Sunday, January 12, 2014

Google Maps Business Hour Glitch

Project Status: Product Bug

With Google Maps you can look up a local business and view the hours of operation. The problem is that the focus is always pulled to the current day instead of the current time. Hours that extend through the end of the day are only seen as a part of the day the time block opened on and the morning hours never relate to the correct day as they should.

In the case that a business stays open past midnight (as in the pictured example where one actually closes at 3:30 AM) and it is after midnight at the time a user looks up the business hours, Google Maps will actually report the business as closed.

In the pictured example provided at 1:54 AM (using the android Google Maps app, version 7.5.0), Sunday becomes the focus and these overlapping hours are ignored. This business should be searchable as "open" rather than appearing as "closed" when using the Google Maps search box with terms such as "open restaurants near me" but the glitch appears to propagate through there as well. It is hard to say for sure though because many other factors are effecting the search results list.

The average user wouldn't have even noticed this glitch, but the night owls like myself sometimes need to find open locations to get their grub on.

If you also believe this is an issue then feel free to check out this post (Issue 102) on Google's Map Engine issue tracker. You can star the issue to help it get resolved sooner, the more stars the more important it is seen as to the Google Map Engine team. You can also watch the post on the issue tracker to keep up to date with the status of the issue, once you star the post you will be notified of any updates to the issue.