471–480 of 705 posts
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.
I would add to this article that a major issue with Google Maps has been businesses trying to SEO-pad their business names on Google Maps, to the detriment of readability. This is also against their TOS – the "business name" form is supposed to be their legally registered business name, the one that they probably have signage for. Moderators simply don't enforce this, and with Map Maker basically gone, the community…
What I'm starting to see a lot which is frustrating is:
{name of completely not local chain} - {neighborhood or city name}
Such as "Local Town Plumbing" with a national telephone number to some plumber referral service and will be located where there is an empty field or other non-business.
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:…
Have you tried Waze? I find that better at detecting jams and routing around them.
Last thing I need when I’m trying to navigate unfamiliar urban areas while operating a heavy piece of machinery at high speed is more distractions and more things to process.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
There was some articles on here about how maps have been changing over the years (also other map apps). The gist is that why would you need to show street names anymore? On printed maps that's the only thing you have, but that's not how most people navigate anymore. They search for a place or POIs and then use navigation. So the things most people care about have changed, streets are less important now and things lik…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Brave + PiHole + uBlock Origin = no video ad, no top banner ad Firefox + PiHole + no extensions = dumbass video, blank top banner ad (all the space is taken up but no content)
Just to be fair, uBlock on Firefox removes it as well. Just to note, that Brave is adding nothing here.
The choice of browser just represents what I had available to test with where different results were shown.
This, beyond anything else, is the main reason I use Apple Maps: if I'm not actively in a navigation mode, then 99.9% of the time I'm looking for cross-streets.
Apple Maps is also not perfect about this (you still need to pinch-and-zoom sometimes to get it to show the street), but it behaves far more consistently than Google Maps in this regard.
The only reason I have Google Maps still installed is because they have all of my pins; once I stop being lazy and figure out how to export those, I'll be only too glad to delete it permanently.
Every time I use Google Maps, I feel so helpless, and frankly, stupid. On Desktop, I simply can't figure it out how to switch to A-B route mode, nor how to trigger street view. I literally just click randomly in a more and more frustrated way until suddenly the option appears. And on Android I just avoid the app. I hate that I couldn't turn off the automatic compass. Every time I finally manage to orient myself when…
Well, it’s not built for you. Cows may not like milking machines either, but the farmer doesn’t care. Google Maps exists to further Google’s surveillance platform and search monopoly. User preference is incidental. It’s just like Internet Explorer on Windows 20 years ago. Microsoft only needed to make a good product long enough to leverage it into their other monopoly products, then they no longer gave a shit. We can…
Ok, off topic, but having grown up around cows, they will line up each day waiting for their chance to get on the milking machine. They very much do like them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
so an interface could be made to present it better: without being zoomed in so much, with filters and so on.
I know of https://www.toiletmap.org.uk/ which does this for public toilets.
I just found this which has an example for restaurants in one town: http://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/where-to-eat-in-middlebu...