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?
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.
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 I feel like it’s become bloated and slow tbh.
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.
They say it doesn’t affect search
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
I haven’t had any issues with Google maps recently, occasionally it’ll try to take me on a more “fuel efficient” route. Recently my wife used apple maps and it took us to the wrong location, it kept trying to take us to Washington township when the address we entered was in Washington heights.
Fascinating, I’ve found better results with Apple Maps lately than Google Maps. Which blew my mind, because Apple Maps was a complete joke when it launched.
In our experience Google maps updates traffic conditions faster than apple maps. But Google maps tends to pick more routes that I wouldn’t consider the most efficient, ex: getting off the highway sooner and taking back roads vs going up another exit closer to the destination. But like I said we have had a few times where apple maps has gotten confused with places with similar names.
Apparently everyone ITT has had 100 times more trouble with Google maps than I ever have had. Seriously entire categories of problems I’ve never experienced. Google maps has never tried to make me drive through a yard or field for example. Been using it since before it was a smartphone app.
It’s been discussed in other comments that because Google is A/B testing their old maps model against a new AI model that only some people are experiencing it. It’s probably only being tested in some areas.
I’d like to recommend ‘Magic Earth’ to everyone, who wants a privacy respecting Maps alternative with trafic data. I used it on several >500km trips and it only misguided me once. It uses OSM maps and can navigate offline.
The only real issue with OpenStreetMaps is that the quality varies significantly town-to-town depending on how much love it’s had by local, knowledgable contributors. Road directions are one of the more complex things to configure in OSM, especially with complex multi-lane junctions, and so densely-populated areas and major roads are likely to be quite good, whereas more rural areas can be hit-and-miss.
Does it give you multiple options for a route? Like fastest/using least petrol/no tolls, etc?
I am currently using Google maps and waze most of the time and tried Organic maps for a while for a more privacy focused option, but it only gives you one option, no alternatives of similar length/time.
Edit: nevermind, just downloaded it and it does offer alternatives. Looking good as well, will definitely test it, thank you!
Seconded! It also has a more informative cycling interface.
Gonna check that out for a trip next week, thank you!
In my experience, google maps is really bad at finding parking. OSM-data is just better in this regard
