Posted by justincormack 12/9/2025
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.
8-10 years ago it was way more reliable. The decline started with them adding the option to promote a business. Frustrating.
- OSM want's a detailed and reliable map.
- Google maps tries to either sell your data to clients, or make you buy from them.
Their business data is their priority for maps. You can see that clearly when you look at location history changes over past decade or so. It used to be actual user location history and it was glorious. Now it's "near what businesses you were more or less, help us rate them".
It's a great moment to again remind about existence of low-friction tools that you can use to add business data (among others) to OSM, like StreetComplete app, available on F-droid and Google Play :)
https://streetcomplete.app/?lang=en
In my region OSM business data starts to be on par with google, better (more up to date) sometimes.
CoMaps would be a good map app, and it will also display when POIs and opening hours were last confirmed (the only OSM app to do so AFAIK)
I would love to use OsmAnd more. StreetComplete sounds great and looks like a nice way to be able to contribute fixes to OSM. Thanks for the recommendation!
> a few times I have had to look up the business in Google Maps to find their address
Exactly my point - Gmaps taught us to expect *businesses" on maps. Not addresses. Pins and stars, instead of streets and numbers. Arrival time and traffic, instead of distance, elevation and road type (size).
I use gmaps still, mostly for businesses, but to actually know where I am I have better options. Gmaps hides most of typical map features - you see less of trees, water, buildings, height elevation. On Comaps/Osmand you suddenly can correlate map with things you see (without street view! :P).
When I zoomed in, it would still only show me the Permanently Closed business listing for the old restaurant.
Searching by address, they do have a listing for its replacement. But they were prioritizing the dead restaurant on the map because why would I want to know current info from a map when they can be useless instead?
And it's not like this is a restaurant in the first floor of a tower with a bunch of businesses stacked on top of it competing for map space. It's a single floor, there's only one occupant.
It's actually much worse than that.
I will often see the business name as I'm zooming in, but if I zoom too far, it's no longer available. You have to find "just the right zoom level" for displaying the given business.
As if it were some weird mind game they were playing with you.
Clever.
Unfortunately, not all numbers are shown, even when all the exits are non-overlapping at the displayed zoom level.
I guess there's various reasons, ranging from "it's hard to make auto-layout algos produce stuff as dense as painstakingly handcrafted maps" to "let's make it harder to scrape/copy data"
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.
On the other hand, they do have historical coverage, have to give them that.
You can see the very poor US coverage here: https://brilliantmaps.com/apple-look-around/
Of course compared to Google Street view there is no comparison on a world wide basis as you can see on the same page.
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.
Remember how YouTube and Netflix used to let you rate things on 1-5 stars? That disappeared in favor of a simple up/down vote.
Most services are driven by two metrics: consumption time and paid subscriptions. How much you enjoy consuming something does not directly impact those metrics. The providers realized the real goal is to find the minimum possibly thing you will consume and then serve you everything above that line.
Trying to find the closest match possible was actually the wrong goal, it pushed you to rank things and set standards for yourself. The best thing for them was for you to focus on simple binary decisions rather than curating the best experience.
They are better off having you begrudgingly consume 3 things rather than excited consuming 2.
The algorithmic suggestion model is to find the cutoff line of what you're willing to consume and then surface everything above that line ranked on how likely you are to actually push the consume button, rather than on how much you'll enjoy it. The majority of which (due to the nature of a bell curve) is barely above that line.
For some people 3 stars is an acceptable rating, closer to 4 stars than 2 stars. For others, 3 stars is a bad rating, closer to 2 stars than 5 stars. And for others still, it doesn't give signal beyond what a non-rating would be, it's "I don't have a strong opinion about this".
Effectively chopping out the 3-star rating, leaves it with a better a scale of:
- Excellent, I want to put effort into seeking out similar content
- Fine, I'd be happy to watch more like it
- Bad, I didn't enjoy this
- Terrible, I want to put effort into avoiding this
- I have no opinion on this
These are comparable to a 5 point Likert scale:
"I enjoy this content"
- Strongly agree
- Agree
- Neither Agree nor Disagree
- Disagree
- Strongly Disagree
It would be interesting to conduct social science with a similar scale with merged Disagree and Strongly disagree to see if that gave it any better consistency.
