little things right as well - like displaying alternate routes, along with a time estimation, directly on the map itself during navigation.
As for the desktop website, I really have no idea what you're talking about. Maps still feels pretty smooth - and I use a MacBook Air. I like the fact that they removed a lot of cruft so that you can see more of the, well, map.
I'm hoping that they improve maps using their acquisition of Waze, rather than abandoning that app...
Apple Maps became useful again (for us iOS users)
Even though it does more, I've noticed maps is faster on desktop for me than it used to be, and I'm not using particularly high-powered machines. But the older one has a fairly decent (if by no means current) ATI graphics card and the one with integrated Intel graphics is a fairly new laptop, so if GPU rendering is involved (WebGL or otherwise) even relative old-new performance could be very system dependent.
> Directions. Just so retarded. The accordion shit on the left. Just show me the effing directions, like you used to.
It is one more click to do that, OTOH the reason is that it provides several alternate routes (with on-map preview), to start with, plus makes the route options + multiple destination routing UIs available. Personally, I find the new UI much more useful than the old one.
> Also, just simple double-clicking to zoom. Extremely less useful than it used to be: just this one simple thing.
Is your complaint that you don't have drag to zoom any more? That's true, but then, if you are a keyboard user (which your complaint about tabbing around the directions UI suggests), you can use +/- to zoom, in addition to double-clicking.
I don't know what they have done to the search in maps, but that sort of thing has been happening to me frequently these days with that product. It is almost never consistent, perhaps relying on the exact zoom and position, or perhaps correcting itself when correct results hit the cache.. I don't really know. It's inconsistency makes me think that I am losing my mind sometimes. What I am sure of is that something is rotten in the state of Google Maps.
No, my complaint is not about drag to zoom. It's about double-click to zoom (the words I used, but I know sometimes things can be looked as maybe just an expression or sloppy language). Double-click. Literally. Click, click. Zoom. This no longer works correctly.
Much of the time, instead of zooming, well... it does something else, I honestly can't remember what. Maybe opens a little dialog about a business it thinks you clicked on or something. Anyway. Seriously bad. There is a way to have our cake and eat, too, to address the general tone of your comment (where you highlight the explanations and the intended benefits), but Google Maps, today, is NOT the way forward. It sucks.
It was clear you were complaining about double-click to zoom, but it was far less clear what about double-click to zoom your complaint was about. I guessed you might have been complaining that double-click to zoom was the only method, as Maps used (IIRC) to also support drag to zoom, but you have no clarified your complaint.
> This no longer works correctly.
IME, it always works correctly. Like most situations where you have both a double click and click functionality, variations in the speed of a double click sometimes result in accidentally getting the functionality of single clicking twice rather than the desired double click functionality, but that's nothing special to Google Maps.
My behavior has remained exactly same, this behavior used to be linked to a positive outcome, and this behavior--unchanged--no longer can be reliably linked to a positive outcome.
In the context of this complaint, it simply does not matter if there's another way (which I do know about, by the way). That's mixing concerns. Right now, it's just purely about double click.
My guess? The new Maps was developed by people who use exclusively quad Xeons with 32GB of RAM and perhaps a high-end workstation graphics card.
(i.e., highly paid developers at a wealthy company)
It's not an uncommon problem. Developers work on high-end hardware whenever they can, and rightly so, but it can cause issues with targeting.
From time to time when I need someting more than basic email stuff, I use the standard javascript interface...
Try it for yourself: http://mail.google.com?ui=html :)
They did a total graphic and UX redesign of the Android app between 6.x and 7.x that made the app pretty horrible to use -- essentially they made it prettier but a LOT less useful as a gps navigation app. You now have to click like 5-7 times to do things that would require 2 or so clicks to accomplish before, which is a huge deal for a GPS app that you just want to dial in and go with, the overhead view is all fucked up now, they also introduced a ton of bugs in the initial 7.x versions -- some of them are now fixed, but it still isn't as rock solid as 6.x was, and they removed a ton of useful features.
bleh, don't get me started on the downfall of Google Maps... whatever change happened over there in their focus as of about 1.5 years ago has been an ongoing travesty, which I think is a huge problem for Android going forward since IMO Google Maps in the 6.x era was the absolute killer app for Android and what kept me not even looking at alternate phones. My next phone may very well be a Windows Phone, which is especially funny since I make a living writing Android apps.
