Hahaha. I've been using the new GMaps for ages, and always thought it was fine. So I thought, I'll check out the old one and see how different it really is.
Holy crap it's fast. Wow. There's no loading or giant pixels, zooming is instant, scrolling around is instant. I can't get over how much faster this is. Woof.
i can tell you, unambiguously, that it has always been this fast. those tilesets are almost certainly statically cached and served at lightning speed with practically 0 overhead from some regionally located cdn server.
server load would have a statistically imperceptible impact here; never seen a google product roll out with scale-related issues, especially one as mature as their gmaps architecture was at the time of the GL switch.
EDIT: the image-based maps is a great example of the "Choose Boring Technology" thread [1]. the benefits of the GL maps, IMO, do not justify the enormous speed sacrifice, at least to the end users. i'm sure google's ultimate plan was/is to merge google earth and "3d/vr/augment all the things!", but for basic maps it is just terrible. i'm really sad about the whole situation because they really have great looking, readable tilesets, much better than OSM (even if less complete). sadly, they never did get the pixel-density-appropriate versions made for mobile devices and all the features looked tiny when implemented using their js maps api :(
Sponsored listings and ads in map search are already a thing on mobile. If I search for certain common terms ("Smog Check", for example), some pinpoints are already highlighted differently because they correspond to ads in the search results list.
Agreed, and the search input stealing focus at page load when I'm trying to use the zoom shortcut keys always gets me. (So I see a lot of "===" or "---" in the text field and have to fight it by clicking on the map, usually twice as we face off in a tug-of-war.)
I see this kind of behavior every day in gmail and it drives me batty. I'll use the 'l' shortcut to bring up the label drawer, start typing the name of my label, and three to four characters later gmail is actually ready for me to start typing.
Then I'll backspace out and re-type what I already typed, and Gmail highlights and decides I must want the third entry in the list for some reason, and makes it highlighted. So I'm moving over to the arrow keys.
The same kind of behavior in the search input as you're describing, too. Sometimes I get auto-suggest appearing after only one keystroke, sometimes it takes two. There seems to be no rhyme or reason, other than after a while I can usually somehow predict when my query will begin to be understood by the suggestion engine.
The inconsistency is really jarring, but just below the threshold where I start looking for another service because of how much it annoys me. Sort of like when my external monitor is physically positioned on the left side of my desk, but every time I plug it into the laptop it gets the virtual location off the right side of my screen.
This is amazing! Thank you! I always get so frustrated when I go to use Google Maps ever since the UI update. The floating drop-down search box infuriates me to no end.
I'm not sure the classic output mode fixes the problems. I still see some street names not showing up, and it still arbitrarily resizes my map and moves around when I do a search, which it never did in the really old versions.
Maps was the one Google app I thought I'd miss when I switched to Blackberry.
And, it is. But Blackberry Maps is soo much nicer for the "just show me where I am on a map" use-case. Street names are shown, and displayed in large font, and the interaction is much faster than GM now. Google Maps has better data and more information like shops and transit... but the experience of using it is frustrating in comparison.
In this new global age, the International Date Line interferes somewhat with nailing down specific dates. In some parts of the world, it's already April 1.
Not all things created have to be useful. Some things can be fun. While we humans may not be the most efficient beings imaginable, we do excel in creativity ;)
