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Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

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121–130 of 232 posts

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#121

Post by Friedduck »

It's nice to hear that I'm not the only one that feels this way. Search for local businesses has become nearly impossible. Whether it's failing to return anything or results that are wholly irrelevant, search and particularly maps have taken a large step backward.

There's a great market opportunity here. (Really) old guard companies like YP still haven't responded to the shift and I infer from Google's backslide that it's not a priority for them.

We can't buy everything from Amazon (esp. Hachette books!)

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#122

Post by alok-g »

buro9 wrote: post #15

In the example given it's the word "forest" that is the problem. "Sambisa" would have found it. "Sambisa Reserve" would have found it. "Sambisa Forest Reserve" would have found it. But my guess is that something attempts to understand keywords and context and when you end with "forest" it looks within the set of forests that are called Sambisa, and actually there isn't a forest called Sambisa, there's a nature reserv…

This is exactly the problem I have. It does not search what I ask it to search, sometimes even after using Verbatim.

And if no results are found, Google, please tell me "no results found" rather than giving me junk to scan to figure why did Google return me all this when it does not even have the keywords I asked for. I do not like to type a + before every keyword.

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#123

Post by anon1385 »

jsnell wrote: post #107
DanBC wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

>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.

Maybe they should actually try using the product instead of relying on automated algorithms to generate metrics when they evaluate changes. For example, it's quite obvious that something is going wrong with the prioritisation of name place text for the UK at the moment: http://imgur.com/kL0GHfe (for the non-UK readers, no there is not a large important city called "Town Centre", Edinburgh is far larger than Kirkcaldy, Birmingham is the second largest city in the country and not labeled at all).

I'm quite curious about how much real human testing they actually do. I've always had the impression that testing by actual humans is the antithesis of Google culture (automate everything and reduce everything to comparable numerical metrics).

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#124

Post by rasz_pl »

runn1ng wrote: post #34
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…

I was with you until you started to hate on Chrome GUI. In my opinion, Chrome's GUI is the best thing that could happen to browsers.

Chrome GUI is great ... if you never used Opera.

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#125

Post by bluecalm »

joel_perl_prog wrote: post #6

Is 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.…

Google somehow manages to make UI's worse and worse as the time progresses. Gtalk was nice, was turned into unusable mess which is Hangouts. Youtube got worse with comments and annoying force feeding of real name policy. Maps got way worse after the recent upgrade for reasons you described. GMail as well made some anti-user changes (like for example being unable to log-in from different account if there is a cookie from previous login but also some choices in inbox itself). I wonder if there is some evil UI design department within Google because they are very consistent at messing up once good and user friendly services.

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#126

Post by enraged_camel »

cliveowen wrote: post #38
joel_perl_prog wrote: post #6

Is 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.…

Just yesterday I realized that they removed the estimate of fuel costs. Why? That doesn't make sense, it's one of the things you expect to see when you search for directions. It's backwards, but they managed to "update" a product and render it less useful.

Less is more, right? Right?!?

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#127

Post by michael_nielsen »

joel_perl_prog wrote: post #6

Is 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.…

I switched to Bing Maps a month or so ago. It's not as good as the old Google Maps -- there's less detailed information -- but at least the basic functionality works. Can't say that for the new Google Maps.

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#128

Post by jsnell »

anon1385 wrote: post #123
jsnell wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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. Maybe they should actually try using the product instead of relying on automated algorithms to generate metrics when they…

It's a good thing that I didn't say anything about "automated algorithms used to generate metrics", then... This was machine-aided human evaluation.

Search quality evaluation can't really be done without humans in the loop. If you had an algorithm that could distinguish between a good result and a bad result, you wouldn't use it to evaluate results. You'd use it to generate the results.

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#129

Post by mark_l_watson »

cliveowen wrote: post #47
mark_l_watson wrote: post #17

The author is complaining about product development siloing at Google. I know, because I consulted there, that they are working on better cross business integration for internal systems (this is a goal of all large organizations). That said, don't you want some degree of siloing between products? Certainly share infrastructure, share some data as appropriate, but it just seems to me that by having smaller independent…

Id' really like to have some opinions about Google Now that everyone seems to find awesome. Let's start with the fact that if I want to set a reminder and I don't have an internet connection I can't. Since when having an internet connection is a prerequisite for even basic tasks? Secondly, of all the suggestions it gave me over the months based on my search history none has been helpful. None. If you search for the s…

I was praising Google Now for its potential. I agree that some of the proffered help can be silly.

I find the most useful alerts come from the automated reading of my email; for example: plane schedules and also information on package delivery.

So, I really do believe that Google Now has a lot of potential, but I have concerns about privacy also.

Re: Google Maps Has Forsaken Us

#130

Post by ceras »

pgrote wrote: post #102
darren_ wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

really? clicking the map on desktop maps should do the same thing as right-click->whats-here. it does for me anyway.

What is your environment? I am on Windows 7 and Chrome 34.0.1847.131 m.

Not who you were replying to, but a simple left-click for "what's here?" works for me on a Chromebook running Chrome 33.0.1750.152
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