I read a blog which hails Google Maps, so I thought I’d drop my comment there, but it Blogger asked me to register first to make a comment – so I thought I’d post it here.

Usually graduates from Google Labs are model netizens – clean, white, neatly dressed, not too graphic but perfectly groomed to be usable right out of the box (Froogle, Image Search etc) – but after using Google Maps for a while I was frustrated by some of its responses. Yes, its fast, its easy, its great, it uses AJAX, it has kick ass satellite views… but is it really intuitive and user-friendly?

1. It needs to default to Driving Directions

   80% of the time you go to an online map site to check driving directions from point A to B, not to gawk at plain old maps. To give out dynamic Driving Directions is its primary use, looking at a Map is its secondary use, so that should be it default.

   Worse still – If you do input a address 1, North First Street, San Jose , CA - and click on DIRECTIONS it wipes out your carefully typed address! Can’t u at least transfer it over in To: field?

2. Search in context

   Google is smart – no doubt, you input 34/8 it is smart enough to understand it might be a mathematical equation and displays the numerical result. But its cousin is plain dumb.

   If you say get me directions from…

   1, North First Street, San Jose , CA [to]
2, North First Street

   … it comes back and asks WHERE?? where ? where do you think? its next door dummy! search in context! scan the neighboring zip codes and see if you can find a match… Check the primary city first, then move to the suburbs (upto 200mile radius) and see if that makes sense.

   Agreed, ‘North First Street’ is a pretty common street name, you might find it in:

   Santa Clara, CA (4 miles),
   San Diego,CA (500 miles),
   Austin,TX (2000 miles),
   Miami,FL (3000 miles),
   even London, UK.

   Now, commonsense should dictate that I don’t plan to drive across the Atlantic so London is out, now you have the same street name in a city which is 500 miles, 2000 miles, 3000 miles and 4 miles. So now first check if the address makes sense in the originating city (San Jose), if it is not found in San Jose – move to Santa Clara, CA then offer the other cities as ‘links’ (Did you mean ‘North First Street, San Diego?’).

   But can u guess what Google thought? it thought that I was driving from San Jose to United Kingdom. This is the single response I got

   Did you mean:
First Street, North Lanarkshire, G71, UK


   Duh! That’s not mighty smart, is it…?