Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Farewell, Google Maps

inderapotheke.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 545 posts

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#271

Post by ocdtrekkie »

Groxx wrote: post #30
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's some other options too for people who want to use OSM data, but avoid deploying it themselves. One of the ones I discovered is that MapQuest (which it doesn't look like they considered) offers OSM data and APIs as an option alongside the MapQuest proprietary data and APIs: https://developer.mapquest.com/documentation/open/ And there's several other places that offer this as well. So the advantage of building…

MapQuest seems like it might be 6x more expensive than the others listed in the post, if "transactions" are the same concept: https://developer.mapquest.com/plans ($100 for 30,000 transactions) (transactions aren't defined anywhere I can easily find tho, so it's possible this isn't correct. but I don't really mind prematurely concluding that they're significantly more expensive if they don't clearly describe their pr…

Entirely possible, I've only used their API well inside the free tier, I haven't compared pricing. I presume there's other OSM-compatible service providers with different pricing options as well.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#272

Post by SllX »

beerlord wrote: post #157
majewsky wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just as in favor of GDPR as you, but I shall reserve my cheers for when the first actual GPDR fines are handed out. For now, I'm mostly seeing annoyed SMEs on one side who go to ridiculous lengths to be compliant in the face of missing precedents. And on the other side, big internet corps are implementing joke consent pages with tons of dark patterns that clearly go against the spirit of the regulation. I think t…

I'm not really a fan of GDPR actually. I think advertising has its place, and the more targeted it is, the better the results for everyone. The worst thing that people can point to that this kind of advertising has caused is fake news on Facebook, which is more of a problem with America's campaign financing (non)restrictions than anything (and probably the fact that the candidate who used it was quite anti-establishm…

Advertising's place is as a vehicle for emotional manipulation and stuffing all available channels with propaganda selling the advertiser's particular brand of product or politics.

Certainly it can also be used to dispense useful information, but if someone is spending money to dispense that particular information, they have an agenda. It might be innocuous, "buy our product!". Or it can be malicious. Either way there is always intent and you cannot separate media, especially advertising, from the intent behind the media and the very goal of advertising is to grab (or accost or steal) your attention.

The internet already has alternate funding mechanisms: the host either eats the cost themselves and pays for it out of pocket, sells something to pay for hosting and other expenses, or users pay the host directly for access. Advertising is just one of at least four options.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#273

Post by thecodemonkey »

I just wanted to add that geocod.io is now a viable alternative to Google Maps for geocoding in terms of both accuracy and pricing. We’re going to continue having a no-credit-card-required 2,500/day free limit, as well as the most affordable pricing, without restrictions. Including a plan that allows for unlimited geocoding. https://geocod.io/pricing

Full disclaimer: I’m one of the Geocodio founders.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#274

Post by 0x0 »

ajross wrote: post #243
martimarkov wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d disagree a bit. There are competitors but the quality and the service is not on the same level. Google have made it hard to compete so that they stay in the leadership position. More importantly google maps “owns” more market share than all of them combined so it is kinda a monopoly. I might not have explained my point well but I do think you get what I’m saying.

If players with the resources of Apple and Microsoft are lagging here, it's not because Google "made it hard", it's because it's a hard problem. Yet they are competing, and that's a good thing. Google is just better. And you want it for free. And thus we get back to the cry-me-a-river bit.

Or is it because being in a #1 market position with a (until now) free price tag attracted thousands of volunteers submitting content and corrections for free?

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#275

Post by nuschk »

PerfectElement wrote: post #213

Does anyone know of a good alternative to Google Places Autocomplete API? Our app makes 25k requests per day. They had a free 150k limit per day, but now it seems like we are going from $0 to $1,800 per month, and this is not a core feature of our app. I wouldn't mind paying a couple hundred dollars for it, but this price is almost what we pay for our whole infrastructure. The worst part is that we didn't get any not…

I'm pretty much looking for the same. AFAIK, autocomplete is provided by bing/azure, mapbox, tomtom, HERE and geocode.earth (I might also be missing a few). Also, mapfit (a pretty young participant, it seems) will have it "in a month", they say.

