Google Maps' Moat

#1

Post by rafaelc » Tue, Dec 19, 2017, 11:51 PM UTC

Re: Google Maps' Moat

#2

Post by NelsonMinar » Wed, Dec 20, 2017, 12:30 AM UTC

It sure is nice having Justin O'Bierne writing publically about maps again. His old 41Latitude blog was phenomenal and then got blackholed when he went to work at Apple Maps. Then he left Apple and is back in the free world and doing phenomenal analysis of digital mapping like this article. I can't wait for him to finish his book.

Re: Google Maps' Moat

#3

Post by donalhunt » Wed, Dec 20, 2017, 12:34 AM UTC

I'm not overly surprised that Google have added so many buildings in such a short time... This IS the same company that re-encoded the whole YouTube corpus (which while small at the time was still a considerable about of content) in a weekend to improve the user experience (SD -> HD launch).

Re: Google Maps' Moat

#4

Post by 40acres » Wed, Dec 20, 2017, 12:48 AM UTC

What an incredible post. I just love this guys blog, I wonder how long it took to research all of this.

As a side note this gives me great confidence that Waymo will come out of the self driving car race in pole position.

Re: Google Maps' Moat

#5

Post by PuffinBlue » Wed, Dec 20, 2017, 12:54 AM UTC

donalhunt wrote: post #3

I'm not overly surprised that Google have added so many buildings in such a short time... This IS the same company that re-encoded the whole YouTube corpus (which while small at the time was still a considerable about of content) in a weekend to improve the user experience (SD -> HD launch).

I can't find anything about this re-encode - do you have a link to read about it?

Re: Google Maps' Moat

#6

Post by sharpercoder » Wed, Dec 20, 2017, 1:01 AM UTC

Google maps is improving since the day I first saw it - that must have been around 2003 or so. The improvement on the data is phenomenal if you look at it over then past 10+ years; The amount of times I blindly trust GM to go somewhere increase every year. I suspect the edgecases will be solved slowly, like navigating to a shop inside a mall, a market stall, an ad-hoc gathering, a planned building, et cetera.

Typing in an address, going there by directions, verifying the building front without extra time needed for travel is truly magic.

Re: Google Maps' Moat

#7

Post by jld » Wed, Dec 20, 2017, 1:02 AM UTC

Google Maps is my pick for the coolest website on the internet. Truly a killer app.

Re: Google Maps' Moat

#8

Post by 0003 » Wed, Dec 20, 2017, 1:05 AM UTC

jld wrote: post #7

Google Maps is my pick for the coolest website on the internet. Truly a killer app.

Can maps be a killer app?

Re: Google Maps' Moat

#9

Post by ajkjk » Wed, Dec 20, 2017, 1:09 AM UTC

Things like this make me think that it's a shame humanity is duplicating all this work instead of collaborating to do it once. One of the awkward failures of capitalism, I guess.

At least when your product is something physical you end up with twice as many outputs. When it's just data you just do the same work twice.

Re: Google Maps' Moat

#10

Post by ghaff » Wed, Dec 20, 2017, 1:10 AM UTC

40acres wrote: post #4

What an incredible post. I just love this guys blog, I wonder how long it took to research all of this. As a side note this gives me great confidence that Waymo will come out of the self driving car race in pole position.

Up to a point. At that point an autonomous system needs to be able to interpret and react to the physical world as it actually is at the moment as opposed to how it's supposed to be.