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Google Maps has become an eyesore

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Re: Google Maps has become an eyesore

#671

Post by UncleMeat »

dietr1ch wrote: post #89
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…

If google can't make money with maps, why isn't Maps taken out of google into a charity/non-profit backed thing. There's OpenStreetMap, and Wikipedia wouldn't mind having a Map I guess. That way it'd help a bit with the monopoly heat and maintaining it could be slightly cheaper. I don't know the legal stuff, but I'd rather have a company supporting a non-profit than burning money internally, so I hope the incentives…

Even if people wanted to do this for some reason, it is practically extremely difficult to extract a codebase from google3.

Re: Google Maps has become an eyesore

#675

Post by lolinder »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #659
lolinder wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't an ad, it's a really bad promotion for first-party content. I still see it with uBO on Firefox. Maybe Brave has extra visual filters that block this specific div?

> promotion for first-party content The pedant in me says: that's an ad. It's just one of the rare ones not delivered by a gigantic network, so it's far less likely to be a scam or malware. Still an ad though.

Fair, but it's a category of ad that uBO has a very hard time with.

Re: Google Maps has become an eyesore

#676

Post by commonlisp94 »

WorldMaker wrote: post #605
commonlisp94 wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike a physical map, we can't go back and access old google maps, so those changing preferences in style leave a memory hole.

On the flipside digital maps can progressively show layers on user demand. You can pull up the OSM map with all the street names. If you've got a bit of patience to learn tools like QGIS (or ArcGIS) you have more power than ever to build personal maps that work best for how you personally navigate spaces beyond the lowest-common denominator that used to be print maps. It's maybe a bit of a shame that the raw tools (l…

I don't think the issue is digital maps, just that the data is not accessible or preserved.

Re: Google Maps has become an eyesore

#677

Post by Ycdr4thfdd »

Symbiote wrote: post #480
rattray wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

OpenStreetMap has at least some of the data: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/40.67540/-73.95641 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...

I love OSM and use it all the time for hiking, but even though their restaurant and hotel listings have good coverage, they're sadly not much use to me without the reviews.

Short of scraping reviews from Google and importing them into OSM for the area in which I'm traveling, I'm not sure there is a good short-term solution.

Re: Google Maps has become an eyesore

#678

Post by minusf »

nielsbot wrote: post #662
baz00 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's even worse for us cyclists. Regularly tries to kill me in the routes it picks.

(Apple guy here) Apple Maps also has cycling directions now, including an option to avoid busy roads. Maybe that will work?

apple maps doesnt have cycling maps for _amsterdam_. none of the eu countries do where i have been

Re: Google Maps has become an eyesore

#679

Post by bhandziuk »

TheRealSteel wrote: post #420
h1fra wrote: post #264

I understand the ads and everything else, I don't not enjoy it but I understand. What I really don't get is the product is hiding a lot of stuff for no reason. Whenever I zoom in my neighbourhood: it doesn't display all the streets, some shops are missing even at maximum zoom, search is removing some results that should match my query, etc... I have slowly lost trust in the products (except for navigation), it's stil…

I'm always so annoyed at Google Maps for not displaying street names. Sometimes it doesn't matter how much you zoom or pan, it just won't show it. I know it knows them because it announces them just fine during navigation. Why? What's the point? It's a map. Street names are pretty much the #1 most important thing.

This complaint is interesting to me because in the last few years I've noticed street names have become more and more abundant. For example, I am looking at the 100ft zoom level (what my scale shows in the bottom right) and this street which is 2000 ft long is labeled 9 times. For major rivers there's always a label on screen. This didn't used to be the case for me. I used to have to really work to find labels but now it's very good.

Re: Google Maps has become an eyesore

#680

Post by gabrielhidasy »

behringer wrote: post #504
wredue wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I use glasswire firewall and I just checked nvidia's activity and it doesn't even amount to a megabyte (uploaded) in the last week. I'm thinking this is tinfoil hat stuff.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is 970KB uncompressed, 228KB with bzip2. You may be able to compress the whole thing in 1MB with some effort.
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