Edit: Added geocode.earth.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#276

Post by woohoo7676 »

ethbro wrote: post #53
woohoo7676 wrote: post #35

I work for a startup that has mapping/routing as one of its core needs - about a year or two ago we decided that our reliance on Google's mapping APIs was too great and decided to work on having a switchable backup provider in case something like this should ever happen. With auto complete especially, we would have had a 10-20x increase in pricing (and this is with an 'enterprise' plan pricing). As the article says,…

Any details on how complicated enabling that switchability was? Or details / costs / takeaways from your process? Seems like now would be a great time to write a blog post on how you did it. :)

It definitely took a decent amount of work (and a double decent amount of testing).

As voltagex_ mentioned, most location providers have a different API flow than Google Maps - rather than doing a total abstraction of providers (which would take too much effort), we went for a Google flow and non-Google flow basically.

For example, location autocomplete with Google requires a two step process (call for suggestions, then call for details of the suggestion) where a couple alternative apis provided the necessary data in the suggestion process. This requires a bit of a different flow on the server/client, so building support for both in was one of the hurdles we had to get over.

As for other takeaways, I guess mainly always have a backup plan for mission-critical service providers :)

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#277

Post by vezycash »

ajross wrote: post #243
martimarkov wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d disagree a bit. There are competitors but the quality and the service is not on the same level. Google have made it hard to compete so that they stay in the leadership position. More importantly google maps “owns” more market share than all of them combined so it is kinda a monopoly. I might not have explained my point well but I do think you get what I’m saying.

If players with the resources of Apple and Microsoft are lagging here, it's not because Google "made it hard", it's because it's a hard problem. Yet they are competing, and that's a good thing. Google is just better. And you want it for free. And thus we get back to the cry-me-a-river bit.

Maps quality like search engine probably increases with the number of users.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#278

Post by hueving »

ajross wrote: post #111
tobltobs wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thought the same, there are not many use cases which will be still profitable after this price increase.

Counterpoint: if these startups need a giant subsidized mapping product for free or else they aren't profitable, they weren't ever profitable . I mean, there's a real cry-me-a-river aspect here. No one has a Google-granted fundamental right to mapping. It's a free product Google released to drive traffic to their own offerings, and which they happen to make available for free for a lot of purposes. As it turns out, y…

>Counterpoint: if these startups need a giant subsidized mapping product for free or else they aren't profitable, they weren't ever profitable.

If startups need a giant subsidized operating system for free or else they weren't profitable, they weren't ever profitable.

Do you see how ridiculous that argument is?

>As it turns out, yeah, there's a lot of value we as a society can derive from low cost pervasive mapping. So let's find a way to share the cost and not just whine about Google, no?

Yeah, Google has vacuumed up incredible amounts of mapping data from users and has now jacked up the prices with the lead this gave them. OSM (or something similar) is the way to share the cost. Google just abused their goodwill and used their other power positions to discourage open source. Whining about Google while moving elsewhere is entirely appropriate.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#279

Post by hueving »

ajross wrote: post #243
martimarkov wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d disagree a bit. There are competitors but the quality and the service is not on the same level. Google have made it hard to compete so that they stay in the leadership position. More importantly google maps “owns” more market share than all of them combined so it is kinda a monopoly. I might not have explained my point well but I do think you get what I’m saying.

If players with the resources of Apple and Microsoft are lagging here, it's not because Google "made it hard", it's because it's a hard problem. Yet they are competing, and that's a good thing. Google is just better. And you want it for free. And thus we get back to the cry-me-a-river bit.

Companies with deep pockets trying and failing to gain a meaningful share in a market is more proof of a monopoly or other anti-competitive behavior, not less.

Re: Farewell, Google Maps

#280

Post by hueving »

ucaetano wrote: post #203
komali2 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost every conversation I've had with someone working at a startup in this city inevitably turns to the "so, are you worried Google will simply start offering your service for free?" I remember like 3 or 4 years ago having this conversation at a hackathon with a bunch of "Machine Learning" / "Sentiment Analysis" APIs present... right as google started offering both for free on their cloud platform.

Which most likely meant the startup was a feature or a product, not a company with a viable business model.

Gmail is free. Does that mean email service is not a product? Why does fastmail exist?
Post reply on HN