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Google Maps has become an eyesore

fastcompany.com

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Re: Google Maps has become an eyesore

#421

Post by yankput »

aembleton wrote: post #234
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Peole forget that millions of people submit data to Google Maps for free. I placed all the local postboxes on google maps, people sibmit information about their businesss, opening hours, etc. This is hugely valuable. Also google grew laxy. Not tskes them a year to add a royal mail postbox

Worth adding that information to open street maps so that it available for other maps too.

Compare the experience of adding stuff to OSM and to Google Maps. Much easier.

OSM is for nerds. Very hard to add even basic info. Google Maps it’s trivial.

Same as uploading photo to Google Maps is easier than adding it to WikiMedia Commons. Such is life.

(Ironically one of the biggest sources of photos is commons is Panoramio; before Google merged it with Google Maps, the photos there defaulted to Creative Commons.)

Re: Google Maps has become an eyesore

#422

Post by lost_tourist »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #401
lotsofpulp wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they resell the real time location and local data correlated to user characteristics, as data service to large discrete customers. I do not understand what resell means here. Who is google selling to first?

Assuming here you consider the users giving up their privacy as the primary product being sold in maps.

This seems wrong. I don't think the average business owner has the capability to reverse engineer the anonymous tokens that represent hash IDs. Also, it's good to go in and reset that occasionally with Google. I gave up on it and switched to apple, tho. Far as I can tell, they don't ever sell that info, even in anonymous hash # form. I'm happy to be proven wrong other than "wHy wOuLd yOu tRuSt aPPle?" .

Re: Google Maps has become an eyesore

#423

Post by lost_tourist »

nielsole wrote: post #266
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…

Google Maps design is becoming less detailed over the years. It's really apparent when compared to OSM. It is necessary to search for a lot of things in Google maps as they are otherwise not visible. You can't really navigate off Google maps without turn-by-turn navigation. I wonder whether this is a strategic drive from Google to make maps more like search to enable advertising or whether they truly think this is th…

I'm not sure why they could add "personalities" or "modes" like simple, tourist, night-life, etc. Seems rather obvious to just about anyone who thinks more than 30 seconds about it

Re: Google Maps has become an eyesore

#424

Post by gardenhedge »

tommit wrote: post #363
hgsgm wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anywhere you put your data can be read by the people that run the place, regardless of what other products they make.

It seems like the person you're responding to has a problem with them selling their data in real-time to 3rd parties, rather than just any Google employee knowing where they are heading.

surely google employees can't look up peoples locations..

Re: Google Maps has become an eyesore

#426

Post by jccalhoun »

LimeLimestone wrote: post #193

Is it just me or have you guys also noticed that the routes suggested by Google Maps have gotten worse? It seems that it only takes into account current traffic jams and not the ones which will occur 30mins into the trip. For instance, there's this spot in my city where I know there is a traffic jam at around 3:20 PM every day. I usually set off from home around 2:50 PM, which means I'll hit that congested area by 3:…

I wish google would do weekly updates here. I live in a small city in the midwest USA and one road has been closed for construction for over a month and google maps still wants me to go that way.

Re: Google Maps has become an eyesore

#427

Post by rattray »

lancesells wrote: post #395
Ycdr4thfdd wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's even worse is that often I'll click "restaurants", zoom in all the way, and then click "Search this area", yet Google will still refuse to show some popular restaurant, even when there are no other restaurants displayed in the window. The only way to get those restaurants to show up is to search them by name. Not sure if they're intentionally penalizing certain restaurants, but it's pretty bad.

FWIW Apple does the same thing to me in my neighborhood. I live in Brooklyn where there are restaurants on every block but it'll zoom out and show ~15 restaurants scattered over a mile with half in Manhattan. Pretty unusable.

Have you found anything better for the area? This frustrates me too...

Re: Google Maps has become an eyesore

#428

Post by erremerre »

Knee_Pain wrote: post #328

The funniest thing to me is that Google Maps seems to be the "normal person" option and yet only OSM tells me where water fountains are. Millions of tourists worldwide use GMaps to navigate around in foreign places and yet they have no option to see where the closest place to refill their bottles is? Especially in the summer?

I don't care where are water fountains, but what bus/train/metro can I take to go to another place, where is the bus stop. At what time does arrive, and which bus stop do I need to get down.

I can do that only on google maps. Open Street Map does not provide that info. Now I am sure there are some local app I can use for each individual city that works fine. But with google maps I only need to have one app.

As user, that is what is valuable for me. I honestly dont care about how clutter is the interface.

Re: Google Maps has become an eyesore

#429

Post by wredue »

yankput wrote: post #418
fnordpiglet wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know, because they tried to sell it to me when I was at a megacorp, they resell the real time location and local data correlated to user characteristics, as data service to large discrete customers. This includes constant real time information about where people are traveling to, businesses being frequented by demographics, with a sophisticated query interface for asking relatively complex questions of maps derived…

Not directly related but last time I was this creeped out is when a antivirus company wanted to sell us crazy amount of data on our customers. Apparently AV companies lose money on the customer endpoint protection (it’s basically for free!) but make it up on selling users data. Also on the business licenses though

GeForce experience tracks every single window you have open, sending the title and window information, along with every single spot that you click on your screen to Nvidia, tied to your now mandatory account.

That was a couple years back. Who knows how much more invasive it’s gotten since.

Oh. And this data is considered to be “valuable debugging information”, so is not prevented by opting out of analytics.

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