I hate to say it, but aside from a little bit of "social" stuff which I'll never use, and a slightly revised UI, it doesn't really seem all that different. I'd prefer fixes to the map data itself. I've been having pretty severe routing issues in the last few weeks.
The New Google Maps
131–140 of 193 posts
Re: The New Google Maps
#132Re: The New Google Maps
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which security risks are you talking about? In the spec or in the implementations? Currently, the biggest security risk in WebGL is, indirectly, your graphics driver. As an example, the latest security problem with WebGL was in OS X and had to to with exposing uninitialized memory contents. Of course, it is true that graphics driver writers are only now warming up to the fact that a webpage shouldn't cause a kernel p…
I'm talking about the OpenGL drivers. They were never intended to be exposed to untrusted code running on web pages, so they haven't really been hardened appropriately.
Only to untrusted binaries on your machine.
Not caring about attacks from the local user is what got Microsoft tons of (justified) bad PR not ten years ago.
Re: The New Google Maps
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google has been using A/B testing for quite some time I think; they even do it with Chrome nowadays. Wouldn't that work to manage load?
You mean instead of handing out N invites, just pick N users at random? Why would that be better? You confuse and potentially upset the randomly-chosen users, and you disappoint the eager people who actually want to try the new thing.
I suppose neither are ideal, really. With an invite only model you run the risk of biasing your feedback. The advantage of a random rollout would be the marketing sleight of hand: "gradual rollout" might be more defensible than "by invitation".
Gmail and Google Groups have both had random rollouts for changes, with optional rollbacks. That seems more fitting (to me at least).
Re: The New Google Maps
#135"Request an invite". Dear god, Google still thinking it's a cute little startup. It really is the Microsoft story all over again.
No, they don't want to open this up to everyone until they can confirm that ad revenue is unaffected by the changes.
exactly, this has nothing to do with ability to rollout, rather marketing (create desire), test profitability (do users come back more often)
Re: The New Google Maps
#136I've always found Google Maps' listings a bit lacking. For something that is supposed to map the world, it still won't show me all the restaurants on a main avenue in NYC[0]. It still doesn't pinpoint the right locations for some places and for others it simply can't find them.
I think we're still far from the future of a 'one true map' that has it all, unfortunately. I still don't trust Google Maps to return quality results with a query like "restaurants near 14th st nyc"—which, from an idealistic standpoint, I should trust it with.
Re: The New Google Maps
#137Does anyone know if this includes Google Earth functionality being available in any way without a plugin? IOW, just naked browser using WebGL?
Re: The New Google Maps
#138I've always found Google Maps' listings a bit lacking. For something that is supposed to map the world, it still won't show me all the restaurants on a main avenue in NYC[0]. It still doesn't pinpoint the right locations for some places and for others it simply can't find them. I think we're still far from the future of a 'one true map' that has it all, unfortunately. I still don't trust Google Maps to return quality…
That should change, according to Zagat (owned by Google):
http://blog.zagat.com/2013/05/zagat-helping-you-find-excepti...
Re: The New Google Maps
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the reason we still have the Google Black Bar when they highly publicized a new navigation last year. It hurt traffic to their other properties.
I like the black bar. It is simple and it works.
I don't hate it, but if you have a nice new tab page (i use speeddial 2 for chrome (and I have a link to calendar and drive)), I don't imagine someone using it that often.
Re: The New Google Maps
#140This is a straight up attack on yelp, targeting local commerce. Their goal is that instead of searching yelp for massage therapy, you search google maps. That sort of query is extremely valuable (trust me - my company pays for it every day). It makes a lot of business sense - it's probably the most lucrative way to monetize maps, and get people to use google reviews more.
Yelp built a community around top reviewers and incentives people to review. Google Places doesn't really offer incentives for people to review or to spend time reviewing.
But what Google has clearly started to do here is an extension of classic Information Retrieval (IR) techniques also applied in its search products. About time.
Basic IR intro, skip this paragraph if you know the drill: Basic text search can be thought of as "looking for your search terms in relevant documents" (ala TF-IDF[1]). More sophisticated search layers on various other metrics. Google famously employed its Page Rank algorithm[2] as one such example. Modern search engines with enough traffic can also use click streams themselves as a search metric: for the given search terms, which link(s) were actually clicked on?
Back on point: What users click on and where they go (if the data is available) and how many times they go (again, if the data is available) are usable metrics, physical equivalents of click-stream traffic.
Likewise, information from other sources about relatedness of locations can also be integrated. Think "semantic fisheye views." E.g. you clicked on a pub, and Google knows about other pubs and bars in the area. Or perhaps you clicked on a Yoga studio, which causes different location relationships to be (de-)emphasized. Google at very least can draw on their classic search data as well as the more structured location and business data they've been building for some time.