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Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

joemorrison.substack.com

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Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#271

Post by spideymans »

soperj wrote: post #267
spideymans wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say it's very reliable. I'll still cross reference Waze and Google Maps, if I absolutely need to arrive at somewhere on time, but over the past year or so there's only been a very small number of instances where I thought that Apple's navigation directions were inferior to the competition (and even then, we're talking a few minutes)

It's not reliable if you're cross referencing constantly. I live outside of the USA, and Apple maps consistently screwed up to the point that I've deleted it.

>It's not reliable if you're cross referencing constantly.

Eh, I cross reference Google Maps with Waze all the time back when I used it, but I wouldn't dare call Google Maps unreliable. It costs nothing to do, so why wouldn't it?

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#272

Post by MereInterest »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #198
freedomben wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With Google Maps I will know about a Maverik gas station that is on my route that I know I want to stop at. I'll search for it "along my route" and I get a bunch of other gas stations that I don't want. I suspect they are prioritizing the other gas station brands because they paid for preference, and selected "Maverik" as one of their keywords, but the impact to me is that the exact thing I searched for doesn't come…

Perhaps one day they, or a competitor, will do a ‘Maps Premium’ that simply charges the user inserted of all the ads, targeting, etc. And maybe a ‘Maps Premium+’ that allows for customization and going back to the peak usability design of Maps.

The problem is the higher-level decision makers having fully internalized "never leave money on the table". If there is a premium paid product, it will later have advertising added to it, and results prioritized, because that is an additional source of revenue. Never mind that it defeats the entire purpose of using the premium in the first place.

The second level is that customers know that this will happen, and don't bother looking into the more expensive options. Why bother paying a premium when you get the same poor experience out of it?

The third level happens when market research shows that people are not willing to pay for a premium product. This gets erroneously attributed to people preferring cheap ad-ridden junk, rather than being a response to markets producing expensive ad-ridden junk. (Side note, I despise the concept of "revealed preferences" for this reason.)

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#273

Post by lotsofpulp »

mistersquid wrote: post #258
17a9f4a4f4e5b3f wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, Apple Maps still doesn't feel as good for searching obscure things as Google Maps did 5 years ago, but neither does Google Maps. An example: I recently searched for "photography repair" in my area and Apple gave me film developing places and local event photographers, Google gave me (I kid you not, first result) McDonalds and Best Buy. The latter I can understand, they sell photography equipment and they do re…

> An example: I recently searched for "photography repair" in my area and Apple gave me film developing places and local event photographers, Google gave me (I kid you not, first result) McDonalds and Best Buy. Not to put too fine a point on it, but your results might have been more satisfying if you had searched using the term “camera repair”.

I wouldn't even expect a camera repair business to exist, much less be able to find it on a search in a map app.

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#274

Post by eigen »

Lio wrote: post #219
Someone wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, say they wanted to support this for most of the world, what would look different to outsiders? Waiting to support part of the world until they can support all of the targeted regions would deprive users of data they have for, I guess, years. So, it should be a gradual rollout. Where should they start? I would think it’s easiest in richer countries, where it’s easier to obtain reliable data, and updates thereof. A…

Only time will tell and we can be hopeful but a map that only covers part of any particular country is not very useful for navigation except as a proof of concept. As it is it’s more like the 3D Tour feature of Maps. A great novelty but not useful outside of a very narrow usecase. That’s been around for a few years now but is still only available in a handful of locations.

> been around for a few years now but still only available in a handful of locations.

seems like a fairly long list though I havent monitored how often they add locations so maybe it launched with 100+ international locations.

https://www.apple.com/ios/feature-availability/#maps-flyover

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#275

Post by grishka »

on_and_off wrote: post #268
grishka wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With uBO on desktop and YouTube Vanced on mobile, you get the exact same experience AND save $12/month.

and you also don't contribute to the creators incomes. I can understand people vouching for using youtube premium or nebula instead, but not this.

