It's completely stopped working for me on Chrome / Linux (Rats! WebGL hit a snag error) I've tried a few times to fix this but ultimately I've transitioned to always using my phone for maps.
Google Maps Has Forsaken Us
51–60 of 232 posts
Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us
#52Is this where we get to complain about how horrible Google Maps suddenly is? Because wow. I can speak about this. It's terrible. First and foremost, and they have their "reasons" of course, but my Samsung Rant (yeah just a feature phone) always had great maps. Just a simple Java app, built on the maps API. Well that doesn't work anymore. Like, nothing. Google basically says "Get an Android phone, sucker." F U Google.…
They fixed something that wasn't broken. Classic screw-up.
I don't mind new things, but the way they went about changing maps was an overhaul instead of incremental.
I even gave feedback during the trial period as they asked. Never heard anything on it.
Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us
#53The Google Maps product really is lacking outside of the United States.
I was down in Chile's Lake District last week, and Google totally failed me, both in Pucón and Panguipulli. These are not particularly tiny towns - in fact, Pucón is a major tourist destination. But Google was completely lacking in street information for both places. I ended up having to use Bing.
Google wasn't even second - both Nokia's HERE Maps (which powers Yahoo) and Apple's map product were better (although Apple was still pretty atrocious).
Here's a couple of links for comparison - Pucón in Google Maps (http://goo.gl/maps/rm1D9) vs Pucón in Bing Maps (http://binged.it/1gR5K55). If Bing Maps had a dedicated iOS application, I'd just switch permanently.
Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us
#54100 times YES! I've gotten this behavior for years and it drives me nuts because I can't understand how it's not fixed? I remember in 2009 I was driving down from SF to LA. I stopped in Santa Barbara. I needed my bearings and I didn't not know the address or the name of the street I was on but I did see an Albertson's supermarket about 200 feet away so I searched for Albertsons and Google gives me some place in Texas…
A lot of Google changes end up making me feel really dumb.
I have no idea how to create a link to what I'm looking at in Google Maps (app on iPhone). I don't know how many inscrutable buttons I am expected to click to discover this.
There's a bunch of stuff with email that I needed to do a websearch to get instructions.
Very very frustrating.
Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us
#55This is a bad article. It tries to draw some kind of causality link between the new maps UI and a couple of bad search results that the author received. (And then tries to blame it on some completely random academic paper written by Googlers, which as far as I can tell doesn't even have a hint of being from a geo-context, and doesn't look particularly applicable to geocoding or local searches). Of course blaming the new UI is a real crowd-pleaser, as can be seen in the HN comments, which must be good for getting some page hits on a Saturday afternoon.
The reality is that Google Maps has always had a (frequently changing) set of searches producing bad results. Some of those failures would have been much more visible, widely publicized, and serious than a blogger not finding the closest burger joint. This article presents the past as searches always just working, which just wasn't true. As such there's no compelling evidence there of the search result quality having actually degraded over time.
Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us
#56What's happening with Google Maps is reminiscent of IE6: a beautiful product appears, light-years ahead of the competition, and free. The competition in question, being light-years behind, and non-free, promptly dies. Then the beautiful product gets frozen in place, and its team "locked up in a dark dungeon" (Spolsky, 2004), which creates a huge opportunity for (open) alternatives. OpenStreetMap + Leaflet is to Googl…
In what year would you say Google Maps became frozen in time?
Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us
#57You can still switch back to Classic Maps via the question-mark icon in the bottom right. Classic for life.
I am having trouble locating it. Am I looking in the right place?
Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us
#58100 times YES! I've gotten this behavior for years and it drives me nuts because I can't understand how it's not fixed? I remember in 2009 I was driving down from SF to LA. I stopped in Santa Barbara. I needed my bearings and I didn't not know the address or the name of the street I was on but I did see an Albertson's supermarket about 200 feet away so I searched for Albertsons and Google gives me some place in Texas…
Yeah, the first thing I did was try to print (cause I needed to). Maybe printing is unhipster.
Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us
#59I was trying to find out how much it costs to use Google Maps in a business product (SaaS) I literally could not find a price without the "give us your details and our sales team will be in touch" which to me translates as "We need to work out exactly where to stick the hose to suck out the money".
Compare that with this https://www.mapbox.com/plans/.
I know who will be getting my money in the near future.
Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us
#60This is basically endemic in any Google search related functionality. Be it Maps, Images, regular web search or internal search in Google Apps, more and more I don't get what I asked for but what Google thinks I want, filtered for assumed typos, regions and languages until the result has very little relation to what I'm looking for.
This becomes especially galling when I know the info is there and my keywords are correct and specific, and the search returns absolutely nothing even remotely related.