Yeah it's weird, very often a venue on a street is simply not visible unless zoomed in TO THE MAX. And then it's not any weird obscure thing, it's a restaurant or coffeeshop that's been there for years.

What's even worse is that often I'll click "restaurants", zoom in all the way, and then click "Search this area", yet Google will still refuse to show some popular restaurant, even when there are no other restaurants displayed in the window.

The only way to get those restaurants to show up is to search them by name.

Not sure if they're intentionally penalizing certain restaurants, but it's pretty bad.

Guess those ones just aren't paying their google taxes...

I get much better results by clicking on the text input field and pressing enter every time after moving/zooming instead of clicking on "search this area".

FWIW Apple does the same thing to me in my neighborhood. I live in Brooklyn where there are restaurants on every block but it'll zoom out and show ~15 restaurants scattered over a mile with half in Manhattan. Pretty unusable.

Have you found anything better for the area? This frustrates me too...

OpenStreetMap has at least some of the data: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/40.67540/-73.95641

so an interface could be made to present it better: without being zoomed in so much, with filters and so on.

I know of https://www.toiletmap.org.uk/ which does this for public toilets.

I just found this which has an example for restaurants in one town: http://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/where-to-eat-in-middlebu...

I love OSM and use it all the time for hiking, but even though their restaurant and hotel listings have good coverage, they're sadly not much use to me without the reviews.

Short of scraping reviews from Google and importing them into OSM for the area in which I'm traveling, I'm not sure there is a good short-term solution.

I don't think that they understand how people in NYC and Chicago live. It is designed for people who are driving everywhere.

Also the "cuisine" filters for restaurants appears to be completely irrelevant. You will still get results for Chinese restaurants even though you have selected "Pizza".

It would seem that the revenue-optimizing ML has learned that the median user could really go for Chinese take-out right about now (for all values of now), no matter what sort of food they started out looking for, so it's always going to show up.

I know median and mediocrity already share a common root, but I wish there were a clever portmanteau describing ML-optimizing for the median user leading to a mediocre experience. "Medianocre" just sounds like an eggcorn, so I presume 99% of readers would take it as a mistake instead of a neologism.

Been noticing this, myself. E.g. for a local used bookstore that's reasonably popular and has been there for decades. I know the owner and can guess -- though I haven't asked -- that they aren't giving Google much if any money.

So, no Maps presence for you! (Except via direct search within Maps.) Just my anecdotal experience, but one of several similar on Maps that leave me thinking they "have that feel" to them.

I really hate when I click search this area and it zooms out to a larger area.

I specifically had an area selected for a reason. I know there are plenty of restaurants there. I don't need it to tell me to look somewhere else.

There was some articles on here about how maps have been changing over the years (also other map apps). The gist is that why would you need to show street names anymore? On printed maps that's the only thing you have, but that's not how most people navigate anymore. They search for a place or POIs and then use navigation.

So the things most people care about have changed, streets are less important now and things like attractions or "active areas" are more important. Yeah, some people still read maps the "old way", but now probably those are in the minority so catering to them isn't worth it anymore.

Of course that's only one aspect next to the question of what makes the most ad money.

It's process lock-in applied to the real world. Sad.

I think you mean this blog? https://www.justinobeirne.com/ , it's been shared a number of times https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=justinobeirne.com here with this one being the most popular https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15965653 , though that's six years old. Still well worth reading

> They search for a place or POIs and then use navigation.

In big cities, there is construction happening everywhere, POIs have closed down or changed location after the pandemic.

Street names are the only thing that stays the same.

Perhaps not a large use case, but I use street names regularly when discussing bicycle routes. "How to get from Town A to Town B by bicycle" often relies on street names - take Rt 123 for 2 miles, turn left on Fancy Farm Lane, etc. The route-finding often keeps you on Rt 123 for the whole route, but it's a busy dual carriageway and really not suitable for bikes.

I think a big problem is that Maps' bicycle routing would prefer to send you down a 55mph 4-lane street with a "sharrow" in the right lane, because that's a "bike friendly street", instead of the 25mph quiet residential street that parallels it.

Unlike a physical map, we can't go back and access old google maps, so those changing preferences in style leave a memory hole.

If you haven't read 1984, this is really confusing, but a "memory hole" is a hole into which you place something you don't want to have any memory of, destroying it forever. The ironic name is an example of "doublethink."

I believe you mean "Doublespeak" rather than "Doublethink".

No, “doublethink” is the term introduced in Orwell’s 1984.

And those who've actually read it also know that Newspeak is also a term he coined and that since we don't actually have newspeak, the natural extrapolation of the term Doublethink into a spoken application is the term Doublespeak.... Right?

On the flipside digital maps can progressively show layers on user demand. You can pull up the OSM map with all the street names. If you've got a bit of patience to learn tools like QGIS (or ArcGIS) you have more power than ever to build personal maps that work best for how you personally navigate spaces beyond the lowest-common denominator that used to be print maps.

