I feel like I’m going nuts because this should be SUCH a simple feature, but I swear they have done away with it or at least made it super convoluted.

I’m going to a restaurant in a city 40 miles from me, and want to find the closest movie theater to said restaurant. I pull up the restaurant on Maps, but there’s no option to “search nearby places” for a location that I’m not currently in. Even if I drop a pin on the restaurant and then put “movie theater” in the search bar under what should be the same search session, it removes the pin and just searches theaters. What am I missing here? This seems ridiculous.

Say i search for a restaurant, on the right of the search it would show some pictures and maps, and when you click on the maps it would take you to maps.google.com with the searched location. For the last couple of weeks that map is just an image.

In all fairness it didn't work properly before as well as it would open like an embedded version of maps where you couldn't see say business details or pictures.

Now the only way to search someplace is going to maps.google.com and looking there.

Is there a way to work around this?

I've been using Google Maps lists for the better part of a year to log restaurants and other places that I go to eat (noting down the date, what I had, etc.). As the list got longer and I visited restaurants more than once, I wanted the order of the list to stay in the order of the date I first went to it, hence I began using the "Editor's order" feature. Put simply, visiting restaurant A, then B, then C, and then B again would keep the order A, B, C in the Editor's order, rather than A, C, B, if I sorted by last edited.

However, as the list has got longer strange things have started to occur. The list has now seemingly become completely random, with restaurants from months ago being on top, new additions being inserted randomly in the middle of the list, old spots being scattered and out of order etc. I can't for the life of me figure it out.

When I click "Edit List" on the mobile app (iOS) it sometimes shows a completely different order to what is displayed on the normal list screen. When I hit save, changes that I make do not save, but the list usually is randomly reordered into something different again.

I've searched around online and can't seem to find anyone running into this issue - I know that the Lists feature is widely criticised for its lack of features and usability but I believe this is a feature that isn't working as intended. I'm wondering if anyone has come across this issue, and potentially what the alternative options are if anyone else uses lists like I do? (besides the obvious "send a request to Google Support"). I'm open to using a different app but clearly naively figured that Google Maps was up to the task.

Side note: I know that everywhere online says that you can't edit lists in the web browser on desktop, but I distinctly remember doing it and it working flawlessly (but I can't anymore). Either I was part of some AB testing or I'm in Black Mirror's Bête Noire episode (and no, it wasn't on https://www.google.com/interests/saved which doesn't save properly either for me - it was on the Google Maps website).