> It's always annoyed me that zooming in on a building will not reliably show the business that operates there.

8-10 years ago it was way more reliable. The decline started with them adding the option to promote a business. Frustrating.

A few days ago I was trying to see if a anything new had taken over a vacant restaurant space yet, previous occupant had closed in July.

When I zoomed in, it would still only show me the Permanently Closed business listing for the old restaurant.

Searching by address, they do have a listing for its replacement. But they were prioritizing the dead restaurant on the map because why would I want to know current info from a map when they can be useless instead?

And it's not like this is a restaurant in the first floor of a tower with a bunch of businesses stacked on top of it competing for map space. It's a single floor, there's only one occupant.

OpenStreetMap-based maps tend to be much better in this regard. Although this is counterbalanced by the fact that they tend to have less data on businesses in general.

> It's always annoyed me that zooming in on a building will not reliably show the business that operates there.

It's actually much worse than that.

I will often see the business name as I'm zooming in, but if I zoom too far, it's no longer available. You have to find "just the right zoom level" for displaying the given business.

As if it were some weird mind game they were playing with you.

A lot of these place names are user-created and I’ve definitely seen completely wrong and bogus place names on Google Maps. It seems that they hide a lot of these when the business owner doesn’t actively take control of the business page. I suppose it’s partly for accuracy, partly to encourage businesses to verify the listing on their maps.

Click on the building, it populates “businesses at this address” - at least, when I’ve tried.

There are two 40-floors buildings nearby to each other in Tbilisi, Georgia, that are missing on Google Maps. All businesses have to put POI just "somewhere". One man from Google told me that there are staff members responsible for Georgia maps but they are chilling :)

Even trying to see the street name has a very high probability of failure, so I don't know what you expect.

I don't know about other countries, but in Japan, maps will show underground passages from e.g. the metro, with exit annotated with their numbers...

Unfortunately, not all numbers are shown, even when all the exits are non-overlapping at the displayed zoom level.

information density of online maps is, in general, quite low compared to old paper maps: https://x.com/patrickc/status/1738646361128792402

I guess there's various reasons, ranging from "it's hard to make auto-layout algos produce stuff as dense as painstakingly handcrafted maps" to "let's make it harder to scrape/copy data"

The most annoying thing is when you search for instance for "Chinese restaurants" and Google maps shows me Japanese restaurants while hiding actual Chinese restaurants.

Its not possible to be better because its not possible for even Google or Apple to verify anything anyone claims which is not static btw. The info keeps changing all the time with biz disputes/divorces/inheritence wars etc etc.

>I am forced to go to street view to read the sign, then type the company name into the search box to force the business marker to show up and get clickable. I've found Apple Maps is a little better in this regard.

the way you juxtapose them calls for pointing out, Apple Maps don't have streetview which makes Apple Maps a lot less convenient.