[sorenjan]

It depends on what you're using it for. Maybe it's the best for finding things like restaurants, looking up business hours, reviews, things like that. Basically a spatial view of points of interests. But as a map I find it very lacking, mainly because of their color scheme, but they're also missing data lite small roads, paths, small lakes. White roads on light gray is difficult to see, and overall it's very low contrast. Which is strange, because they have bragged multiple times of using ML to automatically classify areas and coloring them correctly, but it's only used when zoomed out.

Compare these images and see which map style you prefer: https://imgur.com/a/419XB50

[frosted-flakes]

Here Maps is best out of those screenshots, but none of them are great.

What I can't stand about Google Maps is how it hides so much stuff if you're not zoomed in 1000x. The worst time was when I was trying to trace a 100km long logging road in northern British Columbia to get to a provincial camp site on a lake, but as soon as I zoomed out to get a broader picture it would disappear. Even though that was the only road within a 15 km radius. Nope, you can only see a 1km section at a time, and it's so thin and low-contrast that it's barely visible.

[mdtusz]

Next time you need to map out roads like that, try Caltopo. For any _map_ use cases, things like Caltopo and Gaia are miles better. Google Maps is great for following directions they give you, or finding businesses and well known places, but it's a horrible map in any other context.

[Macha]

There is of course a reason for Google maps very low contrast visual style, the focus is not on being a road map: https://www.justinobeirne.com/a-year-of-google-maps-and-appl...