Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Maps has become an eyesore

fastcompany.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 705 posts

Re: Google Maps has become an eyesore

#161

Post by grishka »

Funny to see that the pins are the author's biggest problem with Google Maps.

Google seems to have started using some kind of automation to generate maps several years ago and quality just went to utter shit. In my city, there are buildings that overlap a river. They're there since at least 2020 and no one tried to fix that. When I traveled to Dubai this spring, it was even worse — only the streets on Google Maps somewhat matched reality, but buildings were some arbitrary shapes strewn around.

This kind of product quality is something that I'd be too shy to show to an office janitor, yet Google — a multi-billion-dollar company — somehow deemed it appropriate to ship this abomination to production.

Re: Google Maps has become an eyesore

#162

Post by e4e5 »

dheera wrote: post #95
AlbertCory wrote: post #34

I 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…

It's also been downright unusable. While navigating it hides all the business names from me so I can't browse the stores are along my way. I constantly have to exit navigation, approximately remember the route, browse the stores, and then re-enter navigation mode. This is only one of many pain points. Its assistant is also useless. "OK Google, zoom in the map by a factor of 1.5" "OK Google, stop hiding the businesses…

Or that for some reason zooming in works differently in the search screen. Instead of zooming where I'm pinching it just always zooms in the middle.

Re: Google Maps has become an eyesore

#163

Post by aix1 »

goguy wrote: post #132
aib wrote: post #118

"Google Maps" is a misnomer. Call it "Google Business Search" or something similar, and the perceived problems disappear. Google Maps provides a small fraction of the functions of a real map. And this fraction does not even cover the fundamentals: Street names, landmarks/points of interest, being able to draw or create marks on the map, and perhaps making basic measurements. Its main view has marginally more informat…

That's not really true though is it. I use it countless times a week to navigate from my current location to point x l, generally a postal code or POI. At no point during this do I have to interact with alternative businesses or way points.

I agree that Google Maps does work as a navigation aid in certain environments (e.g. dense urban) and certain transportation modalities (definitely cars, to a lesser extent public transport, bike and pedestrian).

In my experience it's also useable as a general street/road map. It's clearly not a topographical map; I think it would be foolish and potentially dangerous to rely on Google Maps to, say, hike in the Alps. A standard topographical map would fit that use case much better.

P.S. I don't quite follow some of the complaints on this thread about the UX. For example, I always see the map scale in the bottom-right corner of the app. It is true that street names are not always written onto the map; however, clicking on a street gives me a popup with the name (not the most ergonomic UX, but it's not like the app is trying to hide the info, as some commenters are claiming).

Re: Google Maps has become an eyesore

#165

Post by anigbrowl »

All of these criticisms are very valid, especially the street name one, which is a great example of core functionality being sacrificed to...whatever this is. But then the end:

And as annoyed as I am by all those unwanted pins on my screen, I still often need some of those points of interest, such as popular times, live foot traffic data, reviews, photos, and other useful data that help me plan an outing. It’s nice to know peak wait times for a restaurant and how long customers typically spend there.

Nonsensical. This is smartphone as pacifier for people who can't tolerate any uncertainty or figuring anything out the hard way. It's such a bd excuse I feel like the editor made the writer add it.

Re: Google Maps has become an eyesore

#166

Post by anigbrowl »

xcdzvyn wrote: post #9

It'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.

Vivaldi's ad blocker thankfully means I have no idea what you're referring to. Stay tuned though, by next year they'll have ads of your friends eating mustard skittles, whether they do or not.

Re: Google Maps has become an eyesore

#167

Post by anigbrowl »

ceving wrote: post #156

You say: > In the perennial battle between mapping services, there are two main competitors: Google Maps and Apple Maps. Sorry but for me there is only one: https://www.openstreetmap.org/ And this is my app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.psyberia.o...

ATAK or go home

Re: Google Maps has become an eyesore

#168

Post by mianos »

resolutebat wrote: post #21
foobarbecue wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting that Google has kept the Waze brand around. I expected them to merge it into maps when they bought it.

It's happening, it just took a while. https://arstechnica.com/google/2023/06/waze-googles-other-ma...

It would be great if they replaced the Waze search with Google. I really like the waze mapping and interface, but when I use voice to search for a destination, it is nearly useless here in Sydney.

For example, if I search for an exact local place to eat, the top result is some completely irrelevant store on the other side of the city, followed by a list of useless distant results that I have to scroll through to, maybe, find the place I want to go to.

Whereas, the Google voice search finds it first go and starts navigating to it.

Re: Google Maps has become an eyesore

#169

Post by hbs18 »

cpeterso wrote: post #139
AlbertCory wrote: post #34

I 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 assume people on the Google Maps team use Google Maps in their daily lives. Do they not feel the UX friction from all the ad-centric design?

It's more likely they use Apple Maps

Re: Google Maps has become an eyesore

#170

Post by botanical »

thunfisch wrote: post #100

Google Maps has been broken on Firefox for many months. Not sure if it's my personal setup, or some addon, but on every Firefox instance I have, the search is entirely broken - it won't return any results. I've since switched over to openstreetmap.org for most of my use. It's absolutely not perfect, the search is not as powerful as Google when it comes to recognizing typos or what I'm looking for, but the actual stre…

I had the same issue where even zooming was jittery and there was no StreetView, for some reason a Firefox profile reset fixed the issue. So I don't know if Google is intentionally breaking it or what.
Post reply on HN