I suspect there are others who rarely click “bad” or “good”.
Because of that, I think you first need to train a model on scaling each user’s judgments to a common unit. That likely won’t work well for users that you have little data on.
So, it’s quite possible that a ML model trained on a 3-way choice “very bad or bad/OK-ish/good or very good” won’t do much worse than on given the full 5-way choice.
I think it also is likely that users will be less likely to click on a question the more choices you give them (that certainly is the case if the number of choices gets very high as in having to separately rate a movie’s acting, scenery, plot, etc)
Combined, that may mean given users less choice leads to better recommendations.
I’m sure Netflix has looked at their data well and knows more about that, though.
I'm a bit skeptical about this.
To me there's a big difference between "This didn't spark joy" and "I actively hated this": I might dislike a poorly-made sequel of a movie I previously enjoyed, but I never ever want to see baby seals getting clubbed to death again.
Every series has that one bad episode you have to struggle through during a full rewatch. Very few series have an episode bad enough that it'll make you quit watching the series entirely, and ruin any chance at a future rewatch.
I stopped rating things on Netflix, because after doing so for a long time, Netflix still thinks I'd enjoy Adam Sandler movies, so what's the point?
Being able to see a counter that reads as "Twenty-three thousand other people also didn't like this video!" doesn't serve me in any meaningful way; I don't go to Youtube to seek validation of my opinion, so that counter has no value to me. (For the same reason, the thumbs-up counter also has no value to me.)
But my ratings remain useful in that the algorithm still uses the individualized ratings I provide to help present stuff that I might actually want to watch.
As we all know, investors and advertisers love growth; Youtube thrives and grows and gathers/burns money fastest when more people use it more. The algorithm is designed to encourage viewership. Viewership makes number go up in the ways that the money-people care about.
Presenting stuff to me that I don't want to watch makes the number go up -- at best -- slower. The algorithm seeks to avoid that situation (remember, number must only go up).
Personally rating videos helps the machine make number go up in ways that benefit me directly.
---
Try to think of it less like a rating of a product on Amazon or of an eBay seller; try not to think of it as an avenue for publicly-displayed praise or admonishment. It's not that. (Maybe it once was -- I seem to recall thumbs-up and thumbs-down counts being shown under each thumbnail on the main feed a million years ago. But it is not that, and it has not been for quite a long time.)
Instead, think of it as one way in which to steer and direct your personalized recommendation algorithm to give you more of the content you enjoy seeing, and less of what you're not as fond of.
Use it as a solely self-serving function in which you push the buttons to receive more of the candy you like, and less of of the candy that you don't like.
Someone should make a SponsorBlock/Dearrow-type addon to flag AI slop.
How can you know how green the grass is on the other side of the fence if you've never even seen it?
Isn't it like Shrodinger's Grass, or Green Eggs and Ham, at that point?
(And if your recommendations are working fine, then what is this "AI slop" that you're complaining about? I don't find any of that on my end.)
Fantastically apt, IMO. Kudos.
>I don't find any of that on my end.
Good for you. The true crime genre has been hit hard by AI slop.
I remember this conjecture of yours (that ratings unilaterally ceased to matter as soon as they stopped being displayed to users) very well.
And unlike you, I can see over to the other side of the fence -- in the present day -- at a whim: All I have to do is fire up YouTube in a private session on a disused device. It's fucking awful over there; it's complete bedlam.
(I can't make you take the blinders off and use that utterly useless, vestigial Thumbs Down button, though. You're free to live your life with as blindly and with much suffering as you wish, no matter what anyone else thinks.)
Their objective shifted to occupying your time, and TV you’ll accept vs. movies you’ll love is a cheap way to do that.
If e.g. retention correlates to watch time (or some other metric like "diversity of content enageged with"), then you will optimize for the short list of metrics that show high correlation. The incentive to have a top-tier experience that gets the customer what they want and then back off the platform is not aligned with the goal of maintaining subscription revenue.
You want them to watch the next thing, not the best thing.
