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Get Ready To Be Bombarded With Ads When Using Google Maps (news.com.au)
An anonymous reader writes: The chance to squeeze some extra advertising dollars is something rarely missed by Google. This week the company quietly announced changes to two of its most widely used services, offering businesses the chance to pay for featured advertisements in Google.com and Google Maps. In a blog post, Google senior ads vice president Sridhar Ramaswamy outlined the likely changes to Google Maps that will see users met with pop-up ads for local businesses when they use the GPS-based app. The announcement has been facetiously described online as "the Ad-pocalypse" but Google has shown more tact in their use of language, referring to the ads as "promoted pins".
I got an offer for an Uber coupon while using Google Maps on my phone the other day.
It was a text ad and wasn't very intrusive. Still, though, unsettling.
joes diner: great food, cursed cheese cake provides listeria as advertised.
mega dental: Excellent, fast service set to the pace of a live speed metal band. understandable you must work the sound board properly.
Wal Mart: Theme park for the well to do. Got to beat a real human being with a sack of potatoes. set fire to aisle 12 and dispatched my own fire department. Holiday shopping for boiled shrimp and car tires unfortunately interrupted by Aer Lingus flight 8901 coming in from heathrow.
Good people go to bed earlier.
It depends on how intrusive or useful this is. Featured ads when I am searching generally (for food for instance) that are appealing would be fine, and fit in with what you see on other search pages (amazon, yelp, other companies do this). If it shows up in a way that it makes my search longer however - less welcome. If I'm searching for an address and have to dismiss an ad to get to it, google maps on my phone will have for many situations become unusable. It already takes ages to load.
So what other apps are out there worth using? Android Central - Alternatives (Click "view all").
I am constantly surprised by how good it is. It has paths in there that Google has never heard of, ones up mountains that might not even be 1ft wide, new and old. It doesn't look quite as polished and smartphone-oriented as the Almighty GOOG's version but the maps themselves are more detailed and more accurate
I use the Google Maps on my iPhone for navigating when I'm driving someplace unfamiliar. Does this mean that I'll have to be dismissing ads in order to see continue to have a useable navigation tool? I'm also not wild about the idea of pop up ads drawing my attention away from the road. Time will tell.
You keep your data. You are not SPAMed. You help the community if you annotate or fix mistakes in the map if you find some.
I'd take the incorporated-ads if they'd undo the long span of terrible changes they've made to the service (particularly web, but also mobile) over the years. How is it that one of the most popular products of one of the world's largest corporations has such a mishmash / poorly thought-out interface, a low detail-level which can't be altered by the user, and terribly drawn graphics (their terrain in particular is an embarrassment)? If they'll fix the interface and our penalty as users is to suffer through ads... then bring on the ads.
Honestly, "promoted pins" could be done in a non-intrusive manner.
1) Only show things relative to the layers that the user has enabled. If they don't have restaurants on, don't insert pins for promoted restaurants.
2) Handle them via the culling algorithm. Map details must inherently be culled when zoomed out so that the screen isn't just a giant jumbled mess; as you zoom in and objects on the map move further apart, you have more room to insert more objects, so you cull less. When it comes to "promoted pins", a fair way to deal with them would be to give them a higher priority than unpromoted pins in the culling algorithm, so that they're more likely to show up when zoomed further out.
Friends! Help! A guinea pig tricked me!
Please, please, please, Google, allow me to pay you the revenues you generate from advertisers directly in the form of a subscription fee, and then DO NOT SERVE ME ADS, DO NOT TRACK ME, AND STOP BEING EVIL.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
I was using Google Maps a few days ago and came to the startling realization that the information was presented too clearly, the results were simply too useful, and my satisfaction with the product was simply too high. Thank goodness Google is listening to their customers and doing something to reverse this worrying trend!
The first time I see an ad obstructing the view of my map, or my GPS says "In 500 feet, turn left for Nissan's Memorial Day Sales Event at Bob's Auto" I'm done. Full stop. I have never been disappointed enough with Google Maps to seek out alternatives, but there's a map in the glove box that is a pretty low bar to beat regarding convenience. If Google can't keep above that bar, I'm sure someone else does.
I gave up on Google Maps years ago. I've been using OpenStreetMap for a long time, with better results.
Waze, now owned by Google, has already had popup ads and promoted pins for awhile.
While the ads are a bit annoying, they only show when you are stopped.
The pins really do not make much of a difference.
A few months ago Google must have made some change to their maps, because Firefox on all my boxen goes crazy and chews up oodles of CPU. Here, mapquest, and openstreetmap still work well.
Adblock on, sunglasses set to "Max", cynicism set to "11"....and I'm ready.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Been using Google Maps since the beginning... it's an awesome product that I've never paid a dime for (other than having Google scrape my geo-search related data). I don't mind seeing a few "sponsored pins" here and there.
Google has always done a good job with unintrusive ads... and I will give them the benefit of the doubt here.
How is it that one of the most popular products of one of the world's largest corporations has such a mishmash / poorly thought-out interface, a low detail-level which can't be altered by the user, and terribly drawn graphics (their terrain in particular is an embarrassment)? If they'll fix the interface and our penalty as users is to suffer through ads... then bring on the ads.
You're totally forgetting about the speed.
On my Galaxy S4, Google Maps still seems to be OK, but for the web version, it's ridiculously slow these days. I don't know WTF happened, but Google Maps used to be snappy on a decent computer, but now it's the slowest web page I use. Panning around, zooming, everything is horribly, horribly slow. It's almost unusable. I'm probably have to start looking more seriously at Bing Maps when I'm on a PC (and I'm a huge MS hater).
As for this "promoted pins" crap, it's all a bad idea. donowant. I don't care if I'm looking at restaurants; I don't want to see whatever shitty greasy spoons have paid to have themselves promoted. And I really don't want my screen filled with a bunch of stupid icons for shitty businesses I'm not interested in. If Google resorts to this crap, it's going to be time to look at competing mapping apps such as Bing.
It's pretty sad that I'm having to serious consider Microsoft products because Google is going down the drain so fast. There's a few other navigation apps out there too; I'll have to look at those.
Won't work. He'll propose stuff in the interview that's totally antithetical to their crappy new UX philosophy and won't get hired. They're only going to hire people who've drunk the same Kool-Aid as themselves.