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Plan Your Route Privately: DuckDuckGo Now Has Driving and Walking Directions

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Re: Plan Your Route Privately: DuckDuckGo Now Has Driving and Walking Directions

#61

Post by karussell »

WilTimSon wrote: post #54
karussell wrote: post #51

I'll do a shameless advertisement of our open source routing engine GraphHopper as one of our main advantage over the big companies is that we do not track users. We rent our servers (not on AWS or GC :) ) and remove logs after max. 5 weeks https://graphhopper.com/maps/ (see our privacy policy for more details) We only keep them for debugging purposes and attack prevention. The maps layer (visualization) is done from…

Is there any plan to add stuff like business addresses and all the other fluff of Google Maps? I'll happily use this for getting around but having to input the street address instead of just the name of a business can be a hassle. Either way, thank you for offering an alternative, this seems great.

Actually POI search is already possible and works (according to our tests and effort) in some countries like in Germany ... but geocoding is another big topic besides routing (and map visualization) that you need for a good map application. And to make it working on a global scale is much more effort as the data quality in OSM and how addressing works can be very different for the different countries.

BTW: we also provide our own geocoding which is based on photon an open source geocoding projects where we also invest, additionally to financially supporting the 'main' OpenStreetMap geocoder Nominatim project.

Re: Plan Your Route Privately: DuckDuckGo Now Has Driving and Walking Directions

#62

Post by nitrogen »

karussell wrote: post #60
kqr wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For bicycle, in my case. Sorry, should have specified. Bicycle infrastructure is awful where I live so I need to spend a lot of cognitive effort just not being killed by the road. In that mental state I can't follow very complicated directions, so I prefer bigger roads!

Bike routes are currently heavily optimized already and sometimes I'm also a bit surprised about the good route quality ;) but actually this is only possible with the fantastic OpenStreetmap data. Still the most improvements are probably possible via data improvements in many areas. Still we will try to improve routes via "less turns" and more precise elevation data etc. For bike routing we only need to keep the bala…

Something you could do to be better than Google Maps would be to prefer stoplights over two way stops for left turns. That nearly got me sideswiped in SF once.

Re: Plan Your Route Privately: DuckDuckGo Now Has Driving and Walking Directions

#63

Post by karussell »

nitrogen wrote: post #62
karussell wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bike routes are currently heavily optimized already and sometimes I'm also a bit surprised about the good route quality ;) but actually this is only possible with the fantastic OpenStreetmap data. Still the most improvements are probably possible via data improvements in many areas. Still we will try to improve routes via "less turns" and more precise elevation data etc. For bike routing we only need to keep the bala…

Something you could do to be better than Google Maps would be to prefer stoplights over two way stops for left turns. That nearly got me sideswiped in SF once.

Do you have an example? (avoiding left turns is the same problem like avoiding turns in general that is possible now with some new code we have since 1.0 or so, but we have to do more work to make it working in real world)

Re: Plan Your Route Privately: DuckDuckGo Now Has Driving and Walking Directions

#64

Post by aasasd »

kqr wrote: post #59
karussell wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks :) Do you mean preferring bigger roads for car? This is tricky as optimizing for time sometimes introduces big detours and so we consider also distance (that can take you off big roads) and so yes, we have to improve this further. At least for (small) truck we have to improve there :)

For bicycle, in my case. Sorry, should have specified. Bicycle infrastructure is awful where I live so I need to spend a lot of cognitive effort just not being killed by the road. In that mental state I can't follow very complicated directions, so I prefer bigger roads!

Sorry for hijacking GraphHopper's thread, but: you might want to try the OsmAnd phone app—it has some settings for routes in this very vein. E.g. ‘no unpaved roads’ and such. Not sure if it would solve your specific case, and OsmAnd isn't completely free, but it's an option (specifically map updates are limited for free, at least in the Play Store version).

Re: Plan Your Route Privately: DuckDuckGo Now Has Driving and Walking Directions

#65

Post by Liquix »

johnchristopher wrote: post #41

Good, I decided to finally ditch Google Maps as my usual go-to app when I need bus directions, itineraries or things like that. The app is now cluttered with too much suggestions about restaurants, places and suggestions I have no interest about on the moment. I recently re-installed Here maps (which I loved on windows mobile) and my country railway app has built-in bus data so it can help plan travels as well. I did…

OSMAnd+ has great live navigation if you care to check out alternatives.

