Problem is, for me at least, Google is useless for predictions or recommendations. Search is still better than DDG, but way worse than peak Google.

Their recommendations are all over the place despite the fact that I have been logged in permanently in some form or another since GMail where still invite only.

No one else except my wife and my parents know more about me (and to be perfectly clear they know different subsets of me) but yet Google still insist on showing me the most irrelevant and annoying ads and suggest I call people at work in the middle of the night etc etc.

It sounds like you have issues with the search engine, not maps.

It is not just in the search engine, Google Now AI keeps pushing mostly nonsense.

The most annoying thing is they had this nailed. Google Desktop Search had some bonus features like the feed sidebar that automatically predicted what I wanted to read more of based on what I had read before and it was crazy good.

Search used to be amazing and these days I feel it is barely better than DDG.

Still nothing to do with maps, though.