I don't feel responsible for creators' incomes. It's their own choice and their own risks — no one's forcing them to quit their jobs and rely on YouTube for their only income. Or, simply put, "implicit contracts" aren't a thing for me.

Anyway, many, if not most, youtubers have pateron now in case you want to contribute to their incomes without feeding surveillance capitalism.

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#276

Post by pwg »

jdmichal wrote: post #153
morsch wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> In the meantime, OSM generally doesn't even have place addresses in my experience.

As @matkoniecz pointed out, OSM is quite capable of having place addresses mapped to a specific spot. If your experience has been that they are missing, then that is most likely because no one has added them to OSM for the area's in which you have looked.

But the good part about OSM is that anyone, including you, can add those details, and they appear in the main map within seconds to minutes of someone adding them. So you could help rectify the missing situation by adding some of that missing data.

If you don't want to learn all the OSM details, and provided some background details are present (generally building outlines for address data questions) one easier way to help add the data is via StreetComplete (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/StreetComplete). It asks simple questions, you enter the answer, and the app handles the low-level OSM tagging changes based upon the answer given.

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#277

Post by multjoy »

tybit wrote: post #270
stiray wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google's choice to bump these prices made me realize that they could do the same thing with their compute cloud pricing or other APIs, again with little notice. That, in turn, led to the realization that we needed to remove our reliance on Google's entire stack, and quickly, or we'd be in a terrible bargaining position later. Yes. You are right. The whole cloud deal is a try to rule out on premise infrastructure an…

AWS is already incredibly profitable while continuing to lower prices over time. What makes you think they would choose to run this scheme and forever ruin their reputation?

The point is that nobody expected Google to just hike their price for mapping by 1400% overnight. If they can do it with one product, what’s stopping anyone else in a similar dominant market position doing the same?

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#278

Post by simonw »

alasdair_ wrote: post #173

I worked at a company that heavily used the maps API in 2018. The 1,400% price hike really was an eye opener. It wasn't just the money involved, which was large, but the fact that it came so suddenly and with so much magnitude. Google's choice to bump these prices made me realize that they could do the same thing with their compute cloud pricing or other APIs, again with little notice. That, in turn, led to the reali…

"This one choice by the maps team likely cost Google significantly in the medium to long term"

Reminiscent of the Google Reader thing. Google Reader was used by, in global terms, a tiny number of people. But today those same people get to make purchasing decisions at a large array of well funded companies, and they're still bitter about Reader shutting down.

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#279

Post by soperj »

spideymans wrote: post #271
soperj wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not reliable if you're cross referencing constantly. I live outside of the USA, and Apple maps consistently screwed up to the point that I've deleted it.

>It's not reliable if you're cross referencing constantly. Eh, I cross reference Google Maps with Waze all the time back when I used it, but I wouldn't dare call Google Maps unreliable. It costs nothing to do, so why wouldn't it?

It costs time?

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#280

Post by spaetzleesser »

spideymans wrote: post #249
larrymyers wrote: post #90

I really want to use Apple Maps full time on my iPhone, just because of how much clutter Google Maps has accumulated on the screen. If anything tells me Google is losing the ability to innovate it's the newly added pill buttons for pre-set searches and branded POIs on the map. I remember when this was added to MapQuest circa 2010, and was the transition from trying to have an excellent mapping experience to just addi…

>I really want to use Apple Maps full time on my iPhone, just because of how much clutter Google Maps has accumulated on the screen. Apple Maps UI: A big map, with a search bar at the bottom. Simple and nothing but the essentials. Google Maps UI: A page full of ads, a map full of ads and ads masquerading as recommendations. Plus five tab bar buttons at the bottom to not accomplish very much. I've switched to Apple Ma…

Problem with Apple Maps is that it doesn’t allow multi stop trips and that the search function is way worse than Google maps. I also have had situations where the directions from Apple Maps were just plain wrong. Apple likes to keep things simple but I think they are going too far. Things like offline maps and search, multi stop trips and others are just way too useful to be left out.
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