Google Maps must have purchased a new suite of road information recently. Or maybe they algorithmically tried to “improve” the dataset they had. Used to be it knew local geography pretty well; now, not so much.

When asking for directions from our farm (on Walsh Road, Webster Township) to the Dairy Queen in Hamburg Township, the driving (not walking!) algorithm suggests we stay on northbound Scully. If you saw it from a distance, the satellite image would lead you to believe that, yes.

Except that many years’ fierce argument at the county border has left a nasty but potent gate blocking the road, which will persist into the foreseeable future.

If you were to drive up the rough, mainly untended Scully Road on a snowy day, trying to get (say) to a hospital in Pinckney or something, the least that would happen is you’d waste a half-hour trying to back out of the last few hundred yards without ending up in a ditch… once you arrived at the impassable gate at the border, and well after you had trespassed on a private road at the end.

The De Lorme Michigan Atlas & Gazetteer, a nice old printed book I keep in my car, and which is so obsolete that it shows little red lines for roads of all sizes and characters, manages to catch the gap.

Now every dataset contains errors or missing information. But every time that dataset is used to make a single, summary statement, based on a single model? Badness can happen in unexpected ways. In fact, I am obliged to be curmudgeonly about it because of my professional experience in these matters: it is always wrong to present a single answer for any multi-objective or highly constrained decision-making problem. Big, fat period.

I can’t complain, in all honesty, about advice given by a black box operations-research algorithm that on inspection I knew was incorrect. You get what you pay for. But I can complain about a cultivating a misleading user experience in a ubiquitous data-driven decision support system that presents only one solution at a time to the decision-maker. Hell, every iPhone in the world has one of these on it; they’re all wrong, too.

No, I don’t think I am feeling lucky, Google. And you didn’t even ask.

I want to see a sheaf of routes. The little “adjust the route and recalculate a new one using my milestones” handles Google introduced a few years back are a beautiful thing, a cunning artifact and a useful tool! And of course, the standard “avoiding highway” or “fastest” toggles let me reach in and fiddle with the search method. But only indirectly.

I want the objectives right there, not combined. I want not just to surface the meter (to use a phrase Dan Cooney’s taught me), but surface all of them. I want choices coupled to clearly differentiable supporting arguments.

Like the basic Google Search results themselves: ten routes at a time, ranked somehow. Or not even ranked, but handed to me as a Pareto-equivalent set of alternatives, some faster, some bumpier, some with bigger roads, some with more gas stations, some more scenic. Heck, maybe I just want to know there are at least ten ways to go back and forth, so I can stage a race, or not get bored on my commute, or defend against unwanted SUV invasion by a foreign county or something.

At least sometimes. Stop assuming I’m feeling lucky.

Next time, we can bitch about the misleading user experience and illusory authority created by the fuckin’ weather forecast format. Everybody complains about the weather forecast, but nobody does anything about it.

Lather, rinse, repeat.