Google Maps is filled with false business addresses pretending to be nearby
Is it just me or has the usefulness of Google Maps declined substantially over the past year or so? A miscellaneous listing of complaints:<p>* It supports double-tap to zoom, but the first tap always causes it to lose context and open whatever I happened to tap on. This is extremely annoying when searching for restaurants in an area with one hand because that first tap will always cause me to lose my search context.<p>* Places I <i>know</i> are there don&#x27;t show up, even when I zoom in to the point where the only thing in the viewport is the block where the store is located.<p>* Street names are still impossible to discover. In NYC, whenever I find a place that&#x27;s on an avenue I have to scroll blocks left and right just to find out what street the place is on because street labels aren&#x27;t automatically placed in the viewport.<p>* I routinely make a journey to places that turn out to be closed. I&#x27;m not talking about little mom and pop shops, although plenty of those are reported as open right now despite being permanently closed. I&#x27;m talking about major, newsworthy bankruptcies. I used to see Toy &#x27;R Us on my map for <i>months</i> after the stores themselves shut down. It&#x27;s gotten to the point where I call ahead whenever I want to go to a store I&#x27;ve never been to.<p>* Automatically generated markers obscuring mass transit markers. I recently spent ten minutes trying desperately to find a subway station that I knew was close to me because its marker was hidden underneath a Dunkin&#x27; Donuts. I&#x27;ve literally never set foot in a Dunkin&#x27; Donuts, something which Google literally knows for a fact, and yet it decided that notifying me of that store&#x27;s location was more important than the entrance to the mass transit system I use every single day.<p>* While we&#x27;re at it, let&#x27;s talk about the little store markers. Google is running an ad auction on each impression, and that the reason you see useless stores that have nothing to offer you is because they decided to pay their way into your map. It&#x27;s hard to believe Google is &quot;organizing the world&#x27;s information and making it universally accessible&quot; when they shove Dunkin&#x27; Donuts in my face.<p>If I seem mad, I&#x27;m not. I&#x27;m disappointed. So disappointed that I did the unthinkable and installed Apple Maps, and I have to say, I&#x27;m very glad I did.