The reality is that Google Maps has always had a (frequently changing) set of searches producing bad results. Some of those failures would have been much more visible, widely publicized, and serious than a blogger not finding the closest burger joint. This article presents the past as searches always just working, which just wasn't true. As such there's no compelling evidence there of the search result quality having actually degraded over time.
Also, I have an IP based out of Dallas, TX, and for some reason, Google Maps insists that I live in San Francisco. I have even set my default location (in Chrome, no less) and I still get San Francisco by default, forcing me to put a location in.
What the author said about locations is true. I used to be able to search for something unique to my area even if the map wasn't centered over my home town and it would find it, but now, it fails because I'm in San Francisco.
But it's a very difficult problem where it's rare that a change is uniformly beneficial, that's insanely dependent on frequently changing input data, and that users are very unforgiving about. My theory on the last point is that a map search is much more concrete than a web search. People have an intuition both about what the right answer should be, as well as an expectation that there is a right answer in the first place. But of course that's not the case, and the results are never going to be optimal. (I.e. your "sub optimal searching" bit is a bit of a truism).
I used to work on the Google maps geocoding team a long time ago. At that time amazing amounts of CPU and engineer time would be spent on verifying the quality of all algorithm and data changes, both during development and during launch. Changes that were unevaluated or were a net negative on quality would only be launched under very exceptional circumstances. Now, the evaluation would of course not be a fully deterministic process, it'd always need to be based on some kind of sampling. But on average that should still mean quality ratcheting up slowly. Maybe things have changed since then and stuff is just randomly launched with no regard to quality, but I have no particular reason to believe so. To me it seems much more likely that the anecdotes from the article don't represent any kind of trend.
Maybe they should actually try using the product instead of relying on automated algorithms to generate metrics when they evaluate changes. For example, it's quite obvious that something is going wrong with the prioritisation of name place text for the UK at the moment: http://imgur.com/kL0GHfe (for the non-UK readers, no there is not a large important city called "Town Centre", Edinburgh is far larger than Kirkcaldy, Birmingham is the second largest city in the country and not labeled at all).
I'm quite curious about how much real human testing they actually do. I've always had the impression that testing by actual humans is the antithesis of Google culture (automate everything and reduce everything to comparable numerical metrics).
Search quality evaluation can't really be done without humans in the loop. If you had an algorithm that could distinguish between a good result and a bad result, you wouldn't use it to evaluate results. You'd use it to generate the results.
I wasn't talking about search though. I was talking about the map rendering.
One of my favorite use cases is having GMaps give me directions by public transit, especially if there's a metro, which is nice if you're in a new city and want to save a few bucks on taxis or Uber.
That said, they've definitely made a few changes I haven't been a fan of. For example, offline maps must now be refreshed once every 30 days, and if you're offline when the timer runs out you won't be able to see the map. (Previously there was no time limit.)
That said, I do absolutely, 100% think the everything-is-now-done-through-the-search-box approach is remarkably horrible and unintuitive. I honestly thought that you couldn't customize directions any more. Hell, there were so many little features -- simple things like Search Nearby -- that I thought went away entirely. The UX is that terrible.
Want to customize the route your currently on? That's easy! Ok, so just close what your currently doing -- hey! Why are you looking in the settings? Why would settings be in Settings? Listen to what I'm saying! So, close out of the -- No! It's not in the Hamburger button. Settings aren't in the menu. Why would settings be in a menu? Pay attention! Exit navigation. Back out of the Directions screen, back out of the location screen. Now, see the single line search bar? Click on that -- but don't search for anything, there's a small button in the drop down. Click that! Congratulations! You've found the settings!
I just want to know how that UX meeting went. Settings!? In a menu!? No, no, no. Makes no sense from a user experience perspective.
"Sambisa" would have found it.
"Sambisa Reserve" would have found it.
"Sambisa Forest Reserve" would have found it.
But my guess is that something attempts to understand keywords and context and when you end with "forest" it looks within the set of forests that are called Sambisa, and actually there isn't a forest called Sambisa, there's a nature reserve called Sambisa, which covers an area within a forest landscape.
Yeah, that's pedantic and Google could do a better job when it attempts to contextualise like that (especially if it's topical), by just doing a second search internally for exact matches and doing a join/merge on the results.
