One of my biggest irks with Google Maps is how aggressively it shows pins for hotels, bars and restaurants, even on their search results map. Do users really feel the need for this constant in-your-face advertisement?
But as I type this, I realized Google is primarily an ad business and whatever will drive that revenue will get pushed further. Oh well.
Yes, there are many possible conflicts of interest in mapping. This is why I'm excited to see the improving usability of Open Street Maps through apps like Organic Maps, and big commercial investments in open mapping data from the Overture Maps Foundation.
In many cases OSM has much more detail than google maps, with business listings and addresses being the biggest exceptions I have encountered. Fortunately, business listings are one of the main things added to the first data release from Overture Maps. For the curious, you can interact with the POI data [here.](https://bdon.github.io/overture-tiles/places.html)
If you really just want a map, go use OSM. I love it as well and even contributed. But Google Maps is much more than OSM. The biggest difference and most important feature is its real-time traffic. OSM is just a totally different product seen through the car navigation lens.
For me the killer Google Maps feature is using it as a search engine. The POI data on OSM has low coverage, is often out-of-date, and lacks reviews, so while it's quite good for (non-car) navigation, it's not very useful at all for finding places meeting certain criteria.
What irks me more is that I'll see pins for hotels, restaurants, etc.. but a search won't surface/highlight the pins I'm looking directly at!
Also attempting to search for a property that happens to have "hotel" or "apartment" in their name automatically switches to the stupid hotel finder interface, which only shows hotels that are bookable from online.
Google telephones most businesses in the world multiple times per year to confirm opening hours and ask what their hours will be at Christmas/other holidays.
Let that sink in. They have an actual human put actual minutes into speaking with every single business in their database. Think how much that alone must cost.
And they put all that money in simply so users can be a little more certain that the opening hours shown are correct.
> They have an actual human put actual minutes into speaking with every single business in their database. Think how much that alone must cost.
They may have done this in years past. I have worked in fast food for the last decades and I get Google's calls. They are all automated and the robot on the other end never understands me because the hours of the places I manage aren't simple enough to explain to Google's AI.
Of course OSM can't be updated with up-to-the-minute opening hours at all.
But nothing on OSM is "up-to-the-minute". Many OSM data consumers are months behind OSM discourages putting anything temporary on the map. While I do add OSM business hours including public holidays a lot, this isn't always possible when businesses don't have pre-planned holiday schedules.
The spec is very detailed and allows a lot of granularity. Unfortunately, real businesses often don't have set holiday schedules but rather play it by ear each year. OSM has no way to add "this business will be closed on these holidays this year, next year might be different". When lots of businesses introduced modified hours during the Covid lockdowns, there was no concept of temporary opening hours so a "opening_hours:covid19" was introduced. Older data consumers simply ignored that tag. More generally OSM is only for data that is (mostly) permanent. Adding "this business will be closed for Christmas this year" is not OSM data. "This business is closed on Christmas" can be added on OSM. But many businesses don't plan that far ahead as to have set announced holiday hours that can be written in the OSM opening_hours syntax.
I own a business in Denmark, I never received a call as described. I received lots of email reminders though, because this is something you can update yourself.
Snarky, but I expect that to be a kind-of circle with a small radius, around their offices and the favorite places their employees in SF visit.
Never heard of this happening, and not something I'd expect google to do. I'd expect them to send emails at most, with a link to some page that is broken for anyone not using Chrome, then no support available.
Maybe my business is a corner case which avoids the automation - I am open usually 9-5ish, but can be open anytime if a customer rings the well and waits for someone to get out of bed.
Google has an actual human call every 2-3 months, who usually just asks the opening hours, confirms one other detail (usually the website) and then says goodbye.
These calls should be automated in most cases [1]. Still an impressive feat, but there is no way they are paying a large number of people to phone through all businesses in the world.
I'm pretty sure only the square pins are ads. So the deluge of hotel pins showing in the map near my house isn't even making them money, it's just an out of control algorithm or terrible product choice.
Many people use hotels, bars, and restaurants as landmarks.
If you know an area, it’s easier to remember something is near so and so resturaunt than to remember street names (if in fact your streets actually have names).
Restaurants, to each their own. A dozen hotels marked within a five mile radius of my home, which Google knows very well about, at all times? That’s just stupid.
You can exclude targeting people on Google Maps ads when they're near their home. If the hotels want to pay for more impressions and not target their ads appropriately, Google is happy to take their money.
This is really more the hotel marketing team's fault than Google's.
