Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

Let me be contrarian here. I really like Google Map's redesign.

I have an iPhone 4, still running iOS 6. The Google Maps app has one of the best user experience I have on my phone, hands down. Turn-by-turn navigation works flawlessly. Traffic information is almost real-time, no doubt thanks to their acquisition of Waze. The app gets the little things right as well - like displaying alternate routes, along with a time estimation, directly on the map itself during navigation.

As for the desktop website, I really have no idea what you're talking about. Maps still feels pretty smooth - and I use a MacBook Air. I like the fact that they removed a lot of cruft so that you can see more of the, well, map.

Well, this is embarrassing. Thanks for the follow-up.

Keyhole created KML for use in their earth viewer. Later, Google bought them and branded the software as Google Earth.

Supporting KML in the web maps was just a neat thing Google also did.

No, of course not. What kind of a comment is that anyway? You appear to be doing exactly the same kind of conflating of the UI and the backend that I was complaining about. There's a bunch of people whose job is to improve the search quality. They're largely not going to be the same people who'll work on the UI, so it's not some kind of either-or choice.

But it's a very difficult problem where it's rare that a change is uniformly beneficial, that's insanely dependent on frequently changing input data, and that users are very unforgiving about. My theory on the last point is that a map search is much more concrete than a web search. People have an intuition both about what the right answer should be, as well as an expectation that there is a right answer in the first place. But of course that's not the case, and the results are never going to be optimal. (I.e. your "sub optimal searching" bit is a bit of a truism).

I used to work on the Google maps geocoding team a long time ago. At that time amazing amounts of CPU and engineer time would be spent on verifying the quality of all algorithm and data changes, both during development and during launch. Changes that were unevaluated or were a net negative on quality would only be launched under very exceptional circumstances. Now, the evaluation would of course not be a fully deterministic process, it'd always need to be based on some kind of sampling. But on average that should still mean quality ratcheting up slowly. Maybe things have changed since then and stuff is just randomly launched with no regard to quality, but I have no particular reason to believe so. To me it seems much more likely that the anecdotes from the article don't represent any kind of trend.

> Secondly, the desktop (and basically the tablet experience too is the same) has gotten terrible. It takes a really long time before my mouse event matters. By this time, the screen, since it's still resolving and moving things around the canvas or whatever the hell it's doing, well by the time my mouse event registers, the object I wanted has moved away. I'm now doing something else!

Even though it does more, I've noticed maps is faster on desktop for me than it used to be, and I'm not using particularly high-powered machines. But the older one has a fairly decent (if by no means current) ATI graphics card and the one with integrated Intel graphics is a fairly new laptop, so if GPU rendering is involved (WebGL or otherwise) even relative old-new performance could be very system dependent.

> Directions. Just so retarded. The accordion shit on the left. Just show me the effing directions, like you used to.

It is one more click to do that, OTOH the reason is that it provides several alternate routes (with on-map preview), to start with, plus makes the route options + multiple destination routing UIs available. Personally, I find the new UI much more useful than the old one.

> Also, just simple double-clicking to zoom. Extremely less useful than it used to be: just this one simple thing.

Is your complaint that you don't have drag to zoom any more? That's true, but then, if you are a keyboard user (which your complaint about tabbing around the directions UI suggests), you can use +/- to zoom, in addition to double-clicking.