What happened to google maps?
If you often use Google Maps, you probably noticed the changes that occurred after the redesign about three years ago. The most noticeable thing is that there are much fewer marks, the cards seem to be empty.
This is how the neighborhood of New York looks compared to the 2010 map.
')
How many cities disappeared from the map? Let's count.
2010 - 46 cities
2016 - 8 cities, that is, a reduction of 83%
It is interesting to see which cities have disappeared from the map. For example, the second largest city in this area, Newark, has disappeared. Anyway, if you take the five largest cities (except for New York), then none of them remained on modern maps, although in 2010 everyone was present: Newark, Yonkers, Paterson and Bridgeport.
The map is so deserted that the nearest city from New York is at a distance of as much as 60 kilometers!
Strange, isn't it?
Let's look at a couple of other areas, did the same happen there? Let's start with Chicago.
The same as in New York, on the 2016 map, there are also fewer tags.
How much less?
Calculate the difference between them.
2010 - 44 cities
2016 - 12 cities, that is, a decrease of 73%
As in the past case, the second largest city in the region (Aurora) disappeared from the 2016 map.
Check out another region to see the trend. This time, the San Francisco Bay Area.
The same as in New York and Chicago.
Especially surprising is the disappearance of Auckland and Berkeley. There is quite a lot of space on the map for them, if you place the name San Francisco to the left of the label, as in the 2010 maps. By the way, here we can make sure that on 2016 maps the text is always positioned strictly above the center of the label. Compare with maps of 2010, where text positioning varied.
The last time we count the number of labels on each card.
2010 - 44 cities
2016 - 10 cities, a decrease of 77%
It is clear that the number of cities on the maps significantly reduced from 2010 to 2016.
But when we looked at the cards, did we notice anything else weird?
If we compare the cards, then another change is noteworthy. While the number of cities has decreased significantly, the number of roads has increased markedly .
Let's take another look at the maps of New York and the surrounding area.
This is the first pair of cards we reviewed. It seems as if in 2016 there has become more expensive than in 2010? Indeed it is.
If you look at Connecticut, you see much more roads.
While many new roads appeared, some of the old roads became higher in status. For example, on Long Island.
Across the map, about 40 roads have increased their status on new maps, compared with 2010. Below they are highlighted in black.
Interestingly, many of the “elevated in status” roads are actually short segments, they are usually not as important as the main highways identified on the old maps of 2010, like I-95 or I-80.
So many roads have been added and so many have become fatter that the 2016 map seems more cluttered in places compared to the 2010 map.
For example, here is the area north of New York, near Yonkers.
In 2010, there were also many roads there, but at least they could be distinguished and tracked separately. In 2016, there is a mess. The roads are so close that they merge with each other, it is difficult to track a specific path.
Take another look at Long Island.
The main highway on Long Island I-495 is clearly highlighted on the 2010 map. But on the map of 2016, this is not so much obvious: there are so many roads, elevated in status, and I-495 among them. Worse, it’s even difficult to say exactly which road corresponds to the “I-495” label.
As Edward Tufti said, “the mess is not an attribute of information, the mess is a design error ... correct the design, and do not clear all the details from the map ”.
On maps, Google Maps seemed to have applied the advice of Tafti, on the contrary between 2010 and 2016. All the roads that became bold orange on the 2016 maps were present there in 2010, but their appearance changed, which made the maps more difficult. Consistency and clarity, which were in 2010, are now gone.
And one moment. None of the “elevated in status” roads is marked.
If they are so important, then why didn't you get your badges with the number? After all, an unmarked road is half as useful.
So, on the maps there are fewer cities and more roads.
I wonder what caused this change?
One thing is clear: today's cards look unbalanced. Too many roads, too few cities.
How to fix it?
Digging deeper ...
At that level of scaling, which we analyze, the whole map represents mainly cities and roads. If you remove them, almost nothing remains.
On the contrary, we will look at the map, where only the cities and roads remained.
Amazing. Although everything was deleted, except for cities and roads, but the map is still similar to the map.
In many ways, the map at the top is a graph in which cities are vertices or nodes of a graph, and roads are connections between vertices, arcs, or edges of a graph.
If you live in a city, that often faced with similar graphs.
Or more famous.
The graphs have a feature. There are no vertices on them that are not connected with other vertices. And the graph has no edges without vertices.
This is exactly what happened with Google Maps between 2010 and 2016.
Take another look at the San Francisco Bay Area.
Did you notice?
2010 - many cities and few roads, so many cities are not connected by roads.
2016 - many roads, but few cities, so some roads do not connect anything.
As a public transport scheme, this is not a very useful map.
Will it be useful as a roadmap?
Let us take a closer look at some areas within the area. First, the area of ​​Pittsburgh and Antioch.
2010 - Pittsburgh and Antiok are on the map, but how to get there? No roads lead to Pittsburgh and Antiok.
2016 - Roads are shown, but cities themselves are not on the map. Why go on these roads? Where do they lead?
On the 2010 maps, Pittsburgh and Antiok represent what cartographers call “hanging cities”. They are not connected by roads with the entire road network.
