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TIL that @organicmaps has a (very WIP, but still) desktop app, and so now I can produce side-by-side comparisons. Voilà the query for "café" in #Toulon Note also how the information is shown much more explicitly on the OrganicMaps view. The google map only becomes useful to #bike / #pedestrian once you zoom all the way in. Somehow their designers seem to be afraid of contrast or sth. 🤷 I just love how #OSM is so much better, thanks to all involved! 🫶 9 comments
Note also that I as a user can (and do) use this map as a note-taking device: every time I find a shop that I'd like to re-visit, I make sure I have them on the map, incl opening hours and other contacts. @streetcomplete and @everydoor are great tools for this, but @organicmaps also allows doing this straight from the app! 😍 This way, every time I write some of this down for my own use, everyone can profit from it.  Hmm indeed, if I wanted a map that keeps me "engaged" by drip-feeding me the info I want, and/or if I was bad enough (without making that a value judgement) at reading a map that OSM would overwhelm me, then google might be my map of choice. Fortunately for me, neither is the case. 🙂 @mdione @organicmaps on the other hand, I'm not entirely sure what the excuse would be not not return "Café Columbus", a coffee shop, when I search for "café" and the list of results does not even fill one page. If I was the owner of that café, I'd be pretty pissed and wondering what kind of bribe is being demanded here. @mmcm @organicmaps I'm not sure all people using gmaps would feel overwhelmed by OSM, but it's definitely in Google's interest give you a default service that also gives them data. Think of it this way: every month we read about one or other Google service being shut down. Why? Because it's not part of the cash cow. They tried and didn't return enough data. Maps and Earth very expensive toys, and yet I don't think it will ever be killed. In a less expensive way, gmail is similar. @mmcm @organicmaps ... but that sometimes OSM has better data in indisputable. One thing I can say, most of the time, gmaps has a better search UX. @mdione @organicmaps search UX as in UI interaction, yes. But google these days fails to find extremely simple and relevant results for which they *do* have the data (see example in my thread) and I have no idea how their engineers/PMs justify that besides "that company didn't pay us to advertise." I've been noticing this for over a year now that gmaps will say "end of results" for searches like "restaurant" when clearly within my viewport there are dozens of restaurants that they have data for |
Gregory's Server
@organicmaps note that google returned only SIX results here. Out of which one is out of business and one is a duplicate. Which leaves us with four.
@organicmaps returned ~25 results, and while not all of them are strictly-speaking cafés, most of them would be fine to sit down for a coffee, or have an obvious relation like having "Café" in the name.
It's insane that google even fails to find shops like "Columbus Café" which is a french competitor to Starbucks, and which they *do* know about.