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Comment by TheRealSteel | Hacker News Reader

I'm always so annoyed at Google Maps for not displaying street names. Sometimes it doesn't matter how much you zoom or pan, it just won't show it.

I know it knows them because it announces them just fine during navigation.

Why? What's the point? It's a map. Street names are pretty much the #1 most important thing.

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> Why? What's the point? It's a map. Street names are pretty much the #1 most important thing.

My pet theory here is mislaid/misaligned interests: 90% of Google Maps users are probably using it for automotive navigation, not for identifying cross-streets.

A more strident person would argue that Google is consequently, in part, responsible for reinforcing America's obscene car dependence. I'll leave them to make that argument :-)

If organic maps did traffic, reviews and opening hours I'd never touch google maps again. Literally everything else is worse.

I'm surprised it doesn't do opening hours, as that information is readily available in the OSM tags (though maybe a bit sparsely compared to Google Maps).

As for the rest; yeah I'd love to see a serious effort to get an OMS-based map up to feature parity with Google Maps. Place photos, contacts integration, and the timeline would be big ones for me.

Is is possible but the data is more frequently populated and generally more reliable on google maps.

Google has some sort of system that auto-calls shops, I think, and asks them to verify that their hours are correct.

It's still pretty crap and I'm sure OSM could beat google maps at that game too but it doesn't seem to be a focus.

A lot of that information on Google Maps is, at least partially, crowd-sourced. OSM-based apps could do the same thing (indeed, it's already sort of possible by just editing OSM directly with a separate app), though they don't have nearly as many users as Google Maps does so it wouldn't be quite as effective.

They have less data and their process for crowdsourcing is not as good. For instance, I'm pretty sure google maps validates user inputs by email and by phone if that doesn't work.

I also have a suspicion they put in random data as a means of motivating users to "fix" it where it's wrong. I've gone to one restaurant gmaps has said is open and it's been closed and had lunch at a restaurant next door it said was closed which was open.

Neither one seems to be able to handle stuff like public holiday working hours, odd days off, holidays, etc.

I don't want to say it's always true, but every time I see that (or rather don't see a street name) and investigate it, the name is there, just not on-screen. It's still idiotic design, but if you traverse along the length of a road the name is visible, just elsewhere.

This complaint is interesting to me because in the last few years I've noticed street names have become more and more abundant. For example, I am looking at the 100ft zoom level (what my scale shows in the bottom right) and this street which is 2000 ft long is labeled 9 times. For major rivers there's always a label on screen. This didn't used to be the case for me. I used to have to really work to find labels but now it's very good.

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