My dad uses Google Maps, and he mentioned that it seems to be getting worse. Like, giving him directions that are obviously worse than alternatives. Has anyone else here experienced this?
Here’s some “high quality” (heh heh) anecdata for you: I navigated from my house in Somerville to a restaurant in the Seaport district of Boston last night, in the POURING rain using public transit and walking.
Google maps literally was leading me around in circles downtown once I got off the train, so I switched to Apple Maps and it was straight shooting from there on in.
I think GMaps is more susceptible to the tall buildings fouling the GPS. Not sure why?
This isn’t a new thing but I hate anytime it asks me a question. I’ll be driving through an accident scene trying to work out where the cop directing traffic wants me to go and if I’ll need to go a different way because the turn I was gonna make is blocked off and at that precise moment google maps decides it’s a great idea to cover the bottom half of the screen with a “is tHeRe sTiLl An aCcIdEnT hErE?”
If it’s illegal to use your phone while driving it should be illegal for navigation apps to suddenly require interaction in the middle of navigating.
I ignore those types of notices.
I know it’s not new, but I’ve been seeing a lot more “suggested” (read: sponsored) places along my routes these days. Either businesses are just now discovering the feature, or they lowered the barrier for entry. Either way, it’s annoying as fuck to have ads pop up that I have to avoid when moving the map around to navigate
Yes. I’m not the only one! Maps drives me crazy. As pedestrian it’s borderline unusable especially in European old Cities where there are … actual pedestrian only pathways.
Organic Maps is a game changer here!
Yeah, about 2 months ago I noticed it no longer recommending a slightly alternate route on my way to work that lets me bypass a potentially 20-minute red light (bad light timing)
If I turn and do it myself it goes “oh shit you right” and gives me an updated ETA and shows the route, but it WONT show the expected slowdown anymore and WONT even suggest the alternate route
i tend to use waze more anyway
Waze is owned by Google, and they’re slowly converging over time.
Personally, I’ve been seeing way more markers when you zoom in for bigger businesses meaning they are probably going heavy on pay to show.
Yep, one shape is paid for, the other shape is not (I forget, circles or squares), and to actually see the non paying businesses you have to zoom way in now.
Yeah I feel like it’s become bloated and slow tbh.
Yes, it is. I use it every day to visit multiple locations. My personal pet peeve is when it displays “In 1.5 miles, continue straight”. On a road where there’s no changes in that distance. That’s not part of the directions, that’s just continuing. Not only is it unhelpful because I can’t not do this “step”, but I can’t see the next, actual step, which could be “In 200 ft, turn left” and won’t know which lane to be in.
I can’t prove it, but I think at some point they applied an automatic algorithm that added intermediate steps to all their routing (for when a road curves a certain way, etc), but it was too aggressive and not human-reviewed.
There’s a part of a highway near Denver where it’ll tell you to take a “slight right to stay on highway”, and there is literally no possible turn or off ramp there.
I’ve seen it do that for decades now, and in at least two cases I see it happen is when a highway enters town and gains a name, like how Florida Route 92 becomes International Speedway Boulevard when you enter Daytona Beach. Or, when another route joins the corridor you’re on, like throughout North Carolina US-1, US-15 and US-501 weave in and out of each other a few times along with a few state routes joining and leaving.
So I think when it hits points like this, it sometimes interprets them as intersections rather than junctions, and its programming requires it to issue a direction for an intersection. YOU might not see it as an intersection but IT does.
That’s exactly what it is. I just had this happen where two US highways merge, and it told me to “keep straight on HWY 20” at that location. You’ll also often see this where two interstates merge for a while in and around cities.
A bigger problem I have than occasionally hearing “Keep straight on Highway 20” is “Keep straight on US-20, US-94, US-1, US-15, US-501, US-99, US-98, NC-24, NC-27, NC-17, PG-13, PS-5, N-64, I-95, I-85, I-40, Bragg Boulevard for 1.3 miles.”
It puts the instruction at the beginning, and then it talks so long you forgot what it told you to do. It’s how you stack overflow a human.
I do a lot of highway driving. It’ll frequently tell me “in X miles take the exit towards [whatever]” but it will refuse to tell me what exit number I’m looking for until I’m within a mile or two of it. This is frequently a problem when I have exits with A/B/C branches which is often. I don’t give a shit if I’m exiting towards I40, just tell me I’m exiting on 13B, and tell me that from the beginning.
It used to do this, it changed a couple years ago, and I’ve been pissed off about it every time I’ve had to drive somewhere since then.
It’ll also randomly change voices on me, it’ll flip flop constantly between the American accent and a thick British accent. No rhyme or reason to it either, it’ll be a different voice on the same turn on a different day. Drives me nuts.
It’s been broken on Fx Android for the last few weeks. I mostly use it to cross-reference information lacking on OpenStreetMap (or if I need to see photos). It sucks since locally, the only maps businesses bother with is Google.
It has gotten way worse for me in the past couple of months to the point that organic maps, even without traffic information is the clear winner.
One of the things I hate the most now is that the driving mode (you see a route and you’re represented by a little arrow) is really zoomed out and does not rotate with you, making it a worse version of a paper map
The biggest complaint I’ve had lately is that it will randomly alter my route without letting me know when or why. More than one it has told me to turn when the route it showed me before I hit “start” did not have a turn at that point.
Yeah I’ve definitely been noticing this one a lot more recently. It won’t even give me an option anymore, just switch to another route even when the turn is less than a minute away. Sometimes if I’m driving through a town it will switch multiple times in a few minutes which is infuriating
It coincides with their switch to more and more “AI” black box models. Whereas before they would use a hand-tuned heuristic model to describe whether you are turning, merging, or continuing on a road, they just use a less correct but automagic model where they still inevitably have to tune it a whole lot but it is “AI” so it has the approval of the petty lords of management.
Incorrect entrances and closed roads are another example. They’re just using satellite and street level imagery and tossing it at some models that spit out things like “door 99% confidence” and “road 98% confidence” while neglecting the question of, “are you actually allowed/able to use this?”
PS under basically every correct answer in this category is a team of poorly-paid “labelers” whose answers directly turn into the data in the map. Your door-that-is-not-an-entrance was marked entrance because someone making $8/hr only had 10 seconds to review before moving to the next question.
Semi recently had mine try to take me through a private business parking lot which was entirely fenced off, and didn’t even connect on the other side. That was… confusing, to say the least.
Google is doing a lot of A and B testing right now. Some days I habe to use Bing or duckduckgo, no matter what, or else I get shit results.
They switched from giving you the fastest route by default to giving you the one that uses the least gas.
They also now offer alternative routes that take you past businesses which paid money to Google.That’s in your trip options “prefer fuel efficient route”. You can turn it off.
I know. But I won’t.
Hypermiling is as fun to me as driving fast is for others.
It’s like a mini-game I get to play every time I’m forced to drive a car.I hypermile casually but I’m not sacrificing travel time to save a bit of gas.
I hypermile casually but I’m not sacrificing travel time to save a bit of gas.