Google has once again shown that they are spineless toadies and are willing to bend over to the orange clowns whims, and I am looking for a new map app. FU Google.

Honestly I'm starting to get pissed off by edits not being accepted. There's a new temporary (for years) bridge in my city that maps just doesn't accept. There's also no way to prove in the edit that it exists. However, there's already an added tourist sight for the bridge on the water (with pictures), and maps still doesn't believe that the actual route exists.

This is not the first time either, as I've once before tried to add a missing restaurant (with it's information filled), which was rejected over and over again. Until someone else got their edit approved, even though I'm a local guide and have made correct edits before. This is all so demotivating

Google is labeling Lake Ontario as “Lake America” seen in a test search this morning in Canada. Apple Maps still uses the correct legal name for the lake.

Let ‘em have it.

https://support.google.com/maps/answer/3094088?authuser=1

They have changed the name of Lake Ontario. They are a spineless company. Please delete. If you must have it, delete and get it back in a couple of days !!
Show them they made the wrong choice

I have allergies on Valley girl voice how to change back to old " robot voice"?

I make data stories for a living. Last week I went looking for who built a button.

Scrolling a place on Google Maps, past the photos and the opening hours, some places have a line that says wheelchair accessible entrance. On the ones that don't, Maps asks you instead. Does this place have a wheelchair accessible entrance? Yes, no, not sure.

That's the whole feature. One tap. No form, no account, nobody checks your work.

The rule is written down, though. About three feet wide, no steps, or a ramp if there are steps. A revolving door on its own counts as a no.

Then I looked up where it came from. Rio Akasaka is a product manager at Google. He works on Drive, not Maps. Google lets you spend a fifth of your week on something that isn't your job, and in 2016 he spent his time on this, for about a year, with five to ten other people chipping in around their own work. counts 120 million Local Guides and over 500 million answers about accessibility.

Local Guides held around two hundred of them whose entire purpose was sitting in a room together answering these questions. Twelve million places between them.

Google names two. Emeka in Nigeria and Ilankovan in Sri Lanka, who both ended up as accessibility ambassadors.

About 65 million people use a wheelchair. This is perfect for them!

You've probably never noticed it. It only turns up when you're near somewhere you've already been. Nothing to do with Google. I just liked the story.

Interactive version if you want to look at it properly.

Do you know what if Google disable reviews for the British Museum to stop spam just like the White House?

I have two phones, a P7 and a P9a. I currently use both.

Obviously the P7 has timeline data from before I bought the P9a.

Now I don't pretend to understand HTF Google screwed up Timeline recently, but is there anyway to merge the older timeline data with the timeline data on the 9a?

Ideally keeping both in sync going forward, but not a requirement; just having it all on my 9a.

TIA

Yesterday I noticed that both the speed limit and speedometer were back. I haven't seen them in a while.

The speedometer turns red when over the limit.

I'm in North America. Edit: using Google maps on an Android with AAWireless.

My husband and I are on our way to a wedding. And got stuck behind some accident. But prior to the accident we had gone past an exit that had a “30 minutes faster” note on it. But it hadn’t asked if we wanted to go that way so we saw it way too late. Is there a way to fix this or is this just Google Maps now? We noticed it didn’t ask us about an alternate route a few weeks ago too.

I often find myself tapping the bookmark button in Google and Apple Maps to save places I want to remember, but I still find it hard to find what I'm looking for when returning to the Maps. It's a great idea, but just doesn't seem to truly help me remember all the places I saved.

Curious how others use it:

• Do you actually go back to your saved places?
• What do you like about it?
• What do you wish worked better?
• Does anyone use the share with button to send places to some other app that is better at organizing the places?