But still... you're going to have the same problem with Open Street Map for the same reason:
http://open.mapquestapi.com/nominatim/v1/search.php?format=j...
http://open.mapquestapi.com/nominatim/v1/search.php?format=j...
http://open.mapquestapi.com/nominatim/v1/search.php?format=j...
Oooh maybe they can take out a patent on that idea first...
(Sorry OP, not having a go at you - just getting incredibly frustrated with companies I used to love and respect - like Google and Amazon.)
Google is very concerned about giving users what it thinks they want, rather then what they actually asked for. Sometimes that's great (I love basic stemming), sometimes it fills my results with irrelevant garbage.
I don't think it does much of any contextualization. It might recognize 'forest' as a specific type of feature, but I believe it would only use that to prioritize results, not exclude them (but I haven't taken the time to figure out how to check this).
Photon is another search system that uses OSM data:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Photon
I guess Komoot uses it:
It succeeds with "Sambisa Forest".
And if no results are found, Google, please tell me "no results found" rather than giving me junk to scan to figure why did Google return me all this when it does not even have the keywords I asked for. I do not like to type a + before every keyword.
FYI, the + prefix operator was deprecated a few years ago. There was always an equivalent way to express it, by putting "each" "word" "in" "quotes". I know that's more keypresses than the + sign, but when maintaining a system as gigantic and complex as the Google search engine, everything is tradeoffs, and that's one that we decided to make.
Then the beautiful product gets frozen in place, and its team "locked up in a dark dungeon" (Spolsky, 2004), which creates a huge opportunity for (open) alternatives.
OpenStreetMap + Leaflet is to Google Maps what Firefox was to IE6... but there is still a very long way to go.
It turns out that Google isn't smart enough to avoid the same mistakes made by the companies it supplanted.
I mean, even if you clickity clack through the directions>origin>transit, Google will mark up its suggested routes while still refusing to superimpose the tube lines. It's maddening! For all the sophisticated route-mapping that I'm sure Google is bringing to bear on the problem, I'd much rather just look at a map that simultaneously shows a search result marker and the tube network at the same time and figure out my own route. And heaven forbid that I might want to see a collection of results for DIY shops and figure out which one I can get to quickest with reference to the underground network -- it seems that Google would have me route-map each of them in turn, write down the results and then decide. It's so deeply counter-intuitive that I struggle to think of any possible rationalisation for the decision.
I don't suppose anyone has a bookmarklet that toggles the transit layer?
Have you tried using Citymapper? I've only used it a couple of times as I'm not a Londoner, but it's quite good (it knows to avoid the circle line!). Coincidentally, the first time was to get to #HNLondon where one of the Citymapper guys was giving a talk.
I've gotten used to putting in unnecessarily verbose context in searches, and I assume that's why I don't have search issues in sending me to other irrelevant parts of the world.
I guess there is a lot to complain about. But for me it's still the best map, and pretty usable.
The Google approach of changing things on you - too bad! - is obnoxious. Pushing out Chrome notifications in OS, enabling them by default, and having to find blog posts on how to disable because it's not in settings or documentation, this kinda stuff is just getting old.
For example, I searched Maps for a Mexican restaurant with my phone recently. It directed me to a place in Florida (hundreds of miles away). Seriously, when there's a highly-rated place on Google Maps with the same name not 3 miles from where you've located me? When I returned home and searched, I had no such problems - it pointed straight at the place. I've had the reverse happen as well.
Is it the fact that I'm blocking so many cookies that Google is relying on? Or is there just a signal somewhere that tells Maps to override reason and relevance?
I have tried alternatives, but the top contenders - like Bing and OpenMaps - have their own very special set of problems.. I'm not sure what to use at this point.
I was down in Chile's Lake District last week, and Google totally failed me, both in Pucón and Panguipulli. These are not particularly tiny towns - in fact, Pucón is a major tourist destination. But Google was completely lacking in street information for both places. I ended up having to use Bing.
Google wasn't even second - both Nokia's HERE Maps (which powers Yahoo) and Apple's map product were better (although Apple was still pretty atrocious).
Here's a couple of links for comparison - Pucón in Google Maps (http://goo.gl/maps/rm1D9) vs Pucón in Bing Maps (http://binged.it/1gR5K55). If Bing Maps had a dedicated iOS application, I'd just switch permanently.
http://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=-39.277500%2C-71.9...
