I live in a city in Germany (280k population) where Google hasn’t updated the 2D satellite images since 2004.
A few months ago, they introduced 3D buildings, and Earth shows up-to-date satellite imagery now, but still didn’t update the satellite imagery used in the Maps app.
Worse yet are maps and transit – roads and sometimes entire districts missing, data from somewhere between 2005 and 2009, and no transit data at all.
Every other map service has it all. Apple, Here, Bing, OSM, everything. Google doesn’t.
And yet people here continue using Google Maps, because "it’s the default", and Google Now can only give you estimates from Google Maps.
Same here, Google maps last updated imagery in 2004, streets in 2009. 3D data, funnily, is from 2016 – but with 3D disabled, you only get 2004 satellite images.
Entire streets and districts are missing, and no transit data.
Every competitor has all that. OSM does, Here WeGo does, even Bing does.
In my city, Google Maps has NO transit, NO satellite images since 2004, NO map data since 2010. Here maps has satellite and transit, and Apple Maps even has full 3D buildings.
Following is a set of complaints I compiled last year when a Google employee asked me on reddit to post them more detail about my maps complaints.
The usability of any Google product outside the US is a total disaster, and it’s a wonder how Google is able to keep any market share with their quality of service.
NONE of this has been addressed since we started complaining in 2005 (!), except for one thing: that connection between two streets, which is closed with a fence, has been marked as closed. So now we have less people standing there trying to get through.
> The map data on top is from the municipality, the map data on bottom from Google.
> As you see, the street "Beim Bauernhaus" is completely missing, the "Kellerkate" is missing half the street, the connection between "Beim Bauernhaus" and "Kellerkate" is missing, the "Kl. Koppel" is missing parts of the street.
> You currently have data from 2010 for this specific area.
> At least the connection between Steinberg and Nienbrügger Weg is now marked as service path, until recently it was marked as street and people tried to get through there (there’s a fence making that impossible).
> I won’t get too much into satellite data either, because yours is from 2004, too:
> And the unavailability of Public Transit data for busses, etc. on Google Maps – which is available on Here.com – makes it unlikely that I, as a student using public transit all the time – am going to switch back.
In my place (and I live in a highly developed country, Germany) Google maps is missing a whole district of my city! Which leads to lots of people ending up in a dead end in a residential street, locking for the highway.
Well, it’s always funny, but with Google’s data not updated since 2005, they’re pretty useless.
It's interesting to see how Google is consistently missing those local things. In Iceland http://en.ja.is/kort has way better satellite imagery and OSM has better maps. In Poland most transit data is missing from Google Maps and only available on local apps (e.g. Jakdojade.pl). People catch on sooner or later.
Wow, the response from the Google engineer really highlights that they're blind to the problem.
It's only a matter of time before a new Search engine comes along and takes over the lead.
I resort to Bing and Yandex more than Google these days due to all the reasons mentioned in the article. It's not just search though, Im consistently finding Bing Maps has newer satellite images and streets that Google doesnt know about ( thanks to OSM )
Another issue is that Google maps is mostly shit in Germany: Satellite data is from 2005, maps data doesn't even contain my whole district except for one road, so all the time people using Google Maps to navigate end up here, etc.
Here maps is the best maps here (at least inmy city), and I can understand why German car manufacturers might want it.
Similar problem in Vienna/Austria. They actually used to make their data available upon request, which meant proper Google Maps integration, etc. Via some backroom deal, the data is now only available to one company which has done a terrible job of putting user interfaces (mobile apps, web site) on it.
Actually, a lot of people already use bing maps instead of Google maps because of poor quality of Google maps in several European markets.
In my city in northern Germany (300k population), Google hasn’t updated anything since 2004. Refuses to integrate transit, although transit data is available in the requested format.
While Bing and Here maps both have data from last month, with 3D imagery, and realtime transit data. Of course it’s easy to choose which maps app one will use.
And all the nice AI features Google has over Bing & Co – like Google Now’s "you have to go 5min earlier to work because of a traffic jam" obviously don’t work without realtime transit and up-to-date maps data.
Google Maps makes huge use of government data (particularly in the US where the government makes detailed imagery available under a free license).
I'm also confused what your point is. TeMPOraL expressed an opinion but having this data available in Google Maps and Google now would be strictly better.
That isn't a forceful argument that cities must comply with the demands of Google, but you seem to be answering it as if it were.
Using your words, it's a lamentation that Google provides no service at all.
Have you tried the new maps? The only real regressions I can see are poorer satellite imagery coverage (big whoop - it's a gimmick for 90% of the time) and non existent public transport routing. In my experience in the UK, the public transport routing never really worked on the google provided maps either.
The maps themselves are provided by TomTom and in the UK and Europe at least they are very high quality, can't speak for the US.
The cartography is pretty good. But I'm convinced nobody who works for Google does actually use Google Maps. The quality of the software and the user experience is terrible and notably worse than ten years ago.
Example 1: I had a saved route map from a long while ago. Google Maps can no longer load that map -- it is quietly truncated to the first 10 stops. Given the lack of support, Google apparently doesn't care about losing your data.
Example 2: The move from 'old maps' (tile based) to 'new maps' (webgl based) was a shambles. It still doesn't work as smoothly as old maps, and old maps had working features removed like the ability to edit routes. New maps still performs terribly compared to old maps -- it's slower, less responsive, and about a quarter of the time clicks do nothing.
I now use Bing maps day-to-day, which is worse than 2010-era Google Maps, but immensely better than 2017-era Google Maps.
Well, considering that Google hasn’t updated maps in my city since 2004 (satellite) or 2009 (street data), entire districts are missing, no transit data is integrated (despite being freely available in the required format, and even HERE maps has it), I’d say that Burda probably has some product that’s useful as a map as Google maps is.
Strange, Maps is the only Google service I like. I'm in the Netherlands right now and their traffic data is always spot on. Literally updated by the minute.
I think that densely populated areas and countries with public up to date cartography are easier to serve.
Which is useless in this day. I was in China last week and Google Map’s street layer was aligned correctly to where I was, but the satellite imagery was not.
This demonstrates that Google already knows the correct coordinates of street in China, including those of an airport finished in 2021. For some reason they have spent no time manually aligning the imagery.
Coordinates on the globe are constant whether China likes it or not, my only guess is that Google doesn’t want to spend time fixing data in a country that blocks them entirely.
Yes, and like I said, I still use Google Maps. But I usually use maps to get an overview over an area and to orient myself, not to navigate to a business in an unknown city. And my point still stands, around here Google have the oldest data and most outdated data.
Not only maps.. look up when Google introduced a working product for the last time. After around 2009 they haven’t actually done anything except launch failing products, or make their already existing products shittier.
At some point in the last few years, for a small town I'm familiar with, the alignment between Google maps and aerial imagery got worse, I assume because they switched data providers (or switched what data they are showing or whatever).
I strongly suspect that problem is that Google Maps (and various other Google products) were effectively "done"[0] a few years ago, but the team needs to justify it's existence somehow, so product managers and engineers are literally just changing things to have something to do.
[0] With the caveat that there's no doubt a massive backlog of missing backend data like bike lanes and public transport data that still needs to be filled in.
A few months ago, they introduced 3D buildings, and Earth shows up-to-date satellite imagery now, but still didn’t update the satellite imagery used in the Maps app.
Worse yet are maps and transit – roads and sometimes entire districts missing, data from somewhere between 2005 and 2009, and no transit data at all.
Every other map service has it all. Apple, Here, Bing, OSM, everything. Google doesn’t.
And yet people here continue using Google Maps, because "it’s the default", and Google Now can only give you estimates from Google Maps.
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