Maps are meant to help orient yourself and communicate rich information about the area. They're used for planning. Google Maps has long been moving away from this case, focusing instead on just-in-time point-by-point nav and searchable PoI database. This is an entirely different product category to a map, and has opposite goals.
If you don't use it for directions, then that's entirely what it is.
Sure there are a few icons for sponsored businesses, but that's all. They're easy to ignore.
The way you can pan and zoom, it's 1000x more useful than any of the road atlases I used to have to keep in my car. Looking up an address is instant rather than taking a couple of minutes on a paper atlas, and it's simple to pan and zoom the route you want to plan, without having to jump from page 30 to page 65 when you go north and try to re-locate the road you're trying to follow.
It's much more than a map, but it's crazy to say it isn't a map. Along with Apple Maps and OSM, they're basically the best maps ever made by humankind.
(And you can put down markers too, and then remove them later. Paper maps you can draw on, but erasing is hard/impossible.)
> The way you can pan and zoom, it's 1000x more useful than any of the road atlases I used to have to keep in my car.
Except when it cleverly hides the street names, PoIs and other important labels, as you zoom in. The way Google Maps does it is so absurd that it feels it's done on purpose.
A road atlas is a high-density map. Not the most convenient in paper form, and ripe for digitization, but not in the way Google Maps does it - information density is a feature on a map, when you're trying to orient yourself. It's only a problem when the app is optimized for navigating you to points you already know the address of.
> (And you can put down markers too, and then remove them later. Paper maps you can draw on, but erasing is hard/impossible.)
Sorta, kinda. That's another feature Google is going out of their way to make impossible to use. You can't just put markers (multiple) in the middle of a search or normal scrolling, for example.
Erasing from paper maps is easy - buy laminated ones and use dry-erase markers (or permanent markers and have some alcohol handy).
It's usually fine. Sure sometimes I wish it showed more, but that's just a matter of degree. Again, still 1000x more useful than a paper atlas. If it doesn't show the street name, it does when I zoom out or in or pan a little.
> You can't just put markers (multiple) in the middle of a search or normal scrolling, for example.
During normal scrolling? Of course you can. Just click on any building, and tap "save" in the panel that appears. I just checked on desktop, and you can even do it in the middle of a search -- the panel that appears is in addition to your existing search panel. Do it as many times as you want.
> Erasing from paper maps is easy - buy laminated ones and use dry-erase markers
I've never seen a laminated road atlas, and back in the day I worked a job that required driving for hours a day to addresses I'd never been before so I was familiar with all the atlases sold at the gas station and the bookstore. You're talking about the metropolitan atlases that are 100+ pages? I can't even imagine how thick and heavy they'd be if each page was laminated. Maybe they exist.
> Paper maps you can draw on, but erasing is hard/impossible
I am amused when movies show military situations where commanders draw on huge and otherwise pristine rollout maps. Are they going to be discarded after this one engagement? If not, shouldn't there be scribbles from prior uses?
At this point paper maps start looking more useful than digital ones.
Google Maps is not a map. It's a half-decent nav system slash ad delivery vector, that pretends to be a map, but sucks at it.