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What Happened to Google Maps? (justinobeirne.com)
Google Maps has reduced the number of cities it shows by up to 83% over the past few years, according to Justin O'Beirne. Maps, in addition, has increased the number of roads it showcases. O'Beirne, who writes about digital maps, in a blog post outlines the changes Google has made to its mapping and navigation service over the years. The side-by-side screenshots comparison on his blog post shows that Google has largely abandoned labelling towns and cities in favor of showing as many roads as it can. He has also looked into several elements of Maps from the design standpoint, and questioned Google's decision. He writes: If these roads were so important that they deserved to be upgraded in appearance, why weren't they also given shield icons? After all, an unlabeled road is only half as useful as a labeled one. [...] [Comparing Google Maps to a paper map] Even though it's from the early 1960s, the old print map has so much more information than the Google Map. So many more cities. So many more road labels. And the text size is comparable between the two. O'Beirne believes that Google has made these changes to better serve mobile users. "Unfortunately, these 'optimizations' only served to exacerbate the longstanding imbalances already in the maps," he writes. "As is often the case with cartography: less isn't more. Less is just less."
He may want to ask "What happened to HTML?" instead. Requiring JavaScript just to be able to display text and a few images is insta-fail.
news at 11 most people use it for navigation in their cars, so roads are more important
...I still have hipsters looking at me with disdain.
1) My paper has never experienced a fault while on the move.
2) My paper has more detail than your electronic maps.
3) My paper allows me to see more of the map at once.
Google Maps is intended as a dumbed down service. Expect it to be dumbed down.
Google maps has always been terrible compared to the old paper maps from the 1980s and earlier. It's like the Google Maps people threw every convention that road mapmakers used and decided they could do it better.
They still haven't done it better.
Everybody is adapting the web for the phones and removing important and useful features in the process. Whereas some sites in the past had a minimalist phone version we're getting stuck now with major sites eliminating critical features for everybody. I don't really know what to do about it, but I don't like it. I guess the only thing one really can do is look elsewhere. Unfortunately in many cases there are monopolies or features missing from other companies products / service in part due to these entities disproportionately smaller size.
It's UI design, and that's task-oriented.
Paper maps are highly versatile, general purpose tools. You can do all kinds of things with them, and generally speaking the more data they cram in (in a clever way of course) the better. They're like a swiss army knife; you want them to serve in any possible occasion.
Digital map displays are embedded in a user interface; they're a backdrop that provides the user with useful contextual information as he attempts to perform some specific task. The better you understand how the user performs that task, the more you can pare down irrelevant context that might detract from that task. Now there have been many times I wished the Google Maps UI was a little more versatile, but in general it does really well at the kinds of search and navigation tasks people mainly use it for, e.g. finding all the doughnut stores in Quincy, MA.
So basically you can't automatically apply criteria you'd use in a paper map to a digital display, although it's certainly helpful to under stand those criteria.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
What this does is highlight what Google is famous for- not giving any user choice. It runs throughout most of their products and platforms.
Instead of deciding for us how something must be to best meet the assumed majority, what would be nice would be to simply let us CHOOSE what options we want. What font size, if we want the scale meter to be shown, how much detail we want to see, etc.
I am sick of the "modern" "simple" design of everything that is supposedly so superior... because it isn't. Removing all controls and choices, hiding everything, getting rid of settings, etc. No thanks.
I continue to be amazed at how high the "bandwidth" of a traditional, printed, paper highway map--such as those still provided by AAA, and frequently by the states themselves--compared to anything you can get electronically. Scrolling a six-inch screen is no substitute for a square meter of paper surface printed in high resolution... and with judicious human preselection of points of interest.
For your typical 150-miles-to-a-specific-destination trips I continue to try to make do by printing out relevant Google maps, a small-scale one for the major highway routes to get there and a big one of the neighborhood. It never really works. The GPS and our car's NAV system will get you from point A to point B and show you in very good detail the local roads immediately surrounding your present position, but don't work very well for planning.
Nor are electronic maps very good for sketching, highlighting, or carrying with you. And paper maps don't need to be recharged.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
To this day Google maps does not allow you to rotate whatever you're looking at so it is aligned N-S. For example, if you look at Manhattan, NY, its gridlines are neatly arrayed. However, the island itself does not point N-S. It is slightly askew.
There is no way (that I am aware of) to rotate the map so the gridlines run E-W and N-S so when you print out a close up view everything lines up neatly on the page. Instead, the picture runs off diagonally.
Outside of rotating, when you drag the line for your trip to a different route it regularly ends up doubling back on itself. When you try to drag the offending part to match where you want to go, it may double back again.
Sure, if you fiddle with it enough you can eventually get it to have one continuous line but generally it's faster to clear the entire page and start over.
Google maps has gone downhill over the years. What used to be an easy way to map or view where you want to go has been reduced to the typical shiny so prevalent on the web. Forget ease of use, so long as it's shiny.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Google Maps seems to remove features with every successive release of Maps for Android.
You used to be able to measure distances on the mobile Maps app, but not any more.
You used to be able to plot a course or set waypoints on your desktop computer with its big screen where you could see a lot more, then pull up that route on your phone with the mobile app. Not any more.
I used to be able to publish a link to my location plotted on an embedded map on my personal web site so my friends could track me on road trips. They took that away claiming that idiots were forgetting about their public links and violating their own privacy. So to protect people from their own stupidity, ostensibly, they removed that feature.
I've forgotten all the features that they've removed just in the past couple of years.
In recent versions Maps INSISTS that you turn on wifi in order to get an accurate plot of your location even with GPS already enabled. This tells me that they continue to map wifi access points as you move around to add to their database. It has nothing to do with improving the accuarcy of your location, that's BS.
slashdot: A failed experiment.
Four point text on some street names.
So you zoom and and they shrink all the text back to its original four point font.
Google is supposed to have a lot of smart people.
Maybe they are all on a 5 year sabbatical.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I just came to say how awesome maps are. Not Google Maps, that is becoming more and more shit by day, but maps in general. Can you even imagine the old days when you couldn't get an accurate map anywhere? Imagine how hard that would've been?
I travel a fair bit, and my first stop is always to grab a free local tourist map, it makes such a huge difference once you have even a high level layout of the land.
Go maps!
The DUMBEST thing those idiots have done is remove the 50/50 split from the street view option. It's without a doubt, the most moronic @#$%ing thing they've done. It's incredibly frustrating.
Perhaps you guys are sick of me but I'm personally getting frankly, fucking sick of typing shit up like this time and time again about applications, phones, websites, because idiots feel compelled to change things, not for the sake of improvement, but for the sake of change.
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Google Maps is my resource of last resort when finding a route, or even a simple business location. For any given business or location, no matter how specific you are about its name or location, Google Maps will screw up their hours, phone number, address, or something else.
They really need a disclaimer for users of the service.
They also need to STOP appealing to users of the service to 'update' information for them. I don't work for you.