For example it recommended a band with just a hundred monthly plays which I loved. Almost all bands it recommends has less than 10k monthly plays, so not huge "safe bets", and most are quite decent.
https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleMaps/comments/1737ft9/google_...
Perhaps more importantly, if such organic growth is possible, it lowers the incentive for businesses to buy ads.
I don't want for Google to collect data on me, build a profile and "understand" me. I want Google just to return relevant search results.
> Google Maps shows you what the average person thinks is a good restaurant
I'm fairly sure this isn't true. At least, I still get (notably better) results searching while signed in. Couldn't tell you what the mechanism for that is these days, though. But at least back in 2010, the personalization layer was wired into ranking. You can see in the screenshots how we surfaced justifications for the rankings as well.
Pretty much immediately after launch, Google+ took over the company, the entire social network we had was made obsolete because it didn't require Real Names(tm), and a number of people who objected (including me) took down all our pseudonymous reviews. Most of the team got split off into various other projects, many in support of Google+. As best as I can tell the product was almost immediately put into maintenance mode, or at least headcount for it plummeted like 90%. Half of my local team ended up founding Niantic, later much better known for making Pokemon Go.
As for why collaborative filtering didn't take off, I can offer a few reasons. One is that honestly, the vast majority of people don't rate enough things to be able to get a lot of signal out of it. Internally we had great coverage in SF, London, New York, Tokyo, and Zurich since Geo had teams in all those places and we pushed hard to get people to rate everything, but it dropped off in a hurry elsewhere. The data eventually fills up, but it takes a while. I'm told we had 3x the volume of new reviews that Yelp had at the time, but Yelp mostly only covered the US, while Google Maps was worldwide, so density was quite low for a long time. It was probably 5-10 years before I started hearing business owners consistently talk about their Google reviews before their Yelp reviews.
Another thing is that people are really bad at using the whole rating scale. On a 1-5 scale, you'll probably find that 80% of the reviews are either 1 or 5 stars. Even more so in a real life situation where you meet the humans involved. While you can math your away around that a bit, at that point you're not getting a ton more signal than just thumbs up/down (anecdotally I've heard that's why Netflix moved away from 5 stars). And then at that point, you might be getting better signal from "were you motivated enough to rate this at all?", which is why there's the emphasis on review counts. Many people just won't review things badly unless things have gone terribly wrong. I sat in on a few UX interviews, and it was really enlightening to hear users talk about their motivations for rating things, many of which were way different than mine.
BTW I'm familiar with linkrot, but I just discovered link poisoning.
I was reading the blog post on my Android phone and saw the Maps links to Firefly and Home Restaurant. So I tapped the Home Restaurant link and it took me to the Google Maps app in my normal home position with my home in the center. I thought for a moment that maybe it confused Home restaurant with my home.
So I tapped the Back button and nothing happened. Tapped it several more times with no luck. Finally I used the ||| button and swiped Maps up to kill it.
Then I tried the Firefly link, with the same results.
On the web, both links work fine, but someone forgot to test that these old links still work on Android.
Turns out that Home Restaurant is closed, but Firefly is alive and well. Their menu looks tasty, and the FAQ is something to behold:
https://www.fireflysf.com/faqs
If anyone here ever wants to write an FAQ with charm and grace and humor, read this one and learn. It is the gold standard!
And even they can't get it right, and will give me promoted content before they give me anything related to my tastes. Pandora is the only recommendation engine that actually gives me what I would consider to be valid results. Shame they refuse to improve their audio quality, or I'd jump ship to Pandora. Until then, I'll keep using their free tier to curate Spotify playlists.
This kind of ties into "but your computer is broadcasting a cookie and you're being tracked" paranoia though.
People have been convinced by uninformed twaddle that somehow folk are looking through their screen at them to see what they're doing and that this is bad, but it also means you get fed an awful lot of adverts that really don't fit your demographic.
I don't mind if advertisers or supermarkets are profiling me based on things I like. You want to show me things I like? Good. The flip side is I'd prefer you not to show me things I don't like.
Youtube seems to be hilariously bad at this latter part, and all I get are adverts for a bank I'm already with and have been for 30 years, adverts for online gambling sites which I will never be interested in, adverts for Google's AI slop which I will never be interested, and adverts for online grammar-checking services that don't work in the UK because they convert everything into some weird North American creole dialect, which - again - I will never use.