Interesting. I have an inherent distrust with reviews and descriptions on Google Maps, at least for where I live (India). I usually resort to other services to look for good restaurant/hotel recommendations.
I just want Google Maps to slide the location of the street labels so they always stay visible. Zooming into an area and having a street label simply vanish is an absurd behavior for software in the 21st century.
I don't know how to say this without it coming off as typical internet hyperbole. I mean it quite literally that this makes the thing unusable (as a map) for me. it is a major contributor to why I use Apple Maps for actual maps now.
unfortunately, I still have to use Google Maps to find POI. I suspect this is all they want me to use it for, anyways, since that's all that gives them money.
I've never used Apple maps (since it's not available for the web/android/pc), but Google maps has much better public transit directions than any other map software, and that's what keeps me on it despite the terrible labeling of streets.
Google Maps has changed styles quite a few times, and it usually won't take long to get used to the new one.
One particular change before I remembered was when they reduced the contrast (and amount of details) when zoomed out, which I hated at the time, but now can't go back. It makes finding neighborhoods and such much easier. It looks like the author found the opposite, I guess it's just something very subjective.
(The author provided a comparison between various previous versions at the end (sans the newest), and I genuinely can't say the older ones were better, even the "before 2018" ones.)
But I do agree this newest one is bad, mainly due to the color choice of the roads. I really like GMap's white/yellow roads.
What about actually improving directions, not sending us through barely usable roads in Mediterranean islands, if we can consider them roads at all.
Or shortcuts that might be interesting in a computer game, how the RTS units select their path, but hardly so when driving through a medieval village, instead of the somehow longer circular road that everyone should use.
We have been in Italy in the mountains near Lake Garda, and the hosts where we were staying specifically instructed us not to use Google Maps as it will lead us to sketchy shortcuts which is barely managable to pass trough, while the "official" route to their village is paved, easy to follow, and thus, much faster to pass than Google's route.
I left on Google Maps out of curiosity and indeed, it started to show directions which lead to poor dirty roads where my car would barely fit trough.
One would think that Google has some data about much less cars passing through that road than the paved one and drive some conclusion out of it, as I hardly think anyone would use those roads apart from a few locals who are living there. Especially in an area which is filled with tourists.
Also, Google Maps also often suggests much less efficients routes in my local area where I definitely know that there's a route which not shorter, but still much faster.
+1 (or 100 if I could). Besides all their satellite imagery, Google also knows the average speed on any road while you're navigating, so it can tell if a road is unpaved (or worse, for farm equipment rather than cars). However if it's faster (or equivalent but shorter) it will always recommend an unpaved road over a paved one.
It's crazy, really. I once got routed into a tractor path that was literally a dry creek bed for >2 kms (covered with large, pointy rocks and all). But yeah, it was quicker by 5' than the paved road so it was the top route. Longest 20' of my driving life.
I would seriously pay extra for an option of "ignore unpaved roads" or even better "don't suggest slower roads if the route is shorter than X%"
In this context (driving in central Europe) I've found Apple Maps to choose the conventional route more often. The trip may be slightly longer but more enjoyable, for the exact reasons you mentioned. Google Maps indeed seems to be weighted towards stressful shortcuts.
More enjoyable? Conventional routes are rarely what I'd call enjoyable. Convenient, perhaps.
A month ago I was driving hundreds of kilometers across Poland, and Google sent me from a freeway through a comfy road to a literal dirt road with holes, which after ten kilometers led us back to a large asphalt road. That was fun!
> The new New York map above looks comically bad, almost like student-level work.
I found the new NY map refreshing because of its higher contrast between the streets and city blocks. Feels like it's easier to get a handle on what's on the screen. Granted, whenever a product gives me the opportunity to opt for increased contrast, I usually go for it.
That's super interesting, because to me the new one literally looks like a captcha! It would be completely unusable with careful perusal, let alone glancing down while navigating. The words all have lines of nearly the exact same color overlayed so I can't read them without squinting and going letter by letter.
I found out several years ago that I have some form of color blindness - amusingly enough during a design review for a map we were designing. I had the exact same problem, with everything bleeding together in an indistinguishable mass, and everyone looking at me like I had 3 heads when I asked how we could possibly ship something so unusable with no contrast.
I suspect there is something similar going on here. To me, the foreground text and background roads are nearly identical in hue and saturation. Is it high contrast to other people? The map I struggled with years ago was using two colors with similar saturation but different hues (a purple and a green/yellow), so I had to push to make sure that "high contrast" meant a difference in both hue AND saturation.
