Google Maps’s 2016 Redesign
“Cartography Comparison: Google & Apple Maps” Update
2016
Just a few weeks after our Comparison, Google has refreshed its cartography:
What’s changed? And how many of our earlier observations are still true?
Let’s take one of our cities (San Francisco) and do a quick sweep across each zoom, starting with z2:
Here at z2, the changes are subtle: the water color is slightly different and the coastline effect has been removed. But apart from that, everything looks the same as before.
Let’s go to the next zoom…
Again we see the same things as before.
And the same at z4...
In fact, if we look at the first half of our San Francisco zooms…
…we see all the same things as before:
Not a single label has changed across the first nine zooms. And it isn’t until z11 that there are any label changes at all...
Across our remaining zooms, we see a number of other label changes:
So with all of the changes, how different is the map now?
Let’s count the number of label changes on each zoom:
Across all of our zooms, 28 labels were added, while 38 other labels were removed—giving us 66 changes total.
But even with these 66 changes, only five zooms have different label totals than before:
So what’s being added and removed?
Let’s divide the map’s labels into seven categories...
...and count the changes:
Just four kinds of labels saw changes: Cities, City Sub-Areas, Roads, and Places.
But spread out across all of our zooms, none of these changes seems particularly noticeable. In fact, the map’s overall character is nearly the same as before:
And even when tallying the map’s Places, we see the same general mix:
So how can there be so many changes (66 in all), and yet the map looks the same as before?
What seems to have happened is that most of the additions and subtractions we saw earlier have simply cancelled each other out.
So from a content perspective, there’s been little change as to what’s on the map: the same kinds of things are on the map and in nearly the same amounts. So all of our earlier observations from our Comparison remain true—at least for now...
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It’s surprising that so little has changed. Then again, this is exactly what Google does with its redesigns—i.e., it makes slow, gradual changes and never changes anything too quickly.
So if history is any guide, Google will likely make more changes in the months ahead...