Re: Plan Your Route Privately: DuckDuckGo Now Has Driving and Walking Directions

#66

Post by nitrogen »

karussell wrote: post #63
nitrogen wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something you could do to be better than Google Maps would be to prefer stoplights over two way stops for left turns. That nearly got me sideswiped in SF once.

Do you have an example? (avoiding left turns is the same problem like avoiding turns in general that is possible now with some new code we have since 1.0 or so, but we have to do more work to make it working in real world)

I don't have a specific route I can link to, sorry. I was navigating in an unfamiliar area of SF once and directed to turn right one street before what turned out to be a major street, then make a left turn onto another major street. The directed left turn was from a stop sign onto a street with poor visibility and cross-traffic not stopping. If I had gone one street further before the right, there would have been a stoplight.

Basically if you have data on the type of an intersection, favoring nearby controlled intersections for difficult turns would probably be helfpul, especially in hilly areas.

Re: Plan Your Route Privately: DuckDuckGo Now Has Driving and Walking Directions

#67

Post by sneak »

fooqux wrote: post #14
rietta wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much can be gleaned from the way points. Google guesses home and work with great accuracy without the need for crazy fancy data analysis.

But only because they can tie it to a user account . If DDG is the middleduck acting as an anonymizing layer, Apple won't be able to perform such analysis on the data. This is all conjecture obviously, it's hard to know exactly how much data Apple is getting, and if they could use something else to fingerprint users, but I'll give DDG the benefit of doubt for now.

Only one person (or perhaps two) works at X and lives at Y. Location data can never be anonymous.

Re: Plan Your Route Privately: DuckDuckGo Now Has Driving and Walking Directions

#68

Post by thaumasiotes »

karussell wrote: post #53
kqr wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have only two things to say in response to this: a) I use GraphHopper with OpenStreetMap.org sometimes. It is good. Sometimes too good. Can I ask it to stick to bigger roads at the cost of other things like travel time? b) Thank you so much for bringing up the profit model and being transparent about it. Way too few people do that.

Thanks :) Do you mean preferring bigger roads for car? This is tricky as optimizing for time sometimes introduces big detours and so we consider also distance (that can take you off big roads) and so yes, we have to improve this further. At least for (small) truck we have to improve there :)

I use osmand. I'm not sure whether it uses GraphHopper or not.

But, when routing from Santa Cruz to San Francisco, every time there's a freeway offramp that parallels the freeway and then rejoins it, the osmand routing wants me to take that offramp. So that I can then, just a few seconds later, get back on to the freeway.

This isn't just annoying, it's dangerous. If that's you, can you fix it? And if not, can you make sure you don't do the same thing?

Re: Plan Your Route Privately: DuckDuckGo Now Has Driving and Walking Directions

#69

Post by thaumasiotes »

aasasd wrote: post #64
kqr wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For bicycle, in my case. Sorry, should have specified. Bicycle infrastructure is awful where I live so I need to spend a lot of cognitive effort just not being killed by the road. In that mental state I can't follow very complicated directions, so I prefer bigger roads!

Sorry for hijacking GraphHopper's thread, but: you might want to try the OsmAnd phone app—it has some settings for routes in this very vein. E.g. ‘no unpaved roads’ and such. Not sure if it would solve your specific case, and OsmAnd isn't completely free, but it's an option (specifically map updates are limited for free, at least in the Play Store version).

I have the problem with OsmAnd that, where there's a freeway offramp that briefly parallels and then rejoins the freeway, OsmAnd always chooses to take the offramp and then immediately get back on the freeway. There are no words for how incredibly stupid this is.

Is there a setting that disables this ludicrous behavior? Why is that setting set to "stupid and dangerous" by default?

Re: Plan Your Route Privately: DuckDuckGo Now Has Driving and Walking Directions

#70

Post by paranorman »

kqr wrote: post #52
karussell wrote: post #51

I'll do a shameless advertisement of our open source routing engine GraphHopper as one of our main advantage over the big companies is that we do not track users. We rent our servers (not on AWS or GC :) ) and remove logs after max. 5 weeks https://graphhopper.com/maps/ (see our privacy policy for more details) We only keep them for debugging purposes and attack prevention. The maps layer (visualization) is done from…

I have only two things to say in response to this: a) I use GraphHopper with OpenStreetMap.org sometimes. It is good. Sometimes too good. Can I ask it to stick to bigger roads at the cost of other things like travel time? b) Thank you so much for bringing up the profit model and being transparent about it. Way too few people do that.

I’ll echo this, sharing your profit model here is the only reason I’m paying any attention to GraphHopper (awesome name btw)

Thank you very much for doing that.

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