I really want to know why Google maps is slow on a $3500 laptop with a huge Nvidia card.
What do you mean by "slow"? I'm on a standard M1 Pro Macbook, and don't seem to have any issues?
Google Maps has become an eyesore
71–80 of 705 posts
Re: Google Maps has become an eyesore
#72If you are looking for an alternative navigation app I can recommend giving Magic Earth a try. Simple, clear and free. Nice developers that answers your mail. It even supports Android Auto.
Re: Google Maps has become an eyesore
#73It's inflammatory, but this website is worse. There's some video playing of a stranger eating mustard skittles taking up the bottom quarter of the screen.
That’s funny I did not notice it when I read the article. Had to go back to check again; I think my mind just blurred it all out and let me focus on the tiny scrollable section where the story is.
Re: Google Maps has become an eyesore
#74When I lived in Saigon, it was very hard to remember where places were. Either due to the map not having accurate information, or it being in Vietnamese and I just couldn't read it.
So, I started to pin/label every place I went that I had a good experience at. It is a very big city of about 12m+ people, and I really explored pretty much all of it by motorbike late at night when I couldn't sleep. It was a lot of pins, 1000's.
My map got so cluttered with pins that I couldn't find anything anymore without zooming in super far. Even worse, removing pins is a painful multi step process. The search process on the map, via pins is also pretty useless.
I'm not sure what to do now, so I just left all the pins and moved out of the country during covid. One day, I'll go back, but I'm truly afraid to deal with things being completely out of date now.
Re: Google Maps has become an eyesore
#75Love Apple Maps. It has progressively gotten so much better and awesome. I don’t think I ever use my iPhone and get frustrated. Leaving android in 2015 was the best decision I made.
I find Apple Maps incredibly frustrating. The endless zooming-in and out when approaching turns. I want a consistent layout and structure when I glance down at a map. Not some gee-whiz-shiny display that only works well if you have been watching the entire animation. It also seems to be deliberately obtuse when you want to zoom around the map. Like, how dare you not fully trust its routing.
I honestly love that zoom feature, because with Google Maps, I can't count how many times I've missed an exit due to thinking the blue line was just a little further up, and there's multiple exists clustered together.
Re: Google Maps has become an eyesore
#76I worked on Google Maps monetization, and then on Maps itself. Monetization was a dismal failure. I don't know how well they're doing now, but Maps was a gigantic money-loser, forever. I'd be a little surprised if it didn't still lose money, but maybe less. I don't what those "pin ads" cost, but I'd bet it's way less than a search ad. If you don't believe that, that's fine. "What about indirect revenue?" you ask? Goo…
I personally think that ads on maps were a bad idea even for monetization. At glance, this seems to be a plausible ads inventory for local businesses but in reality this doesn't scale very well compared to Search or App ads (or even Display) since most of ads will be limited to a very narrow area so big advertisers don't feel as strongly as other channels. They could design ad campaigns specific to local areas but this increases overall complexity and makes it really hard to plan and optimize its budgets. Also, it's worth mentioning the difficulty of measuring offline conversions accurately... Some degree of automation might help, but at this state it's not really a great place for advertisers.
Re: Google Maps has become an eyesore
#77Mapping has become a commodity. The differences between various maps are increasingly cosmetic (i.e. styling) and now that people can self host openstreetmap through things like protomaps, even cost is no longer a big obstacle. Core map features have almost no value, it's all the stuff people do on top of maps that holds the value.
Honestly Google Maps is fine for what it does but as a search expert I notice that precision and recall metrics aren't great for Google Maps these days. It doesn't find places (recall) I know exist or ranks them so low that you won't find them unless you really look. And it boosts places that (presumably) are paying to get boosted (precision). It's more than a bit manipulative. All that erodes trust. If, I look for restaurants or bars in an area that I know has loads of them, I expect to see all of them; not just a few. This is a problem because it erodes trust and breaks the promise to the user that Google has it all. Once that obviously stops being true, users are free to use competing products.
The question is what they should use. Because a lot of the alternatives aren't much better.
Re: Google Maps has become an eyesore
#78Some locals in Brisbane succeeded in getting a brief historical name for the central business district ("Frogs Hollow") boosted up as a locality name which shows up in several zoom levels. It's more prominent than the real name of the location (Gardens Point) sometimes. Nobody appears able to get this rescinded. Either its being contested, or the process boundaries on "this is graffiti") are limiting. I do quite a lo…
I can't actually see it anymore at any zoom level on mobile or desktop. Maybe somebody finally did fix it (or maybe on a different sized screen or something it would still show?)... You can still search for it though.
Re: Google Maps has become an eyesore
#79I worked on Google Maps monetization, and then on Maps itself. Monetization was a dismal failure. I don't know how well they're doing now, but Maps was a gigantic money-loser, forever. I'd be a little surprised if it didn't still lose money, but maybe less. I don't what those "pin ads" cost, but I'd bet it's way less than a search ad. If you don't believe that, that's fine. "What about indirect revenue?" you ask? Goo…
> What about indirect revenue?
Google decision makers must know of its importance as a moat, a data collection pipe, a vehicle for other services and so on.
No offense, but trying to squeeze direct revenue out seems kinda laughable. Or maybe even a way to plausibly deny the indirect revenue importance.
Re: Google Maps has become an eyesore
#80Google Maps is actually one of the few Google properties that has not got bad. I appreciate their reviews since they don't have Yelp's problem of extorting businesses.
It's also neat that you can review almost everything in google maps. Wanna leave a review for a cool rock in your neighborhood? Sure! Why not.