[Ycdr4thfdd]

What's even worse is that often I'll click "restaurants", zoom in all the way, and then click "Search this area", yet Google will still refuse to show some popular restaurant, even when there are no other restaurants displayed in the window.

The only way to get those restaurants to show up is to search them by name.

Not sure if they're intentionally penalizing certain restaurants, but it's pretty bad.

[pbnjeh]

Been noticing this, myself. E.g. for a local used bookstore that's reasonably popular and has been there for decades. I know the owner and can guess -- though I haven't asked -- that they aren't giving Google much if any money.

So, no Maps presence for you! (Except via direct search within Maps.) Just my anecdotal experience, but one of several similar on Maps that leave me thinking they "have that feel" to them.

[vidanay]

Also the "cuisine" filters for restaurants appears to be completely irrelevant. You will still get results for Chinese restaurants even though you have selected "Pizza".

[KMag]

It would seem that the revenue-optimizing ML has learned that the median user could really go for Chinese take-out right about now (for all values of now), no matter what sort of food they started out looking for, so it's always going to show up.

I know median and mediocrity already share a common root, but I wish there were a clever portmanteau describing ML-optimizing for the median user leading to a mediocre experience. "Medianocre" just sounds like an eggcorn, so I presume 99% of readers would take it as a mistake instead of a neologism.

[lancesells]

FWIW Apple does the same thing to me in my neighborhood. I live in Brooklyn where there are restaurants on every block but it'll zoom out and show ~15 restaurants scattered over a mile with half in Manhattan. Pretty unusable.

[manicennui]

I don't think that they understand how people in NYC and Chicago live. It is designed for people who are driving everywhere.

[rattray]

Have you found anything better for the area? This frustrates me too...

[Symbiote]

OpenStreetMap has at least some of the data: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/40.67540/-73.95641

so an interface could be made to present it better: without being zoomed in so much, with filters and so on.

I know of https://www.toiletmap.org.uk/ which does this for public toilets.

I just found this which has an example for restaurants in one town: http://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/where-to-eat-in-middlebu...

[Ycdr4thfdd]

I love OSM and use it all the time for hiking, but even though their restaurant and hotel listings have good coverage, they're sadly not much use to me without the reviews.

Short of scraping reviews from Google and importing them into OSM for the area in which I'm traveling, I'm not sure there is a good short-term solution.

[agentgumshoe]

Guess those ones just aren't paying their google taxes...

[asielen]

I really hate when I click search this area and it zooms out to a larger area.

I specifically had an area selected for a reason. I know there are plenty of restaurants there. I don't need it to tell me to look somewhere else.

[ju-st]

I get much better results by clicking on the text input field and pressing enter every time after moving/zooming instead of clicking on "search this area".