It's maybe a bit of a shame that the raw tools (like OSM, QGIS, ArcGIS, even what is left of Google Earth) aren't easy to learn and equally accessible to everyone and the incentives of the big maps (Google Maps, Apple Maps, etc) is its own drive to a different lowest common denominator, but digital maps have such tools in the first place. (It was far more expensive to get custom printed maps. AAA triptychs are interesting thing to compare here.)

I don't think the issue is digital maps, just that the data is not accessible or preserved.

I've sometimes noticed friends navigating (on foot) in a residential area staring at their phone until the blue dot is on the turn they need to make.

I would usually look at the map briefly, see "we need Farm Lane, should be 4th on the right" and then look at the street name signs. In a non-residential area I'll often do this on foot, but if I'm cycling I'm more likely to think "Right after the paint shop" or similar.

You need street names as I see the name on a map on iPhone plan in my head a route and see the street name so as to know where I turn - or how far you are along a road. GPS is not that accurate.

There were always people who were like that it's just that it was harder with paper maps, at least that's my view.

For those old enough, just think back to all the times your "navigator" wouldn't just tell you the street name or even "turn at the third intersection after this one " and instead waited until just moments before you reached it and said "Here" like a jack hole.

> The gist is that why would you need to show street names anymore?

I need the street names. They're authoritative. Landmarks (or, worse, businesses used as landmarks) are things that are occasionally useful to me in the right circumstance, but they're too dynamic to really rely on.

If a map application doesn't make it easy to know the street names, then it's one that isn't useful to me.

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The funniest thing to me is that Google Maps seems to be the "normal person" option and yet only OSM tells me where water fountains are.

Millions of tourists worldwide use GMaps to navigate around in foreign places and yet they have no option to see where the closest place to refill their bottles is? Especially in the summer?

Probably because 99% of normal people "don't refill their water bottles" (and surely not off of water fountains), just buy bottled water and/or drink when they stop at cafes and restaurants?

Not saying it's good. In fact, it's quite bad and harmful. But it just is.

This is very location dependant. In southern Europe there are places where most normal people actually would refill their water at the fountain when going through a town, and I have even faced small queues when the fountain is small but a slightly larger group is refilling bottles. In many small towns you don't even have a shop so buying bottles is not even an option. There's sometimes a local bar / restaurant but if you want to just get water that's a bit overkill.

Nah, it's just that 99% of people aren't so chronically online as to need a web service to find out how to freely drink water in a place with free water drinking infrastructure.

Well, maybe because I wasn't born there, but they're not always in the most obvious locations to me.

The extremely detailed mapping of drinking water on OSM that the OP alludes to, is more helpful than you assume. If you are cycling or hiking in baking-hot Southern Europe, or wandering through some picturesque villages, there are often springs hidden just off the trail that most people would never spot, if the map didn’t alert people to their presence. Also, with OSM one doesn’t need to be “chronically online” and use a “web service”, because various apps allow using OSM fully offline.

Agree with this. When I was cycling a lot, my summer workouts were planned around functional drinking fountains.

This is in the US even. Working drinking fountains are not as ubiquitous as you might think in a lot of areas.

It's because no one buys ads against water fountains.

>99%

please avoid writing random bullshit numbers, just say "the majority". If you ever went to a touristic place outside a metropolis you would have seen plenty of people refilling their bottles at public fountains.

I've been all around Europe, the US, and several other countries and continents besides.

Seeing "plenty of people refilling their bottles at public fountains" says nothing compared to the vast majority that doesn't, and doesn't even carry bottles.

Also, regarding "please avoid writing random bullshit numbers", please avoid being rude.

hurting people's intelligence by throwing around absolutely unsubstantiated and risible percentages is just a different form of being rude

People reading in good faith understand what 99% means (it, as well as 95% etc., are commonly used that way, to mean "overwhelming majority"). Besides, if I wanted to write the actual number, which I happen to have, I'd have written 92,768%.

In any case, you don't have to justify the rudeness, a simple "sorry" would have sufficed.

79.53% of statistics come from the nether region.

“99%” when used like this is essentially an expression in English, for “almost all” or “almost certain.” It is very hard to believe that they have the actual statistic or that it happens to be exactly 99%, so I wouldn’t worry about anybody getting mixed up.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

The majority of 86% of people dislike this comment.

> Millions of tourists worldwide use GMaps to navigate around in foreign places and yet they have no option to see where the closest place to refill their bottles is? Especially in the summer?

It’s almost like this isn’t a thing folks are actually looking for.

I thought to try searching "public toilet" in Copenhagen, which I'm sure is something tourists search for.

It does show a few of them, but it also shows an apartment complex miscategorized as one, and misses several within the city centre. They are shown with various names ("Toilet", "Public toilet", "Public toilet for men", "Public restroom") so I think this is crowdsourced, rather than anything Google has made an effort to map.

