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100 times YES!

I've gotten this behavior for years and it drives me nuts because I can't understand how it's not fixed? I remember in 2009 I was driving down from SF to LA. I stopped in Santa Barbara. I needed my bearings and I didn't not know the address or the name of the street I was on but I did see an Albertson's supermarket about 200 feet away so I searched for Albertsons and Google gives me some place in Texas. (I think this was on a SonyW810)

I've searched for Pizza in Tokyo last December and had it give me some place in Chicago. It's so infuriating. It knows I'm in Tokyo, it's pinpointed me on the map. So in what situation would I EVER want Pizza in Texas unless I specifically asked for "Pizza, Texas"?

There's other things too. It mostly feels like maps hasn't changed in years. Sure, there's the new maps UI which many people, including me, feel like it's a change for the worse. The geek in me loves that it's slick and live and webgl but can you figure out how to get a short link to a place? Clicking "Share" just brings up a G+ form. Not what I wanted. I wanted a link I could msg to someone. Didn't have that problem with the old maps.

How about how to print? The old maps had a print button and it would format for printing. The new maps has one but I can never remember where it's buried in the UI. Picking Print from the browser directly doesn't do this.

Trying to figure out the UI that pops up and down. Here's one. Pick any marker on the map or search for something like Best Buy. The popup UI should show some details on whatever you picked or the one it picked for you. Now click "Directions". Ok, now how do you get back to the state just before you clicked "Directions"? There's no back button, clicking the X in the corner goes all the way back before you selected anything. In other words there is no back. If you clicked directions by accident well, I guess you just have to start over and type your search in again. If you clicked some dot on a detailed map, well now you've lost your place.

Even more frustrating is who can compete with them? How do you compete with free? If they're not going to do a good job then I'd love for someone else to try but the moment that someone else does try they'll finally feel some pressure to up their game and you're out of business.

And where's the ads? Maybe you don't want ads but I do. I want to see logos of places. Maybe I'm looking for McDonalds. Even if I'm not the logos serve as landmarks. You'd think it would be in their best interest to sell ads on maps since 90+% of all of Google's revenue is ads. And, if done right it would be extremely useful for users as well. It would even fit their mission statement if done well.

Sigh....




A lot of Google changes end up making me feel really dumb.

I have no idea how to create a link to what I'm looking at in Google Maps (app on iPhone). I don't know how many inscrutable buttons I am expected to click to discover this.

There's a bunch of stuff with email that I needed to do a websearch to get instructions.

Very very frustrating.


> I have no idea how to create a link to what I'm looking at in Google Maps (app on iPhone).

I voiced this complaint about the new desktop/browser version of google maps on here a few months ago. FWIW, apparently the permalink functionality has been removed because the address bar is now updated on the fly, so whatever is in the address bar is now always your permalink. This of course is not communicated to the user anywhere that I can see.

I don't know if this helps you on iOS or not.


Also "show me street view here" gets more and more difficult to get with every UI iteration.


This is beautiful if you want to print maps: http://www.maposmatic.org/


Yeah, the first thing I did was try to print (cause I needed to). Maybe printing is unhipster.




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