The same is around Santa Cruz.
It is not clear from both maps how to get from San Francisco (or any other city) to Santa Cruz.
See the problem? Both cards, 2010 and 2016, suffer from a similar disadvantage: lack of balance.
There are many cities on the maps of 2010, but not enough roads.
There are many roads on maps of 2016, but not enough cities.
Ideally, there should be a balance.
A few years ago I lived in Chicago and once I found a great map in a gas station store. Someone made a photo album cover from this card.
I took a few photos, because here is the best example of this concept among all that I have seen (the photos were taken on iPhone 4 in the dark, so I apologize for the quality).
Now compare this map with Google Maps at about the same scale.
Although the map was created in the early 60s, it is much more balanced than the Google map.
Note that there are no hanging cities on the old map. Each city is connected to the road network.
And not only there are no hanging cities, there are also no unnecessary roads. Almost every road is marked, and almost every road has a city . There is no jumble of unmarked roads like on Google Maps. Instead, each road has its own purpose.
Balance is present.
And such a card is incredibly effective.
I took a picture more than five years ago, but I always wondered what the modern version of the old map would look like. Will it be better than Google Maps today?
Let's try a little experiment.
For starters, take today's google maps.
Now we will add cities from the old roadmap of the 60s.
After adding cities, the balance clearly improved.
Now remove all roads that are not on the map of the 60s. Let's leave free freeways (freeways), because many of them have not built yet - but we will get rid of everything else.
After the removal of these roads, it does not seem at all that we have lost something important. And on certain roads it is now much easier to follow the path with your eyes, especially to the north of Chicago.
True, there was one problem: but the remaining roads do not have enough tags.
Take them from the map of the 60s and see what happens.
Now almost every road has a mark, and the map has become more useful.
Finally, compare the result of our upgrade with the current Google Maps.
If I got lost in the area, I know which card I would choose.
In view of the foregoing, I suspect that the reduction in the number of cities on Google Maps is caused by the optimization of maps for mobile devices, and the new roads added so that the maps do not look so deserted. In the end, if there are less tags on the map, then it is faster to evaluate it with a quick look.
Just look at how the number of sold mobile devices and personal computers changed between April 2010 and April 2016, when these screenshots were taken.
During this period, the number of Google Maps users from mobile devices has also exceeded the number of Google Maps users from personal computers.
So it seems that Google Maps has been optimized for mobile access, which explains some of the changes made.
Unfortunately, such "optimization" only aggravated the long-standing problem with the imbalance of the cards.
Google should return some cities to the map, then the maps will become better and more balanced.
Hope they do it.
This is how the neighborhood of New York looks compared to the 2010 map.
')
How many cities disappeared from the map? Let's count.
2010 - 46 cities
2016 - 8 cities, that is, a reduction of 83%
It is interesting to see which cities have disappeared from the map. For example, the second largest city in this area, Newark, has disappeared. Anyway, if you take the five largest cities (except for New York), then none of them remained on modern maps, although in 2010 everyone was present: Newark, Yonkers, Paterson and Bridgeport.
The map is so deserted that the nearest city from New York is at a distance of as much as 60 kilometers!
Strange, isn't it?
Let's look at a couple of other areas, did the same happen there? Let's start with Chicago.
The same as in New York, on the 2016 map, there are also fewer tags.
How much less?
Calculate the difference between them.
2010 - 44 cities
2016 - 12 cities, that is, a decrease of 73%
As in the past case, the second largest city in the region (Aurora) disappeared from the 2016 map.
Check out another region to see the trend. This time, the San Francisco Bay Area.
The same as in New York and Chicago.
Especially surprising is the disappearance of Auckland and Berkeley. There is quite a lot of space on the map for them, if you place the name San Francisco to the left of the label, as in the 2010 maps. By the way, here we can make sure that on 2016 maps the text is always positioned strictly above the center of the label. Compare with maps of 2010, where text positioning varied.
The last time we count the number of labels on each card.
2010 - 44 cities
2016 - 10 cities, a decrease of 77%
It is clear that the number of cities on the maps significantly reduced from 2010 to 2016.
But when we looked at the cards, did we notice anything else weird?
Fewer cities ... but more roads?
If we compare the cards, then another change is noteworthy. While the number of cities has decreased significantly, the number of roads has increased markedly .
Let's take another look at the maps of New York and the surrounding area.
This is the first pair of cards we reviewed. It seems as if in 2016 there has become more expensive than in 2010? Indeed it is.
If you look at Connecticut, you see much more roads.
While many new roads appeared, some of the old roads became higher in status. For example, on Long Island.
Across the map, about 40 roads have increased their status on new maps, compared with 2010. Below they are highlighted in black.
Interestingly, many of the “elevated in status” roads are actually short segments, they are usually not as important as the main highways identified on the old maps of 2010, like I-95 or I-80.
So many roads have been added and so many have become fatter that the 2016 map seems more cluttered in places compared to the 2010 map.
For example, here is the area north of New York, near Yonkers.