Yes, take a look at my restaurant-using profile. Recommend stuff I like.
I mean... this sounds like the perfect use case for a third party app like "My taste restaurant finder"? There are undoubtedly apps out there like this.
I don't think Google Maps (a general purpose maps app) should try to be everything for everyone. It's good enough for what it is.
I am sad that Google services are so popular, because it makes the world a little bit worse for everyone. This includes not only Google Maps, but also Gmail (did you know that Google is quite active at censoring your E-mail and you will never see certain E-mails?).
I would really like to see more competition, ideally without the ever-present enshittification (I'm pretty sure Apple Maps will go down the drain, too, because KPIs and money).
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.
Some filters are available with a specific subset of words but not with another.
Zoom in a location, look for a common word? There are good chances it will zoom out and send you to the other side of the globe instead. Then pan back, hit "Search in this area" and bam it works.
Some devices can make reviews and some can't (tested on different devices, even Google ones).
Search for a specific word which might be in a review (say, "decaf") and you get even stuff which doesn't even remotely contain the word (I'd expect an empty result if no place has mentioned my keyword).
And many more.
It's just insane how a huge company just seem focused in making a "good enough" experience instead of being the leader. Maybe it's for the best but if they went 1 sprint/quarter into "let's fix glaring BS UX issues in our products", they would probably destroy so many alternatives out there.
Maybe it's on purpose to avoid some anti-trust kind of response? We'll never know.
From my point of view Google Search is terrible, too. Is hard to find relevant results, you mostly get results optimized to make money, or junk. You have to explore tens or hundreds of results to find the needle in the haystack.
Youtube was in this business from day 1. Even before Google. Youtube was never going to be anything other than an ad-platform with videos to lure in the products.
Vid.me tried to be a video platform with videos to lure in users, but it went bankrupt, because nobody wanted to pay and nobody wanted to watch ads.
Hard to believe it is the best possible video search implementation for their ad serving goals.
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
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
When I search for 'chicago' I like having the map move to Chicago, even if there's a Chicago Grill, Chicago Pizza and Chicago Trading Company closer.
Are you saying that if I want to find, for example, where Athens, Georgia is, I need to basically find it manually in the world map?
If the progression holds, oodles of recommendation engines can bloom, and it'll be trivial to fork and customize a favorite with a prompt. As the friction of doing large analysis jobs tends toward nil, the Google moat dries up and their commanding height subsides. Too optimistic?
Can we make a decentralized search engine. Which breaks down into two questions, is it technically feasible and is it socially feasible?
(Maybe the word search would be a bit more broad than retrieving web pages. It could be for everything right.)
I don't know but I'm inclined to say that the difficulty will be more on the social side than on the technical side.
The web was very decentralized 20 years ago, and we had all manner of peer to peer systems already. There just doesn't seem to be much appetite for that kind of thing, at least in the mainstream.
Although there might be something to it, with the AI part of the equation.
Like we had self hostable services for a long time, most people just don't want to be a sysadmin.
Well, I gave Claude root on my $3 VPS. Claude is my sysadmin now. I don't have to configure anything anymore. Life is good :)
In this case it seems like she used their API to get the data. But as she notes, scraping can quickly mean having to spend money. And that's where the scraping dream ends for many people - if they have to spend money in any way, shape, or form, it's a non-starter.
I guess you can do it right now if you tell a llm your preferences.
I only trust what friends recommend.
Of course, it also has a reply from the owner, stating this review that says he files criminal complaints against reviewers is a complete lie, and therefore, he's filing a criminal complaint against this reviewer.
Also I’ve decided I don’t want to live my life by following what Google says I should do as a default. Sometimes I go to a place that sucks. But that happened when I checked Google reviews anyway!!
Similar with online shopping. If all the one-star reviews are complaining about the shipment being lost in the mail or other irrelevant nonsense, the product is probably pretty good.
Is there a project on GitHub or somewhere that I could clone?? (smiling face with halo)
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.
You don't want to show every business as a default view, of course.