Shipping a couple map-related products has given me a real appreciation for how differently users can experience visual layouts. For one thing, technical people generally like maps a LOT more than the general population does, to the point that we take it for granted that it's the ideal way of presenting anything with a position component.
Quite a lot of people get overwhelmed by maps - they basically shut down and can't figure out the UI at all. Looking at the new version gave me that panicked feeling that I hear those users talk about.
when I hear "captcha" I think of mostly black text on white background. The text is made hard to read by distorting the font, and possibly drawing a line through it.
So I find your analogy of "literally looks like a captcha" to be confusing.
To me that's what it looks like (minus the text distortion). The color of the roads is nearly identical to the color of the text, so it's text with a bunch of random lines going through it so that I can't easily read it. From other people's reactions, I suspect color blindness at play here.
Are the roads and text very different colors to you, so that you can easily read the text?
Yeah, I don’t know what the author is talking about. I loved his comparisons over the years, but Google Maps (and others, really) are atrocious to use because of extremely low contrast; the blue version is much better (even if potentially “uglier”)
For a product meant to be used outdoors, Maps does an awful job at being readable.
Interesting, do you mean contrast between non-roads and roads, or between map and text? I think (bear in mind I have some color blindness) that it's gone from a low-contrast road grid with high contrast text to a high-contrast road grid with low-contrast text.
It would be easier to trace the shape of the roads, but that's not how I personally use a map. I'm much more focused on the name of a neighborhood or the name of a road, and its relative position.
I regularly use the map to plan events and the inability to see roads clearly makes it difficult. Sometimes small paths won’t show up until you zoom in all the way and even then they’re kind of lost in the bad contrast.
Maps nowadays look beautiful compared to the old style paper maps, but are comparatively unusable.
I stopped using google map to navigate while driving due to the low contrast issue. I used to be able to scan the map and figure out which fork I should take. with the current google map, I have to stare at it for a fraction of a second to be sure. Now I use Apple map and works much better for me.
Seems like the road text still needs some fixing/adjustments, assuming they keep that light-gray blueish road color.
The apple map road color is a lot darker, creating more context. For the google map road color, they'd almost need to use something like a yellow text perhaps.
I find the new map far more cluttered than the old. You don’t want to see a dark grey line for every alleyway and minor path at the high level view. It just looks like a grey mess.
The lack of contrasting colours between the main and minor streets (particularly interstates) is a massive step backwards and makes it far hard to plan your route at a glance.
Personally, I don't need to see every single street and avenue in high contrast, I'm more interested in the general layout and things around that area. I agree with the author, the NYC map is almost unparseable at a glance.
As the person you’re replying to is talking about design, I think they and you and me agree. Apple Maps looks nicer and “cleaner”. Also on iOS and macOS, the performance of Google Maps is so janky that for navigation Apple Maps is also superior.
For navigation, if you’re in a region where Apple has their “new maps” which have maximum speed, traffic lights, 3D buildings etc. then navigation is on par with Google with some nice extras thrown in because Apple owns the platform (like: navigation on the Lock Screen, custom notification styles etc.) Except bike navigation which Apple still does not offer in the bike capital of the world, The Netherlands.
As for location data…yeah Apple is indeed bad. Both in number of places it knows, in accuracy of their data like opening hours and especially in reviews which is regurgitated from terrible sites like Yelp or TripAdvisor.
I am of the opinion that Apple Maps are pretty bad outside of Cali.
The locations are not exactly accurate for the remote locations of the United States. They seems to be exceptionally interested in improving lives of Californians who use iPhone.
I have to say that in Italy (and Europe) in general they are not that bad. Still way behind google maps. Like anything else unfortunately.
Anyway my point stands: if something doesn't have a clear business model, I'm not happy using it. If the business model is ads I'm very unhappy using it.
I don't understand what commitment there is. If you go somewhere and have an iPhone with you, you can route with Apple Maps. There's no commitment to use it later when you look up a place on your PC.
I agree 100%. I use Apple Maps for navigation but Google Maps is so much better for discovery of places. It's the only reason I keep it installed, tbh. My "places to go" is contained within Google Maps, just because they have so much more data.
It's wild to me that Apple hasn't spun off their own reviews system yet. Relying on Yelp in 2023 seems foolish.
Apple also has a bunch of small hiking and biking trails that Google doesn't. They must've bought some GPS data from Strava or something because you can't see them from space and there's no way they could have paid someone to map them that thoroughly.
Open POI on top of OSM? Would have to figure out how to accept and lifecycle reviews, but could probably be done. Perhaps reaching critical mass is the hard part.