Although the interface of https://www.openstreetmap.org/ doesn't have a way to highlight them, other interfaces (phone apps etc) can, and OSM has much better coverage.

Why is it that whenever somebody comes up with a clear cut and reasonable shortcoming of a big tech product, there's a mass of sycophants that crawl out of the ground to say "nobody wants that, you're just a weirdo"?

Everybody drinks water. It often isn't intuitively obvious where you can find water. Even in city parks, water fountains may not be where you expect but often are where you wouldn't. Google maps also sucks at finding bathrooms. Everybody pisses, even cyborgs.

> Why is it that whenever somebody comes up with a clear cut and reasonable shortcoming of a big tech product

Is it reasonable though?

Sticking to the cyborg larp? I shouldn't need to explain the relevance of water to you twice.

The point isn't the relevance of water, but the relevance of a specific feature to a given app.

Should Google Maps show me every single public bench too in case I need to sit down?

How about if I'm an avid cyclist, should they also show me every single secure railing I can lock my bike against?

I don't care where are water fountains, but what bus/train/metro can I take to go to another place, where is the bus stop. At what time does arrive, and which bus stop do I need to get down.

I can do that only on google maps. Open Street Map does not provide that info. Now I am sure there are some local app I can use for each individual city that works fine. But with google maps I only need to have one app.

As user, that is what is valuable for me. I honestly dont care about how clutter is the interface.

It's annoying, but if you are serious about taking public transit, you really do need to use the apps for whatever city you are in to get accurate information in my experience. Yes, Google Maps will tell you when a bus or metro is coming, but they often get it wrong, claiming that buses that run only on weekdays run on Saturday and so on.

Even if google maps is right, it isn't helpful to how people ride transit. Do you want to ride the 4 or 9 or 99? It doesn't matter, all of them go to where I'm going, but I have to choose when really I should just go to the stop and catch the first bus. This is a real situation for me where I selected the 4, but it turns out that it went by half a block before I reached the stop, and google maps got mad when I got on the 9 even though they both go exactly the same place (by a somewhat different route in between that didn't matter)

I haven't found city specific transit apps any more helpful, but I don't have much experience with them. google maps sucks is terrible for the job though.

Right. Last I tried, it's terribly difficult to get Google maps to show you directions for a bus route you just jumped on (and so it thinks you'll miss if you try to board).

there is a non-local app that does so for multiple cities:

https://transitapp.com/region#all-regions

I've used it in 2 larger US cities so far, and can vouch for its functionality

The Transportr app[0], which is Free Software and even on F-Droid, shows public transit directions for a number of cities around the world. There is now a standardized format for transit routing and timetables, and transit authorities freely share it, so for those cities Google has no especial monopoly in that regard.

[0] https://transportr.app/

For many, many major cities, the app you want is CityMapper, not Google Maps. Far superior for transit.

Google Maps often misses paths in parks that OSM has. I don't mean obscure trails deep in national forests, I mean paved paths in city parks. Google maps seems optimized for directing people to businesses that might advertise with Google, anything else languishes.

Worse, Google makes it really difficult for government GIS admins to upload the correct data. Last time I looked, if you ever want to update the bike/ped paths (like when a new one is constructed) they want you to upload ONLY the new part. This is really time consuming to extract only the new data, especially if you have multiple paths to update at the same time which are not connected. The sensible thing would be to just upload the entire path network for a city anytime there is an update, but apparently Google does not want you to do this.

Apple Maps is even worse, I don't think they even offer a way to update incorrect data -- not that I've been able to find. And it's super frustrating to use, because Apple Maps does not have a "Bicycle" layer that you can turn on and off to find pathways. They only appear if you plan a route. Totally idiotic.

Google maps is the poster child of missing common-sense features. Monopolies make bad products. Stop wondering.

Google lets bottle water stands pay money to get shown with a featured pin at a farther zoom level, why would they ever show free water fountains?

I'm not sure why they could add "personalities" or "modes" like simple, tourist, night-life, etc. Seems rather obvious to just about anyone who thinks more than 30 seconds about it

Implemented in OsmAnd, called profiles :)

Yea it's got some really odd behaviors that I can only attribute to Yelp style behavior from Google.

I was literally on the same block as a restaurant and it wouldn't show in maps at all, though the other 3 restaurants on the block were, and the only way to get it to show up was to Google it then click on the maps link. As soon as I took focus off the restaurant it disappeared again.

I can only presume it's because they hadn't paid Google or were being punished for some reason. It lead to me looking for more examples and found many places, including some major ones in the city I'm visiting, were excluded for no apparent reason, even ones with 4.9 ratings, and the only correlation between them was that they either were inherently more "indy" than the rest and thus likely to avoid engaging in certain aspects of Google or were close to a more powerful competitor.

This was particularly shocking when Wendy's wasn't being shown at a strip mall but the Burger King was....