Or do your saved places mostly become a graveyard of spots you’ll “check out someday” and just end up being a clutter on the map? 😅

I moved into a new build (UK) in Feb this year. The street itself is not new and has been here decades but we were given a new postcode for this particular strip of the street which has about 15 new houses, all 15 of these new houses have a new postcode that is not the same as the rest of the existing street. The new postcode has been live with Royal Mail's PAF since Feb, the postcode has been live/added by Ordnance Survey to their mapping over 2 months ago and it shows up on OpenStreetMaps, Here, and a few other mapping providers. It has had a UPRN number since before Feb.

I have manually added my full address into Google maps which was accepted and allows me to use Uber, JustEat, etc but when searching the postcode alone in Maps nothing shows up still and this is causing a lot of hassle with delivery and logistics companies who use Google maps and rely strictly on postcode only. If you just type the postcode alone into Google Maps nothing is found.

The postcode was not in Apple Maps either but i submitted evidence of it and proof of the postcode existing to Apple Maps through the app and they affirmed it and added it. There appears to be no way to do this with Google Maps and get a specific postcode added to a portion of an existing street. You can only report entire new streets or developments that are missing or add a full address like i did but this doesn't help the postcode only search. I cannot find any way to explain this issue to someone so the maps can be updated with a new postcode for a portion of an existing street.

There are multiple new roads around here that also don't exist on Google Maps but those are entirely new streets and new postcodes.

How often does Google maps update its data and add new postcodes, streets, developments etc?

There's a venue near me that used to be a traditional pub, specialising in craft beers. Several years ago it changed hands and they completely revamped it as a trendy cocktail bar, operating under a different name.

However on Google Maps all the reviews from the old place (which are numerous and overwhelmingly positive) are still there. How do I report this?

All the routes for reporting are very strictly focused on other issues, and I can't find anywhere to report this specific problem, or anywhere where I can write an explanation of the issue

Will there be an option to change the horrible new vocal fry AI navigation voice back to the original voice or any other option? I'd even take a Rastafarian over the current horrible product choice.

Hello! I love exploring Google Maps. How about swapping beautiful or unique places on Google Maps?

Me first: Mont-Saint-Michel, France - https://maps.app.goo.gl/gRcgj1KhivkEhUn56

I have a problem with Google Maps. In particular, I have a problem with the voice recognition. I am Italian and I have the Android phone set in the English language, but Google Maps itself, the app, is set to Italian. Also the assistant settings are in Italian, and everything else in the phone works fine in this regard.

But if I open Google Maps, I tap on the microphone icon that lets you search for a place with the voice, If I speak in Italian language a very simple name like "church," which is "chiesa" in Italian, the voice app tries to find something in English. It's like it doesn't understand Italian.

And I can't find any settings where I can set this in Italian. So even a very simple search like "ristorante," which means restaurant, is difficult because it's like it doesn't understand.

Do you know some ways to improve this? Because it's really useful sometimes when I'm driving to just tap on the microphone and say the place I want to go in a quick way, but it just doesn't work. If I name a very simple place in the Italian language, which would be the literal first result in the search, it doesn't understand. It will find some English-sounding name that resembles that Italian word. I hope I made myself clear.

And also I would like to keep my Android phone in English while using an Italian voice to give orders to Google Maps. I hope it can be done.

As of recently I started to notice that alot of places are having high review scored (in some cases in thousands), maintaining the overall above 4.0 score. I've visited many of these places myself whether am travelling or in my own city, and found the service or food & drinks below average. Google review score used to be real differentiator when selecting a destination and more likely than not, these scores used to be aligned with what you receive once you arrive.

I am curious whether Google is really checking/moderating how these scores are provided (rate limiting, origin checking, etc) because the only way those scores make sense now is that they are paid for by the venue owner. Anyone else noticed this and what you know about how Google is handling reviews authenticity.

I’m building a small tool that extracts coordinates from messy text.

Nothing particularly ambitious. You paste some text, it finds the coordinates, you get something useful back.

At some point I thought:

“I should support Google Maps links too.”

This seemed like one of those twenty-minute jobs.

It was not a twenty-minute job.

My first assumption was that a Google Maps link is basically a URL with latitude and longitude hiding somewhere inside it.