Disagree with that, I keep trying it sometimes and it's still inferior in too many ways. It feels like they don't use their own product, which wouldn't come as a surprise.
The changes to foliage and general terrain I like.
The updates to roads and streets? Not so much. There is way too much emphasis on streets, distracting you from seeing the labeled places. The streets and highways shouldn't be a city's prominent showcase, the landmarks should.
That second-to-last image of Chicago streets around The Art Institute of Chicago show the lack of contrast between the green of a street and the green of the park - it all just blends in. It was better before, but just barely.
I think the point is (despite the title) less that they're aping Apple's style, and more that the author believes the new style is generally worse than the old style.
On that point I personally agree, though it seems there's at least a few other people in the comments here who prefer the new style.
Thanks for the tip. The map style is very dense but IMHO the best for urban areas.
Some names are only rendered in Czech, and hill shading seems to be available only with an active internet connection. I still prefer the shading of "Bergfex Touren" for mountain sports.
Absolutely. I’m actually Czech, so they’re my no. 1 choice anyway, but I’m currently on vacation in Italy and the maps are still great and very useful.
Has anyone else noticed that Google maps has lately become a lot worse on Firefox compared to Chrome? Zooming is less smooth, even with the whole map flashing in between levels, and in satellite view the tiles seem to load a lot slower.
We haven't, and I hope you are not implying that one of the largest tech companies in the world would take advantage of their complete dominance of the internet to weaken their remaining competition.
In all seriousness, it's not a new issue, if you search for it, there are complaints about it going back years.
Now, I'm sure there is a "non-evil" explanation, such as "oh we just test more with Chrome so we optimized for that, but we will try to convince an intern to install Firefox", "Chrome is just better", "Firefox doesn't have x and y features, so it's slow, but it they implement it, it will be fast, too"...
... and there are the "evil" explanation, "let's make one of our most popular products slightly slower on a competing browser to nudge people into using our browser".
They should add an option "focus on roads" "focus on landscape". Although to be realistic focus on roads is probably way more common, and that appears to be the new design - the roads really stand out.
Maybe maps hasn’t grown with its users, or can’t be everything for everyone.
If the only metric is engagement it might not be across the features relevant in a single user journey vs head to head.
I needed a map the other day for a repeat need and built it in a few minutes in mapbox studio, only ever used mapbox via code in another life. Didn’t know what to think.
Oddly haven’t looked back for that use. It just embeds and shares and delights.
I never thought I would see the day when Google Maps would copy Apple Maps. Apple has absolutely nailed the map UI and even the UX (like richer details during navigation, requiring fewer touches to do things, etc.) is so good and well thought out. GMaps just looks so cluttered and bloated.
The only reason for me not to use Apple Maps (in the US) is that they are far behind GMaps in POI data.
Several years ago when I was testing the Apple Maps navigation UI, I started a random navigation trip at home, looked around and tested the UI out without actually driving anywhere. Looked fine until I pressed the power button. Then I found that the Apple Maps hijacked my lock screen to display its own UI. That's the point I noped out of Apple Maps. This is malware-level behavior. No app should be able to override my Lock Screen. Especially not a first-party app because third-party apps are so well sandboxed that they cannot do that. Where are the cries of antitrust?
Apple Maps is malware. Any app that could modify system level behavior such as the Lock Screen is malware. You probably don't agree, but still I will never use it.
I get what you’re trying to say and it makes sense if you think of your phone as a tiny computer. An app should not be able to escape out of its window and app-level capabilities and it should be clear if an app is running or not.
I don’t share the same view, because I consider my iPhone an appliance. If my goal is to get to a place, I’ll let the appliance do anything and everything to get me there, including changing the UI or jumping out of my hand and leading the way.
Apple Maps is hard to use in rural areas. It is just a pretty green page with the faintest lines. Labels are maddening to read. Google maps also needs label improvements, but generally has enough contrast to see the lines.
I love-hate this blog. It covers the long and slow enshittification of one of my most beloved websites. I vividly remember their previous post about the loss of labels on Google Maps, which rendered them useless for manual navigation.
Wow the streets and avenues are especially bad, they are borderline unparseable if you're looking for things around the area rather than the roads themselves, which is usually my use case.
The biggest advantage of apple maps is that they don't sell every move you make to 3rd party vendors or keep a long history of where you've been and sell that to vendors.
To be fair, I think Apple Maps has by far the best design and look (even if not yet the usability), and Google Maps seems to be catching up but not quite there yet.
But as I type this, I realized Google is primarily an ad business and whatever will drive that revenue will get pushed further. Oh well.