Compare that with this https://www.mapbox.com/plans/.
I know who will be getting my money in the near future.
I know that sounds somewhat daft but I like been a paying customer as it means I can get some support plus the documentation for mapbox is lovely as well.
I like that mapbox wraps it all up, clearly documents it and provides it at a reasonable cost, to me that is a value added worth paying for is all.
Interesting - someone used you comment as validation that Mapbox provides insufficient attribution to Openstreetmap: https://twitter.com/Anonymaps/status/465216595242274817
Interesting that was the conclusion someone projected though.
Some parts of the new UI still suck, though. Just today, I wanted to print route directions. However, there's no print thingy anywhere in sight. You now have to click "List all steps", and only then a printer icon appears... Completely non-obvious. My wife mentioned that she had already reverted to just using Print Screen a few times because she couldn't find the stupid widget.
Here is an easy way to get started: http://www.openstreetmap.org/fixthemap
I've gotten this behavior for years and it drives me nuts because I can't understand how it's not fixed? I remember in 2009 I was driving down from SF to LA. I stopped in Santa Barbara. I needed my bearings and I didn't not know the address or the name of the street I was on but I did see an Albertson's supermarket about 200 feet away so I searched for Albertsons and Google gives me some place in Texas. (I think this was on a SonyW810)
I've searched for Pizza in Tokyo last December and had it give me some place in Chicago. It's so infuriating. It knows I'm in Tokyo, it's pinpointed me on the map. So in what situation would I EVER want Pizza in Texas unless I specifically asked for "Pizza, Texas"?
There's other things too. It mostly feels like maps hasn't changed in years. Sure, there's the new maps UI which many people, including me, feel like it's a change for the worse. The geek in me loves that it's slick and live and webgl but can you figure out how to get a short link to a place? Clicking "Share" just brings up a G+ form. Not what I wanted. I wanted a link I could msg to someone. Didn't have that problem with the old maps.
How about how to print? The old maps had a print button and it would format for printing. The new maps has one but I can never remember where it's buried in the UI. Picking Print from the browser directly doesn't do this.
Trying to figure out the UI that pops up and down. Here's one. Pick any marker on the map or search for something like Best Buy. The popup UI should show some details on whatever you picked or the one it picked for you. Now click "Directions". Ok, now how do you get back to the state just before you clicked "Directions"? There's no back button, clicking the X in the corner goes all the way back before you selected anything. In other words there is no back. If you clicked directions by accident well, I guess you just have to start over and type your search in again. If you clicked some dot on a detailed map, well now you've lost your place.
Even more frustrating is who can compete with them? How do you compete with free? If they're not going to do a good job then I'd love for someone else to try but the moment that someone else does try they'll finally feel some pressure to up their game and you're out of business.
And where's the ads? Maybe you don't want ads but I do. I want to see logos of places. Maybe I'm looking for McDonalds. Even if I'm not the logos serve as landmarks. You'd think it would be in their best interest to sell ads on maps since 90+% of all of Google's revenue is ads. And, if done right it would be extremely useful for users as well. It would even fit their mission statement if done well.
Sigh....
I have no idea how to create a link to what I'm looking at in Google Maps (app on iPhone). I don't know how many inscrutable buttons I am expected to click to discover this.
There's a bunch of stuff with email that I needed to do a websearch to get instructions.
Very very frustrating.
I voiced this complaint about the new desktop/browser version of google maps on here a few months ago. FWIW, apparently the permalink functionality has been removed because the address bar is now updated on the fly, so whatever is in the address bar is now always your permalink. This of course is not communicated to the user anywhere that I can see.
I don't know if this helps you on iOS or not.
Keep in mind that Mapquest, Yahoo maps, Bing maps, and Nokia HERE have no record of it at all. So this is really between Google Maps and OpenStreetMap.
They are saying that google's ability to take natural language requests (sambisa forest, in-n-out east bay) and come up with an answer that corresponds what you searched for has seriously degraded. Personally, that is consistent with my experience.
What is causing the problem (bug, difference in focus, etc) is also worth discussing. Why does google have so much trouble finding answers to queries that seem straightforward? Why can it suggest "Sambisa Forest Reserve" (based on "sambisa forest") and then have no idea how to find "sambia forest?" The title might be a little grandiose, but I think it's a fair question.
