Google Maps Has Forsaken Us • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#91

Post by Serow225 » Sat, May 10, 2014, 3:29 PM UTC

masterleep wrote: post #63

joel_perl_prog wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I hear ya. Whoever guided this Titanic into the iceberg...well he ain't no Steve Jobs. That's for sure. It's hard to overstate how just plain awful Google Maps is now. It's amazing, in a way. I literally cannot understand how so many smart people can, all together, fail to observe the obvious. Manifestly obviously just shit awful. To observe this one only needs a few seconds with Google Maps. A few minutes cemen…

Pegman sealed the deal.

At least they listened to the outcry and brought them back!

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#92

Post by dalek2point3 » Sat, May 10, 2014, 3:30 PM UTC

greggman wrote: post #18

100 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…

This is beautiful if you want to print maps: http://www.maposmatic.org/

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#93

Post by roryhughes » Sat, May 10, 2014, 3:31 PM UTC

ktran03 wrote: post #88

Among the points already mentioned, I really hate the 'shake to report issue' feature. Stuck in traffic and frustrated, that thing comes up every time I hit a pothole. The thought that comes to mind everytime is "No Google, I don't want to report a problem, AT THIS MOMENT". Overall bad choice of control. Much more sensical to stick that in somewhere fitting, like settings.

They could just put it in settings too and when you shake to show it there would be a button saying 'Don't show again on shake'.

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#94

Post by jameshart » Sat, May 10, 2014, 3:32 PM UTC

Something is, indeed, terribly terribly wrong in Google Maps algorithm land. For at least the last couple of weeks, Google Maps has been insisting that Basingstoke in England is called "Town Centre", and is one of the most important places in England. On a view of the entire country, it's displaying a label in the same font-size it uses for Southampton, Bristol and Liverpool marking Basingstoke as "Town Centre". Manchester and Birmingham aren't labelled at all. If this is the quality of mapping Google is providing for a major first-world English-speaking market - you should be grateful it even knows Nigeria exists.

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#95

Post by wyck » Sat, May 10, 2014, 3:32 PM UTC

The old google maps allows you to paste KML file URL's into the search, now it doesn't work, you have to revert to the old version.

ps. KML files were developed by Google for maps...

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#96

Post by personZ » Sat, May 10, 2014, 3:33 PM UTC

Trivia, but Gleghorn-South Kilgore is in Arkansas (AR) rather than Arizona (AZ). It is an interesting case and I wonder how Google decided that location was important to him.

Contextual search is really tough, and the same choices that might give great answers for most answers can yield infuriating answers for other questions. In this case he is searching for something that doesn't exist, and a forest that probably gets searched a dozen times in aggregate a day on Google Maps, likely contrived for effect. That doesn't excuse those cases, but it isn't correlated with the cases where people got surprisingly cogent answers to their questions.

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#97

Post by kevrone » Sat, May 10, 2014, 3:34 PM UTC

joel_perl_prog wrote: post #33

Pacabel wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're saying is absolutely correct. I actually had to use Bing Maps today to look up some directions because the new version of Google Maps was pretty much unusable. As for why UX disasters like this can happen, I think it generally comes down to one thing these days: "hipsters". Those of us who've been in industry for a long time have no doubt seen this happen before. A relatively well-established product has…

Yeah I hear ya. Whoever guided this Titanic into the iceberg...well he ain't no Steve Jobs. That's for sure. It's hard to overstate how just plain awful Google Maps is now. It's amazing, in a way. I literally cannot understand how so many smart people can, all together, fail to observe the obvious. Manifestly obviously just shit awful. To observe this one only needs a few seconds with Google Maps. A few minutes cemen…

I've been bitching and moaning about the new g-maps for so long! And this thread makes me feel...vindicated? I guess? Too bad I'm still stuck with it.

The funny thing is that it's possible the UI could have been screwed while keeping the search stable, but as the article points out, the search is killing me. It's Apple Maps-ish in a way. I mean, if I'm zoomed in to a particular level and I do a search, there's a good bet that I'm only interested in results within those bounds, right? I'm not crazy to want that am I?

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#98

Post by chapel » Sat, May 10, 2014, 3:41 PM UTC

This blog post is way off. The issue isn't that Google Maps couldn't find Sambisa Forest, it is that it has an issue with how it handles auto complete and pressing enter without selecting the choices it brings up. It quite frankly looks like a bug. You can see for yourself here: http://i.imgur.com/vX1xqp2.gif

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#99

Post by beams_of_light » Sat, May 10, 2014, 3:41 PM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #75

jsnell wrote: post #55

This 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…

So they had a project with usable interface and sub optimal searching, and they decided to "fix" the UI but not the searching?

The search function was far better prior to the new Google Maps, IMNSHO.

Also, I have an IP based out of Dallas, TX, and for some reason, Google Maps insists that I live in San Francisco. I have even set my default location (in Chrome, no less) and I still get San Francisco by default, forcing me to put a location in.

What the author said about locations is true. I used to be able to search for something unique to my area even if the map wasn't centered over my home town and it would find it, but now, it fails because I'm in San Francisco.

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#100

Post by ignostic » Sat, May 10, 2014, 3:44 PM UTC

I can't say that I've had problems figuring the UI out, but I have had problems with the algorithm lately. If I had to guess I'd say it's Google often failing to factor in the location at some points, because I can rarely repeat the errors.

For example, I searched Maps for a Mexican restaurant with my phone recently. It directed me to a place in Florida (hundreds of miles away). Seriously, when there's a highly-rated place on Google Maps with the same name not 3 miles from where you've located me? When I returned home and searched, I had no such problems - it pointed straight at the place. I've had the reverse happen as well.

Is it the fact that I'm blocking so many cookies that Google is relying on? Or is there just a signal somewhere that tells Maps to override reason and relevance?

I have tried alternatives, but the top contenders - like Bing and OpenMaps - have their own very special set of problems.. I'm not sure what to use at this point.