In 2010, there were also many roads there, but at least they could be distinguished and tracked separately. In 2016, there is a mess. The roads are so close that they merge with each other, it is difficult to track a specific path.
Take another look at Long Island.
The main highway on Long Island I-495 is clearly highlighted on the 2010 map. But on the map of 2016, this is not so much obvious: there are so many roads, elevated in status, and I-495 among them. Worse, it’s even difficult to say exactly which road corresponds to the “I-495” label.
As Edward Tufti said, “the mess is not an attribute of information, the mess is a design error ... correct the design, and do not clear all the details from the map ”.
On maps, Google Maps seemed to have applied the advice of Tafti, on the contrary between 2010 and 2016. All the roads that became bold orange on the 2016 maps were present there in 2010, but their appearance changed, which made the maps more difficult. Consistency and clarity, which were in 2010, are now gone.
And one moment. None of the “elevated in status” roads is marked.
If they are so important, then why didn't you get your badges with the number? After all, an unmarked road is half as useful.
So, on the maps there are fewer cities and more roads.
I wonder what caused this change?
One thing is clear: today's cards look unbalanced. Too many roads, too few cities.
How to fix it?
Digging deeper ...
Hanging cities and roads to nowhere
At that level of scaling, which we analyze, the whole map represents mainly cities and roads. If you remove them, almost nothing remains.
On the contrary, we will look at the map, where only the cities and roads remained.
Amazing. Although everything was deleted, except for cities and roads, but the map is still similar to the map.
In many ways, the map at the top is a graph in which cities are vertices or nodes of a graph, and roads are connections between vertices, arcs, or edges of a graph.
If you live in a city, that often faced with similar graphs.
Or more famous.
The graphs have a feature. There are no vertices on them that are not connected with other vertices. And the graph has no edges without vertices.
This is exactly what happened with Google Maps between 2010 and 2016.
Take another look at the San Francisco Bay Area.
Did you notice?
2010 - many cities and few roads, so many cities are not connected by roads.
2016 - many roads, but few cities, so some roads do not connect anything.
As a public transport scheme, this is not a very useful map.
Will it be useful as a roadmap?
Let us take a closer look at some areas within the area. First, the area of ​​Pittsburgh and Antioch.
2010 - Pittsburgh and Antiok are on the map, but how to get there? No roads lead to Pittsburgh and Antiok.
2016 - Roads are shown, but cities themselves are not on the map. Why go on these roads? Where do they lead?
On the 2010 maps, Pittsburgh and Antiok represent what cartographers call “hanging cities”. They are not connected by roads with the entire road network.
The same is around Santa Cruz.
It is not clear from both maps how to get from San Francisco (or any other city) to Santa Cruz.
See the problem? Both cards, 2010 and 2016, suffer from a similar disadvantage: lack of balance.
There are many cities on the maps of 2010, but not enough roads.
There are many roads on maps of 2016, but not enough cities.
Ideally, there should be a balance.
A few years ago I lived in Chicago and once I found a great map in a gas station store. Someone made a photo album cover from this card.
I took a few photos, because here is the best example of this concept among all that I have seen (the photos were taken on iPhone 4 in the dark, so I apologize for the quality).
Now compare this map with Google Maps at about the same scale.
Although the map was created in the early 60s, it is much more balanced than the Google map.
Note that there are no hanging cities on the old map. Each city is connected to the road network.
And not only there are no hanging cities, there are also no unnecessary roads. Almost every road is marked, and almost every road has a city . There is no jumble of unmarked roads like on Google Maps. Instead, each road has its own purpose.
Balance is present.
And such a card is incredibly effective.
I took a picture more than five years ago, but I always wondered what the modern version of the old map would look like. Will it be better than Google Maps today?
Let's try a little experiment.
For starters, take today's google maps.
Now we will add cities from the old roadmap of the 60s.
After adding cities, the balance clearly improved.
Now remove all roads that are not on the map of the 60s. Let's leave free freeways (freeways), because many of them have not built yet - but we will get rid of everything else.
After the removal of these roads, it does not seem at all that we have lost something important. And on certain roads it is now much easier to follow the path with your eyes, especially to the north of Chicago.
True, there was one problem: but the remaining roads do not have enough tags.
Take them from the map of the 60s and see what happens.
Now almost every road has a mark, and the map has become more useful.
Finally, compare the result of our upgrade with the current Google Maps.
If I got lost in the area, I know which card I would choose.
In view of the foregoing, I suspect that the reduction in the number of cities on Google Maps is caused by the optimization of maps for mobile devices, and the new roads added so that the maps do not look so deserted. In the end, if there are less tags on the map, then it is faster to evaluate it with a quick look.
Just look at how the number of sold mobile devices and personal computers changed between April 2010 and April 2016, when these screenshots were taken.
During this period, the number of Google Maps users from mobile devices has also exceeded the number of Google Maps users from personal computers.
So it seems that Google Maps has been optimized for mobile access, which explains some of the changes made.
Unfortunately, such "optimization" only aggravated the long-standing problem with the imbalance of the cards.
Google should return some cities to the map, then the maps will become better and more balanced.
Hope they do it.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/282838/
All Articles