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Once I was driving home on the highway and Google maps suggested I get off at the next exit. Sometimes there's heavy traffic at the entrance of my city so I figured it would make me save a few minutes by approaching from another angle.

Nope, it made me take the exit, drive a kilometer in a dead end then turn a roundabout, drive back and enter the highway exactly where I exited it.

this is the route your body would take when youre ran over half way there

You selected walking, which relies on it having accurate data on public spaces for pedestrians. That's just nowhere near as good as driving suggestions, because they actually drove those routes to collect it.

I find many of the changes google has made in the last 2 years really stupid.

The "go past this light and turn at blah blah road" is way too fucking wordy and can lead to missing turns because by the time its dome speaking you have already drove past. I want road name plus minimal direction feature. Stop trying to humanize the gps. I think I yell at the GPS to shut the fuck up more and more.

Time to check out Cartes.app! https://cartes.app/?clic=34.02076%7C-118.50899

It uses OSM and has some very useful routing options for foot/bike/public transportation.

A few fun things Google Maps has done recently:

Going to a friend's new house in a rural area with long, long driveways. Google maps told us to go up their neighbor's driveway, park at their neighbor's house, and walk 1500 feet across a canyon.

Getting to a train station in Philadelphia, you know the kind of place that's had a steady address for probably at least a century: Sent me to a MicroCenter (I think it was) about a mile away. Finally figured out it was because there was a hotel behind it, and a lot of the reviews mentioned convenient access to the train station.

Google audio directions are also garbage if you're relying on audio (like riding a motorcycle). Often doesn't repeat the street name when you have to turn, which is fun when there are two or three streets in close succession. Also seems to pick a random distance from your turn to tell you to turn. Sometimes it's several hundred feet before, sometimes it's only just as you're passing the turn.

There's a really old Top Gear episode, where someone sent in a suggested travel route (they did verify it) from one of the online services. What they wanted was "go from this one part of London to this other part of London, but avoid the big motorways". The suggested route had the submitter leaving London and crossing the Channel into France ...

Google has really gone down the shitter so far as to be near useless sometimes.

I can’t remember what I tried to search for a few days ago, but I used “quotes” to restrict the search (not that modifiers mean shit anymore, they’re often completely ignored) and got zero search results.

Zero.

It wasn’t even that restrictive of a search term. Nowhere on the entire english speaking internet has someone not written what I asked for? Literally impossible. Want to know how bad it was? It couldn’t even be bothered to give shitty AI results.

15 years ago there would have been several pages of results. But now, nothing. Probably because my request couldn’t be monetized.

It sent me in circles last week. I didn't know the area and thought the road was maybe under construction. Nope, it wanted me to be late.

I've found that Gmaps has gotten so bad, that I instinctively go to CoMaps these days,

Do you have a midpoint set at the grey dot with a (1) ?

In Delft, in the Netherlands, there is a rest stop at the motorway, and next to it is a monument to Delft porcelain. You can't reach it from the rest stop, though, as it is on the other side of a canal, but there are roads next to it on that other side, so I asked Google Earth how to get there.

But instead of what I expected (like use the next exit and follow that road to the monument), it simply suggested I walk across the canal...

Now thats a course with some chest hair!

Am I close?

Google Maps sucks for pedestrian and bicycle navigation, since most of their data comes from camera cars.
Openstreetmap gets data from actual people living there. So if you have volunteer mappers in your area, it will work much better (and if not, become one. It's really fun and the barrier of entry is quite low!)

There's a spot on Main Street in my town, a road with two sidewalks, where it forces me to cross the street for no reason. Like, there's just a dead spot on Google maps right there, it makes no sense.

I’ve seen this in some roads. There used to be a major road in my city that runs north-south. And yet, at a random intersection, GPS directions would always tell you to turn right, then left, then go a block and then come back to the main road and continue on your way. It made no sense.

I think someone finally dug in and saw that the map data our city published was missing a tiny connecting node in that intersection, so all the routing algorithms saw that as “the road ends here” and found a way to route you around it.

They fixed it after several years and newer GPS devices (and web stuff) finally routed properly.

But you’re not wrong - Google Maps IS fucking drunk.