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Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

joemorrison.substack.com

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Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#411

Post by jessriedel »

To me, the killer maps app would be the ability to type a consumer product into the maps search bar and have it display on the map all businesses (likely) selling that product. There are still lots of items that are not on Amazon or that I cannot wait two days for.

Every time I try this now, I'm amazed by how bad the results are. First, I think that the simplest ML tools would be able to (say) identify which stores are grocery stores by their name, yet Google Maps is unreliable at this. Second, merchants have a big incentive to tell Google what they sell (either typically or, more ambitiously, with an up-to-date inventory API), if only Google would give them a portal to do so.

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#412

Post by iso1631 »

I went to look at apple maps

https://www.apple.com/maps/

All I see is an advert page telling me "You’ll like where this is going" and "get much easier"

There's a tiny "open maps" in the top right corner which links to https://maps.apple.com/go, but that just reloads the advert page

OSM and Google Maps work just fine

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#413

Post by dotancohen »

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…

> 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.

Always keep deployments vendor-agnostic. I'm very very happy on AWS, but I could literally deploy to Google Cloud or Rackspace in an hour if need be. I run my own Linux servers, Elasticsearch and RabbitMQ servers, and though I do use and love RDS, I could just as easily move to a self-installed MySQL server. And I don't use the AWS DNS services, rather I trust that only with my registrar who I am very very happy with.

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#414

Post by dmd »

iso1631 wrote: post #412

I went to look at apple maps https://www.apple.com/maps/ All I see is an advert page telling me "You’ll like where this is going" and "get much easier" There's a tiny "open maps" in the top right corner which links to https://maps.apple.com/go , but that just reloads the advert page OSM and Google Maps work just fine

You can use Apple Maps via DuckDuckGo.

As far as I know, you can't use it anywhere from apple.com directly.

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#415

Post by jdmichal »

matkoniecz wrote: post #230
jdmichal wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Addresses and exact shop locations can be added to OSM. See https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/50.07298/19.93528 where it is mapped at least in a small part. > then I could easily write some scrappers to help out with filling in other data. Note that it may not possible due to copyright issues

I'm not talking about adding addresses to OSM. I'm talking about resolving features based on address. "Give me the building at address (____), because I know that's a business and I can fill in additional information."

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#416

Post by vxNsr »

coldtea wrote: post #365
vxNsr wrote: post #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"

> Isn't the whole moat of google maps that it's part of google? No, that's only for the very lazy :-) Especially for something like Maps, that doesn't get some huge benefit from the integration.

The lazy being all the people who don't go to different search engines for different topics or who don't care about privacy hoopla and just want to find their thing... so basically 96% of people.

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#417

Post by coldtea »

vxNsr wrote: post #416
coldtea wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isn't the whole moat of google maps that it's part of google? No, that's only for the very lazy :-) Especially for something like Maps, that doesn't get some huge benefit from the integration.

The lazy being all the people who don't go to different search engines for different topics or who don't care about privacy hoopla and just want to find their thing... so basically 96% of people.

Well, people switch all the time when it offers some real benefit. The don't stick with Google search out of lazyness, but because all alternatives suck llamas balls (Bing, DDG, etc.)

But consider how fast, and how many times, people switched browsers, first leaving behind the de-facto market leader (Netscape to IE), then leaving behind the OS-bundled one (IE to Firefox), then again leaving behind the current leader to a new faster engine (Firefox to Chrome).

With Google Maps deteriorating and the discomfort of change much smaller than changing than changing browsers, it's all too easy to switch to another map website.

Heck, that has happened in the past, Google Maps wasn't the first always. As recorded in this classic piece of folk lore:

  (well let's hit up yahoo maps to find the dopest route!)
  I prefer mapquest (that's a good one too)
  Google maps is the best (true dat) double true!

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#418

Post by franklampard »

jfim wrote: post #289
franklampard wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like this analogy. I think a good idea is to sign a long term (1 year to multiple years) contract with cloud providers.

A long term contract pretty much guarantees that the company will lose the institutional knowledge to run things on premises. Think about it, if the company has sysadmins that have been with the company for some years, have racked and are running most of their infrastructure, and all of a sudden they sign a long term contract with a cloud provider, why would they stay?

There are different use cases.

It’s possible that the company do not have all that infrastructure at all.

I also don’t see the importance of ‘knowledge to run things on premise’ for most people.

Technologies change very fast and if I can pay a reliable provider with a fixed price for the years that I intend to use it, why do I have to know how to use it?

If I can hire a gardener to take care of things for a reasonable price, I don’t care if I have any knowledge.

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#419

Post by draw_down »

simonw wrote: post #278
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.

Still bitter... and still using Gmail and search and maps and whatever else. I dunno guys, we don’t have to like it but it sure seems like they know what they’re doing over there in Mountain View.

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#420

Post by chipotle_coyote »

antipaul wrote: post #130
nr2x wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wanted Apple Maps to succeed so I’ve been using it from day one. It’s gotten much, much better. That said, if I’m going on a long trip where a non-optimal route is a big deal, I’ll double check with google maps and often (but not always) find a better route.

I also _want_ to like Apple Maps. But I always need to double check business hours using Google.

Hmm. At least in the US, Apple Maps gets their business info from Yelp, so it tends to be about as reliable as Yelp is. In general I find Yelp to be mostly on point -- not perfect, but not worse on the whole than Google.
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