Hacker News Reader

Comment by omalleyt | Hacker News Reader

It's showing him Wawas he's been to before. That's what the clocks mean.

For the search "wawa" it doesn't make a lot of sense to prioritize history over distance, because Wawas are nearly identical. But for "farmer's markets" this would probably be a useful feature.

Figuring out how to differentiate between those two examples algorithmically is super non-trivial though

View on HN

This is incorrect: the clocks mean he has selected those search results before, not that he has physically been there.

Source: Just tested this in-app.

Oof, that's really bad if that's the case; it means that a mis-click can poison your search results and make them less useful.

I get that Google's all about saving clicks now, but I've noticed between maps and other apps (Google Music comes to mind) the extra inference sometimes just makes me scared to click on things.

Can you at least long press or something to remove a location from your history?

This is usually true for any big website you browse on the internet. Any click on Facebook or Amazon is influencing the content you're going to see.

Google has a user history website where you can see everything they recorded from Search and other apps, and you can delete the entries

This is one of my biggest pet peeves with modern recommendation systems. It's like somebody decided "no, the user can't click a 'show-me-more-like-this' button, it has to be automatic" and now I have to treat every website like I'm doing reinforcement training with a cat.

But at least with AI there's something marginally close to an excuse, because you need a ton of data to make it work. With maps it's just plain and simple bad UX design, I can't think of any reason why locations shouldn't be sorted by last visited instead of last clicked.

> Google has a user history website

From a usability standpoint, if it's not accessible from the same same interface where your results are displayed, then it doesn't exist.

Just like in Google Search, it still makes sense to show the results he was interested in previously even though he's not been there.

Maybe he looked at a location first for information, and to know where it is, and needs to look for it again at a later time to actually go there.

Why did they choose the clock symbol to represent this?

Probably to convey recency. What other symbol would you choose?

Even if it gives history priority, there's still something a bit peculiar about the arrangement; it's not sorting by distance within history, but rather probably sorting history hits by recency. That's the sort of thing I think of as "programmer logical" rather than "common sense logical." If I search for "tiki bar" when I'm in Oakland, it's all well and good to remember that I also ran that search when I was in Portland, but it should probably show me a few tiki bars in and around Oakland, and give rather low priority to letting me know it's only 632 miles to Hale Pele.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com