> For whatever reason I can never see the street name I want to see anymore.

It's been this way for years, and it's my #1 gripe with Maps. It's particularly bad in a dense grid like NYC, where some streets only appear for a block or two. If Maps doesn't decide to print the name on that block...I guess I'm not allowed to know what street that is?

Yes, you're right, it's been aggravating me for years.

I vaguely recall reading about this on HN when it happened, and the consensus was that the logic for determining whether to print the street label had been changed for aesthetic reasons.

Peak form over function.

Anecdotally, I don't see any rhyme nor reason for whether it decides to show the street name or not. Oftentimes, it will value a side-street over the main street, and in _some_ cases this makes sense (e.g. you are on the larger street, and want to see intersecting streets), but Maps doesn't seem to read contextual clues... if I am not navigating, or zooming in from further away, showing larger streets first would be better.

I don’t think I’ve seen any mapping program show dense streets that well, from MapQuest to Microsoft Streets to maps.me to Google Maps.

I’ve worked on similar problems and it’s not the easiest to solve. And I’ve never solved it because it was never that important of problem to solve and we just moved on to the next issue.

I would say the other POI markers do serve one value, and that is with regards to finding a place... if you notice it's right behind the McDonalds, then you know you are close when you see the big M from the street. Similar for strip malls.

That's true, but it's not Google's intent. It's just another source of ad/promotional revenue. The POIs show up before I search anything. A more user focused solution would wait until I selected a destination, detect that where I'm going is a less frequented, and then display something along the lines of "Hey it looks like this location can be difficult to find, here's some near by stores to look for <insert recognizable brands>."

To be fair it doesn't matter what Google's intent is, I use this feature for that purpose all the time.

Until you come to Japan and realize that most of the streets don't have a name, and the addresses look more like random numbers than coordinates :)