Overall bad choice of control. Much more sensical to stick that in somewhere fitting, like settings.
* Start in San Francisco by typing San Francisco. It still manages to find that city. Do 'directions' and type in Eugene, OR, USA - my home town, which is a fairly straightforward drive north. It can't find it and gives you bad results.
* THEY KILLED TERRAIN MODE! This was a super-useful feature that I still use on my computer, but can no longer access on my mobile devices.
https://maps.google.com/maps?saddr=San+Francisco,+CA&daddr=E...
I don't know who came up with the above concept for switching modes, but it's absolutely awful.
The new google maps is frustrating to use. All the ways that I used to use google maps for just don't seem to work with the new maps either because they removed the feature, or moved the UI elements in such a way that they don't exist on the same page any more or its just too slow on my very fast laptop and my very fast internet.
I really hope they fix it fast, I am loosing all hope that maps will ever be usable again.
It's an example that overly smartness actually degrades the experience for me rather than being and improvement.
There's a great market opportunity here. (Really) old guard companies like YP still haven't responded to the shift and I infer from Google's backslide that it's not a priority for them.
We can't buy everything from Amazon (esp. Hachette books!)
This becomes especially galling when I know the info is there and my keywords are correct and specific, and the search returns absolutely nothing even remotely related.
ps. KML files were developed by Google for maps...
Supporting KML in the web maps was just a neat thing Google also did.
†http://fly.historicwings.com/2013/02/kh-1-the-first-spy-sate...
I think iOS 8 will include major updates to Apple maps that will integrate transit directions. Apple recently bought the mapping company Embark along with a few other transit-related acquisitions.
- Home is in London
- Work is in London
- My most recent restaurant reviews are in London
- My IP address is in London
- My location, if you ask my browser, is in London
Stop showing me a map of the US when I open Maps.
If I open https://maps.google.co.uk/ it shows the UK.
I expect there are people in places outside the U.S. who would be frustrated by maps.google.com showing their current location, so it isn't an easy thing to solve for everyone.
BTW, I love Google maps and Google Now - my fanboy'ism is based on both pretty good functionality right now, and I my expectation that it will keep getting better. I have some privacy issues with these products but at least for now I consider the functionality worth some loss of privacy - I can see my opinion changing however.
I find the most useful alerts come from the automated reading of my email; for example: plane schedules and also information on package delivery.
So, I really do believe that Google Now has a lot of potential, but I have concerns about privacy also.
There's the slight possibility that it might be different in this case, given that Google has many resources at its disposal. But in other cases, such a fallback is merely an attempt to temporarily mitigate legitimate complains about a now-inferior experience, without doing any actual work.
So if you happen to use Google Maps then it would show you only 4 results even after you filter down to Buses. Why not show all the options Google? When you have it in your results, just show it.
Because I and lot of people that I know have been in this situation where we are waiting for the bus that google maps is showing and in the process missing out on the ones that are not shown.
TechCrunch randomly chose a thing to search and that's where they are? Granted, it's a huge 60,000kmsq area... But of every place TechCrunch could've searched for on Google Maps, it's the same place?
I don't know WTF happened, but this is an all-hands-on deck situation for Google: must fix ASAHP.
What I think I remember isn't a great point of reference, but a switch to a cheaper, lower quality data set would explain problems with routing.
It's as if it's running on auto-pilot right now or something.
I can't quite put my finger on it, but something needs to be changed.
The Google Index does seem to lack a lot of more obscure names. In this case I would rather have high quality authoritative gazetteers than an algorithm that tries to guess what I mean.
Contextual search is really tough, and the same choices that might give great answers for most answers can yield infuriating answers for other questions. In this case he is searching for something that doesn't exist, and a forest that probably gets searched a dozen times in aggregate a day on Google Maps, likely contrived for effect. That doesn't excuse those cases, but it isn't correlated with the cases where people got surprisingly cogent answers to their questions.
EDIT: I forgot that a sense of humor is not an option here. Geez.
And just to be clear, I actually agree with him that the new Google Maps seems less useful than the old version.
Also the selectiveness of tweets and bug reports makes it all seem very labored and seedy and betrays a lack in of understanding in how complex software development (btw directwrite is behind a flag in Chrome 35)
And when you take into account that the author has a history of shitting on Google, it appeals like an attempt in catering to a like minded audience: http://techcrunch.com/author/jon-evans/