I think this may be a 'bug': as you zoom into the US west coast, SAN is visible before LAX. But LAX serves much more people every day, so a random person is much more likely to care about LAX. Intuitively, it seems to me that LAX should show up first. That could be intentional, but I can't think of a good reason why that choice would be made.
Google Maps has had this bug with street names not revealing based on any rational priority at varying zoom levels.. for like a decade.
I'm going to start using this as an interview question for people to solve.
If you think this is an easy problem to solve, here's an old article that discusses some of the challenges in doing so:
https://medium.com/google-design/google-maps-cb0326d165f5
I don't think it's an easy problem to solve at all, that's why I quipped about making it an interview problem. :) In an interview, I'm just interested in hearing people talk through trying to solve difficult problems. Getting to a solution is incidental. And it's way more fun when I don't know of a go-to solution, either.
Similar in Australia, BNE shows up before SYD.
Edit: actually it's even weirder. Here's the zoom levels I see, from zoomed out, to zoomed in:
- BNE, MEL
- BNE, SYD, MEL
- BNE, CBR, MEL (??)
- BNE, SYD, CBR, MEL
Haha I came in to write the exact same thing. Such a weird choice
This screams vibe-coded slop. Think about it, if you were to implement zoom based detail level, you would have to try hard to introduce a bug on line 3, yet it happens to hit prod.
Yet, this thread is full of people defending this pre-alpha quality thing.
Not only that, but airports blink in-and-out of existence as you zoom or pan the map around. It can't even decide if it wants to show a certain airport or not.
I think the map is biased towards airports with the most disruptions, not the largest.