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Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

joemorrison.substack.com

151–160 of 442 posts

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#151

Meta: could someone explain/clarify the sentence "Back in 2012, I had not yet been born (I am, in fact, only six years old)." please? I highly doubt a 6-years-old wrote this article, so is it a joke? Or is it alluding to some mapping alternative being 6 years old?

It is a joke.

Then it definitely is not that funny of a joke. He could've added "and I am 10 meters tall" without affecting how funny his joke is

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#152

Apple is so far behind outside of the places they prioritize that it'll take decades at this pace to get on Google Maps' current level. It's really useless in places like Eastern Europe, where Apple has no interest in supporting and isn't likely that it'll turn that around any time soon.

Mapy.cz is far better than Google in case of Slovakia or Czech Republic. They have full coverage of high resolution pictures taken from planes and not satellites. Also these contain all the hiking, cycling and other routes. The native Android and iOS apps work great and support offline maps - you can download the whole map for a country with one click. Google Maps is unusable for sport or hiking because you only see…

That is true, it's an order of magnitude of difference. For example, look at this location:

https://en.mapy.cz/turisticka?x=13.8929744&y=50.0331743&z=14...

And compare it to Google Maps:

https://www.google.com/maps/@50.0297578,13.8901237,13.85z

Google Maps is substantially better at search and places data but this advantage is slowly shrinking.

Also, Mapy.cz has a tracker feature with online sync and gpx export.

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#153
post #97
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mapy.cz covers most of other use cases as well, including business info, public transport and other details. I personally find mapy.cz more tailored to pedestrian/public transport navigation within european city. The only feature which I go to google maps is the mentioned estimation of how crowded a place is (as this comes from android data, and google has an clear edge there).

The software supports the use cases but the data isn't there. Certainly for where I'm living. Most of the information is missing -- eg apparently there are no pediatricians in my city, many opening times are missing, in my area there are no photos, no reviews; other stuff is wrong. It's more comprehensive in Prague, though from a brief look Google still has more of everything. I'm not saying that OSM (and other proje…

Does OSM support address-based resolution of places? AFAIK, Google is getting things like store hours when it crawls websites. Which, of course, it's doing anyway for indexing. As long as it can figure out the address and the store hours from the website, it can put them on the map.

In the meantime, OSM generally doesn't even have place addresses in my experience. If I could resolve addresses to places in OSM, then I could easily write some scrappers to help out with filling in other data.

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#154

What’s up HN?! Always fun to find an article of mine on here. What I’ve learned so far: I’ve underestimated the important of their place data to the rest of the search apparatus, and likely underestimated the relevance of Maps to their autonomous vehicle strategy. What I remain curious about that I’d love your speculation on: why do they bother with the Google Maps Platform at all? They have plenty of ways to monetiz…

Without opening a platform, competitors and would be service providers have a clear investor story. By opening a platform, Google undermine their story to investors, making it look like a commodity. Then, each time a competitor is diffused, Google can cripple the service or raise the price so much as to make it useless.

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#155
Isn't the whole moat of google maps that it's part of google? when I search I don't want to have to use different websites for each type of search, right now google is the leader but even if they become only mediocre at maps but stay at no. 1 at search they're very safe.

I don't see any future where google creates a special modal box for apple maps on it's search results page no matter who is deemed "the best map"

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#156

I've started deleting all my maps review and public pictures I posted after google announced that Photos was not going to be unlimited anymore. I think more people should do the same.

Why should Photos be unlimited forever? Do you expect such largesse from Spotify or Netflix? Or do you prefer Google put ads in photos to monetize?

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#158
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Easter Europe even Google Maps are much worse that OpenStreetMaps.

I live in northern Europe (Sweden) at at least in my specific area OpenStreetMap is a lot better than Google maps.

I also live in Sweden and do a lot of GIS analysis with both OSM data and other providers. OSM is great when it comes to the actual road geometry (esp. bike and pedestrian roads), although it often gets the speed limits wrong. For pedestrian travel analysis I'd say it's the best dateset available, since it includes all those 'unofficial' paths that everybody uses, but are often left off official maps. It is however pretty terrible when it comes to buildings and addresses. You don't have to get many km out from major cities before a lot of buildings are missing, and the numbering of buildings is often either missing or wrong.
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