Find your favorite locations faster with personalized search.
"Now, if you're signed in with your Google account and have Web History enabled, personalized suggestions can make searching easier and faster by showing you suggestions based on past searches.
This seems like a pretty cool feature, but what happens if you don't have Web History enabled? When Google launched this feature they also removed an existing "Saved Locations" feature that long time Google customers had been using to build a database of saved locations to manage their business, driving direction etc. Needless to say those customers are pissed off that they received no notice or automatic option to migrate from old to new (update: six months later there is no improvement and the browser based form history is still broken).
A Google employee replied "We're looking at the Personalized Suggestions tool, and how we can update it to meet the needs that were filled with Saved Locations." Wait a minute, Google is just doing this now? They removed an old working feature and added a different one that is only enabled when web history without thinking about this first!! The good news is you can extract a saved locations KML file (after some serious prodding) which can be used elsewhere including Bing maps.
Well it turns out the Google engineers didn't test the Web history disabled case either because even standard browser form history is broken. I never used saved locations because the couple of locations I typically referenced where automatically handled by my browser. As I started typing my home address a nice drop down appeared with previously entered values that matched characters I had already typed (hmm sort of like the new functionality). It worked in the map search field, the direction from: or direction to: fields. Now I watch as Google sends every character I type to the back end, only to realize there is nothing there and overrides my previously helpful browser form history with nothing. I manually have to type each address over and over again including the full address. My frequently used locations aren't available as they were before this new functionality was added! Bing maps does not have these issues, and browser form history works fine.
I find myself absolutely blown away that Google would do something like this to alienate two sets of long term customers. In order to enable Web History it must be enabled across all tools so you can't even enable just map web history. I would love to have a Google engineer explain how any of this is faster if web history is disabled! This is a perfect example of how Google does not respect their customer's time and highlights the need for Customer Advocates. Buzz is only the most recent example, am I expecting too much from Google?
I don't know which would be worse, they thought about the customers needs but disregarded them to change functionality or they didn't even think about it!! In other recent cases including comment privacy and removal of ads from feeds displayed in Buzz, those issues have been written off as bugs.. what explains this? I think it goes deeper than buggy code.. conspiracy no, a major disconnect yes!
"Now, if you're signed in with your Google account and have Web History enabled, personalized suggestions can make searching easier and faster by showing you suggestions based on past searches.
This seems like a pretty cool feature, but what happens if you don't have Web History enabled? When Google launched this feature they also removed an existing "Saved Locations" feature that long time Google customers had been using to build a database of saved locations to manage their business, driving direction etc. Needless to say those customers are pissed off that they received no notice or automatic option to migrate from old to new (update: six months later there is no improvement and the browser based form history is still broken).
A Google employee replied "We're looking at the Personalized Suggestions tool, and how we can update it to meet the needs that were filled with Saved Locations." Wait a minute, Google is just doing this now? They removed an old working feature and added a different one that is only enabled when web history without thinking about this first!! The good news is you can extract a saved locations KML file (after some serious prodding) which can be used elsewhere including Bing maps.
Well it turns out the Google engineers didn't test the Web history disabled case either because even standard browser form history is broken. I never used saved locations because the couple of locations I typically referenced where automatically handled by my browser. As I started typing my home address a nice drop down appeared with previously entered values that matched characters I had already typed (hmm sort of like the new functionality). It worked in the map search field, the direction from: or direction to: fields. Now I watch as Google sends every character I type to the back end, only to realize there is nothing there and overrides my previously helpful browser form history with nothing. I manually have to type each address over and over again including the full address. My frequently used locations aren't available as they were before this new functionality was added! Bing maps does not have these issues, and browser form history works fine.
I find myself absolutely blown away that Google would do something like this to alienate two sets of long term customers. In order to enable Web History it must be enabled across all tools so you can't even enable just map web history. I would love to have a Google engineer explain how any of this is faster if web history is disabled! This is a perfect example of how Google does not respect their customer's time and highlights the need for Customer Advocates. Buzz is only the most recent example, am I expecting too much from Google?
I don't know which would be worse, they thought about the customers needs but disregarded them to change functionality or they didn't even think about it!! In other recent cases including comment privacy and removal of ads from feeds displayed in Buzz, those issues have been written off as bugs.. what explains this? I think it goes deeper than buggy code.. conspiracy no, a major disconnect yes!
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