My most hated Google Maps misfeature: I'm zoomed in and I want to find a restaurant near the corner I'm looking at. Or, in this case, I'm looking at the restaurant's building on Street View but they don't have a sign and I don't remember what it's called.
You can't get there from here.
The phone version (PalmOS, at least) realizes that you want to see things near here, but the web page doesn't. No matter what you search for, it zooms you out to "city view" (if you're lucky: sometimes you get the whole continent.)
How much more context could I possibly give than the area I am already looking at? Why does it zoom out all the time! Gaah!
WTF, Google.
For those just tuning in:
Right-click where you want to look near, select "Center Map here", then type your query.
I agree with the complaint, but in the hopes of offering a work around: if you are zoomed in and want to find something, you can ask for 'awesome restaurant near embarcadero and broadway, san francisco, ca' or whatever. It'll still zoom out, but it will at least center results around the intersecion.
Try searching for * when zoomed in on the spot:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=*&sll=37.793978,-122.407509&sspn=0.001242,0.002843&ie=UTF8&ll=37.794235,-122.407509&spn=0.001242,0.002843&z=19
That's my new favorite Google trick, thanks! Are there any other search boxes where [*] is particularly useful? Or, are there any other arbitrary characters that do special things on Maps?
thanks for that!
Wow, there's an oboe repair business across the street from my house.
I was certain from that that it would be possible to track down
precisely where you lived, but remarkably it was not.
[don't worry. not a creep. just avoiding work.]
http://digitalinspiration.com/community/location.html
Holy shit. I was about to complain that queries like "123 Where I'm At Road, 12345 to Business near City, ST" still don't work, but they've finally fixed that, probably within the past few weeks. Hallelujah.
Now I'll just wonder why "123 Streetname Road to 456 Roadname Street, 12345" (the last number being a zipcode) still won't assume that "Streetname Road" is probably in the city described by zipcode 12345. The same thing happens if you use the city and state but only specify it once at the end of the query.
Natural language can be hard, but if it's smart enough to get that far, it could stop showing me results 3 states away when trying to disambiguate the first part of the query with the city and state not specified. (In fact, for my location, it's asking me if I meant addresses three states away, but *not* the one in the town I'm in.)
I blame the fact that somewhere there is a street with the word "to" in its name.
Hmmm.... works for me!
Can you give examples where this doesn't work?
Your example doesn't have streets with the word "to" in their name. No, I don't know of any such streets, but given the diversity of street names, I can't believe that none exist.
2100 Western Ave to 401 Elliott Ave W, 98119 fails in this precise way.
Maybe that's because those two addresses are not in the same zipcode? Google thinks the first address is in 98121.
Try it with the city, state instead of the zipcode. For my locale it gives the same nationwide results.
re: "names with to in them," I agree that it would never be perfect, but for addresses with numbers in them you just have to match an occurrence of 'to [0-9]', and if the string lacks that, take the text after the last 'to' and try it as a business.
I'm actually surprised how much work they've put into ignoring punctuation. For instance, the following mess of multiple-word names with no street names actually produces a flawless result:
123 broadway new york new york to 123 san andreas los angeles california
Er, s/street names/street-indicating-words-or-suffixes. (Street, St., Dr., Ave...)
Someone find some streets with "to" in their names to cram in there.
I don't know if such a street exists, but in Portland, there's an "Interstate Avenue" that really fucks things up.
Hey jwz,
I ran across this post and would love to look into it for you. Can you let me know what search queries you used when you saw these results? This will help us to investigate.
Thanks,
Maps Guide Jen
http://maps.google.com
Um... this is weird. It's not doing it any more. Perhaps one of your cohorts has already fixed it? Because I swear, last week (and last year) it didn't work this way! Here's what I did just now:
Is it possible that someone fixed this last week? Because I know I didn't imagine this... It consistently did that "zooming out" thing for me all last year.
Ok, wait, here's an example of it screwing up.
So there you have it. Maybe it's street view that makes it lose its location context.