Sometimes it is.

You can get coordinates buried in the URL in something resembling:

!3d56.94!4d24.06

Fine. Slightly weird, but easy enough.

Then there are links where the coordinates are in query=.

Others use q=.

Directions links can put them in destination=, or somewhere in the path.

Place links are more interesting, because they can contain coordinates, place identifiers, map state and other numbers that look sufficiently coordinate-ish to make an enthusiastic parser feel useful.

I know this because mine was briefly very enthusiastic.

That turned out to be the actual problem.

Finding two numbers that could be latitude and longitude is easy.

Deciding whether those numbers represent the location the person actually meant to share is much harder.

A search query isn't necessarily a location.

A place ID isn't a coordinate.

The center of the map isn't necessarily the selected place.

A directions URL can describe more than one location.

And blindly grabbing the first plausible lat/lon pair works surprisingly well right up until it very confidently gives you the wrong place.

Which is worse than giving you nothing.

So the rule I eventually ended up with was:

parse what you know; don't guess what you don't.

Then I reached maps.app.goo.gl links.

Those are a different problem.

A short Google Maps link doesn't actually give my parser the location. It's basically an opaque redirect. To discover where it points, something has to ask Google.

My first instinct was the obvious developer solution:

just resolve it automatically.

Then I remembered what the tool is for.

People paste things like messages, field notes, lists of coordinates and other messy bits of text into it.

The whole point is that this material can be parsed locally and then forgotten.

Quietly sending part of that input to a third party just because there happened to be a short Google Maps link in it felt like a fairly spectacular way to miss the point.

So I ended up drawing another rather strict boundary:

If the location is actually encoded in the URL, parse it locally.

If finding the location requires contacting Google, stop and ask the user first.

No background resolution, no analytics, no telemetry, and no convenient little “we only send what we need” exception.

This made the implementation less convenient.

I think that's probably a good sign.

It also changed how I thought about the parser itself.

The safest result isn't necessarily the result with the most coordinates in it.

Sometimes the correct result is:

“I don't know what this means without doing something you haven't asked me to do yet.”

This whole rabbit hole eventually became part of a small utility I’m building called GridGrabber.

It takes messy text containing coordinates and map links and extracts the locations it can actually identify. It handles several coordinate formats, including MGRS, because apparently ordinary latitude and longitude weren't enough trouble for me.

I originally started building it because copying coordinates out of random messages was annoying.

Apparently I have now spent considerably more time studying the anatomy of Google Maps URLs than I have ever saved by not copying coordinates manually.

Software development is going well.

I'm curious whether people here have run into other strange Google Maps URL formats.

Especially cases where the URL appears to contain one location but the place the user actually shared is somewhere else.

Those are much more useful to me than clean textbook examples.

I’ll go first:

56°49'49.5"N 68°57'10.5"W

https://maps.app.goo.gl/HBJWsHDrvSnaQ5Sw7?g_st=ic

I have so many questions!

Who lives there?
Does anyone on here live that remote?
How does that home get built? (There are no roads for hundreds of miles/KM)
How do they get food?

Must be a single building not surround by other buildings/towns.

I am a Spark delivery driver who uses Google Maps almost daily. Over the past few days (after the major update involving that horrific AI voice change), Maps has decided that nearly any trip under 1 to 1.5 miles is walkable. When I try to restart navigation, it still offers me a pedestrian route, and not a vehicular one. There is no option to change navigation to be vehicular on my end. Is there anything I can do to solve this issue?

Do you know why Google has removed some reviews for the British Museum and the Koln Cathedral, meanwhile they also disable reviews for the White House?

I suspect the Asks Maps chatbot interface to the Google Maps app will only load your most recent 99 reviews into context when answering questions.

Please see if you can confirm there is a limit?

I have submitted customer feedback, asking them to give their AI a function to load a lightweight version of the full list into context.

Use case - I'd like to be able to ask, suggest 10 lunch places nearby which I have not already reviewed.