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With Google Maps I will know about a Maverik gas station that is on my route that I know I want to stop at. I'll search for it "along my route" and I get a bunch of other gas stations that I don't want.

I suspect they are prioritizing the other gas station brands because they paid for preference, and selected "Maverik" as one of their keywords, but the impact to me is that the exact thing I searched for doesn't come up even though I know it's there because I've stopped there before.

If somebody gives me a simple maps product algorithm that just shows me what I'm asking for without preferencing paid people using key words and I'll likely switch. I've loved Google for many years but they are getting much worse.

Perhaps one day they, or a competitor, will do a ‘Maps Premium’ that simply charges the user inserted of all the ads, targeting, etc. And maybe a ‘Maps Premium+’ that allows for customization and going back to the peak usability design of Maps.

The problem is the higher-level decision makers having fully internalized "never leave money on the table". If there is a premium paid product, it will later have advertising added to it, and results prioritized, because that is an additional source of revenue. Never mind that it defeats the entire purpose of using the premium in the first place.

The second level is that customers know that this will happen, and don't bother looking into the more expensive options. Why bother paying a premium when you get the same poor experience out of it?

The third level happens when market research shows that people are not willing to pay for a premium product. This gets erroneously attributed to people preferring cheap ad-ridden junk, rather than being a response to markets producing expensive ad-ridden junk. (Side note, I despise the concept of "revealed preferences" for this reason.)

Your right in that there are people who have near sighted foolish thoughts like that. The truly impressive folks, if they’re around, will see past that kind of nonsense. Someone who doesn’t subscribe to another’s dogma in Steve Job’s words.

I wish there was a premium product that I could pay for. I’d pay an annual fee if the search is accurate, supports offline, has good navigation and supports CarPlay. Right now I use Apple Maps for online navigation and Here maps for offline. Neither does a good job of search. And both suck to different extent with navigation. Navigation is so crucial to us these days it’s totally worth paying for. I have been using Apple Maps for a few years now and it has gotten a ton better than it used to be. If that continues it’ll be part of the Apple tax and I’d be glad to continue as an Apple customer.

Adding to the anecdata, this was actually infuriating recently while I was on a road trip. I was searching along my route for gas stations and it seemed to be prioritizing Chevron stations. I ended up at a sketchy gas station in the middle of nowhere where half the pumps didn't work and the other half had broken card readers. Come to find out there was a Love's less than 5 miles up the road, right off the highway, with clean restrooms and working amenities.

Was also having this recently. Apple for some reason was failing at finding anything along the main stretches of highway I was on (with pit stop style gas/convenience combos) whereas Google was recommending gas 5 minutes off the highway but also recommending Subway which was located in the pitstops with the lesser known gas so then I'm just searching for Subway to find the rest stations instead of gas...

> An example: I recently searched for "photography repair" in my area and Apple gave me film developing places and local event photographers, Google gave me (I kid you not, first result) McDonalds and Best Buy.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but your results might have been more satisfying if you had searched using the term “camera repair”.

I wouldn't even expect a camera repair business to exist, much less be able to find it on a search in a map app.

Yeah bit of a brain fart when I wrote this, I probably searched for that but I tried a couple of terms in each.

Actually I probably was searching "photography" at some point because "camera" was bringing up general retail more and I was hoping an actual repair business would hav photography as a keyword more than a retail business would. Just further illustrates how frustrating this is.

I agree, I’ve often found smaller or less “online” businesses (e.g. a local car stereo shop) on Google that Maps doesn’t surface. But I usually just search for these in a browser anyway, and open Maps when I actually want to navigate there.

I made it a habit to report all missing businesses/locations on Apple Maps I find via other means. Mostly for my own convenience but also to help others/those businesses.