Posted by justincormack 1 day ago
I've found Apple Maps is a little better in this regard. They show a higher density of business markers at any given zoom level.
the way you juxtapose them calls for pointing out, Apple Maps don't have streetview which makes Apple Maps a lot less convenient.
Google street view has the 2d overlay letting you know where there is coverage, shows the date taken along with previous imagery, and they have coverage nearly everywhere in the US at a least, although some of its pretty old.
Apple Maps does seem to have more up to date satellite / aerial imagery though.
Hard to overstate how valuable all that street view coverage is on the Google side.
When I want to find something that's actually good, I use this site: https://top-rated.online. At first glance it looks like an unremarkable SEO spam site, but it's actually a great way to get properly ranked Google Maps reviews. It uses proper Bayesian ranking, so it won't show you a 5 star place with two reviews over a 4.9 star place with 2,000 reviews, as Google often will. And it has good sorting and filtering options so you can, for example, filter or sort by number of reviews.
the unrelated videos it shows me are so far from anything I'm interested in that I can only conclude it's showing both of us the same stuff, just lowest common denominator popularity.
>videos I'm also interested in, sometimes more than what I'm searching for
therefore, based on my argument, you must have horrible taste
Instead, I'd love for Google to understand me well enough to show me which restaurants I would disproportionately love compared to other people based on its understanding of my taste profiles. That way, the love can be shared amongst a much wider base of restaurants and each distinctive restaurant could find its 10,000 true fans.
On top of that, it actually gives me an incentive to rate things. Right now, you only rate from some vague sense of public service instead of "this can actively improve your experience with our product".
It's not just Google Maps, Netflix used to operate on the model of deep personalization that they've slowly de-emphasized over the years. I'm still waiting for Letterboxd to introduce a feature to give me personalized film recs based on the over 1000 ratings I've given it over the years as a paying customer but they seem in no hurry to do so. Amazon used to take your purchase history into account when ordering search results but I think that's also been significantly de-emphasized.
About the only arena this is widespread is streaming music services like Spotify.
https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleMaps/comments/1737ft9/google_...
I think this is very likely false if you mean compared to the status quo ante. Before Maps, a well-loved but hard-to-find venue just wouldn't ever be seen by most people, and the absence of reviews made branding more important because it was all you had to go on. I'd be very doubtful if the proportion of independent cafes and restaurants decreases when Google Maps enters an area. (Couldn't find any causal research designs though....)
The more general point that the algorithm is not neutral (and probably never could be) must be right.
(I asked ChatGPT but it ended up with: "We have almost no clean exogenous variation in Maps rankings or feature rollouts at fine geographic scales that would let you estimate impacts on entry, survival, or market structure in a neat DiD/IV way.")
Second, stop moving the map when I search for things. Why does google maps on both mobile and desktop, change your search area. I put the map in one place because I want to search there.
Third, stop scrubbing bad reviews. When every restaurant is 5 stars, theres no point
Now, if I think about the time I lived in Vancouver, it was the opposite. You don’t have that many options, after a while you basically make a list of your favourites and rotate.
I haven’t been outside Japan for nearly a decade so I can’t compare it with other countries, but my impression is that Japan has more small restaurants than some other places. It’s not unusual to go into a ramen, curry, gyoza, soba, or other eating place with fewer than a dozen seats and staffed by just one or two people.
The existence of such small places increases the eating-out options. I don’t know why such small food businesses are viable here but not elsewhere; perhaps regulatory frameworks (accessibility, fire, health, tax, labor, etc.) play a role.
If you can just say "Peruvian" and it finds all restaurants around you within 2km, you might get 30 options. At that point, using the wisdom of the crowd for some initial filtering makes a lot of sense.
Personally I love going to completely unknown restaurants that has just opened and have zero reviews yet which Google Maps helps with too, but looking at how others around me use Google Maps, a lot of them basically use it for discovering new restaurants to try, and we're all locals.
This is actually a big frustration for me how I can search food and get totally different results over the same area in the frame. I seem to remember in the old days of google maps you'd see, you know, everything in the area. Like pins on pins on overlapping pins. And you'd click through them or zoom in as appropriate. You found everything. It all worked.
Then someone had the brilliant idea that this was all too busy, and you should have pins omitted until you have sometimes zoomed so far in you are filling your map viewer frame with the doorstep of that business...
I wouldn't be surprised to learn businesses get charged to appear first. Seems like it tends to be things like fast food or national chains over new locally owned restaurants that pop up more often on google maps.
Im sure they favour the ones that use google ads, but i would not think that they are bullying places a la yelp.
Anyway its pretty crazy that nowadays your success as restaurant is so dependent on one huge platform. (… and actually, lets not forget the delivery platforms also)
Is there a project on GitHub or somewhere that I could clone?? (smiling face with halo)