Google's Maps search ranking doesn't seem sophisticated to me. In fact it seems unbelievably naive. Ranking is Google's core business and yet they seem to forget how to do it when a map is involved.

When I want to find something that's actually good, I use this site: https://top-rated.online. At first glance it looks like an unremarkable SEO spam site, but it's actually a great way to get properly ranked Google Maps reviews. It uses proper Bayesian ranking, so it won't show you a 5 star place with two reviews over a 4.9 star place with 2,000 reviews, as Google often will. And it has good sorting and filtering options so you can, for example, filter or sort by number of reviews.

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xandrius 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Maps's search as a whole is terrible even from a UX perspective: search something with some filters, realise that you want to change a letter in the search? Byebye filters.

Some filters are available with a specific subset of words but not with another.

Zoom in a location, look for a common word? There are good chances it will zoom out and send you to the other side of the globe instead. Then pan back, hit "Search in this area" and bam it works.

Some devices can make reviews and some can't (tested on different devices, even Google ones).

Search for a specific word which might be in a review (say, "decaf") and you get even stuff which doesn't even remotely contain the word (I'd expect an empty result if no place has mentioned my keyword).

And many more.

It's just insane how a huge company just seem focused in making a "good enough" experience instead of being the leader. Maybe it's for the best but if they went 1 sprint/quarter into "let's fix glaring BS UX issues in our products", they would probably destroy so many alternatives out there.

Maybe it's on purpose to avoid some anti-trust kind of response? We'll never know.

	▲	modeless 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Years ago I worked on the Google Maps team. IMO Google has underinvested in Maps UI for a long time due to a lack of competition and a lack of appreciation for the value of the product because the amount of direct revenue attributable to it is low. It's practically in maintenance mode.

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LocalH 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No, advertising is Google's core business.

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shalmanese 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I've said for decades that Google is terrible at search in every area except Google Search. Youtube search? Terrible! Chrome history search? Abysmal! Gmail search? Atrocious! Google Maps Search? At some point, standing in a middle of a mall searching for "coffee" returned only 3 SERPs despite me standing in front of a coffeeshop that I could not get to show up.

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dieortin 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

SERP = Search Engine Results Page. I’m pretty sure what you mean is simply “3 results”, and not “3 search engine result pages”

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DeathArrow 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>I've said for decades that Google is terrible at search in every area except Google Search.

From my point of view Google Search is terrible, too. Is hard to find relevant results, you mostly get results optimized to make money, or junk. You have to explore tens or hundreds of results to find the needle in the haystack.

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modeless 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I find YouTube search to be serviceable. At least it has decent filtering and sorting options. Gmail search is just OK, but I haven't found anything much better. Chrome history search, though, is completely worthless. Especially since it got merged into that myactivity thing that is utter garbage, completely non-functional for any purpose. There's so much potential in searching a complete history of everything you've ever personally seen online, and it would make Chrome more sticky. Incredible fumble by Google here.

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shalmanese 3 days ago | parent [-]

Youtube search does a baffling thing where it shows you 5 SERPs, then a bunch of unrelated things it thinks you like, then another 5 SERPs. It used to only show you the top 5 SERPs before switching to "suggested videos" for the rest of the scroll. Truly a terrible product when that was the design.

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jerlam 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Youtube is not in the business of giving you accurate search results or information. It's now in the business of getting you to watch any video, related or not to your query, in order to serve you ads.

	▲	Workaccount2 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> It's now in the business of getting you to watch any video, related or not to your query, in order to serve you ads. Youtube was in this business from day 1. Even before Google. Youtube was never going to be anything other than an ad-platform with videos to lure in the products. Vid.me tried to be a video platform with videos to lure in users, but it went bankrupt, because nobody wanted to pay and nobody wanted to watch ads.
	▲	data_marsupial 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It is a very crude method for injecting diversity into search results (and the browsing experience). It can't be turned off and still shows up even if very specific search terms are used. Hard to believe it is the best possible video search implementation for their ad serving goals.

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vintermann 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They fear tiktok is outcompeting them with even more aggressive attention hijacking, I guess, so they can't resist showing up something "This wasn't what you were looking at but can I get you to click it?"

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charcircuit 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

To be fair those "unrelated" videos are sometimes videos I'm also interested in, sometimes more than what I'm searching for.

	▲	fsckboy 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		>To be fair those "unrelated" videos are the unrelated videos it shows me are so far from anything I'm interested in that I can only conclude it's showing both of us the same stuff, just lowest common denominator popularity. >videos I'm also interested in, sometimes more than what I'm searching for therefore, based on my argument, you must have horrible taste