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Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

joemorrison.substack.com

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Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#341

Post by kccqzy »

nojs wrote: post #287

As another point of comparison Apple Maps works very well in China whereas Google Maps is completely broken (even if you have the data offline the GPS location is usually wrong). Apple have obviously put a lot of focus on making it work there.

That's a stupid Chinese restriction because Chinese mapping data uses GCJ-2 instead of the standard WGS 84 datum. If the Chinese government were to give Google the license to use their datum, Google's map location issue would be gone. (Though POI would still be a problem.)

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#342

Post by dang »

stiray wrote: post #314
pldr1234 wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is missing a `word-break: break-all` on their `default p` class. (Your reply with an unbroken word that spans larger than the page width forced my page to grow (horizontal scrollbar))

Sorry, I didn't notice it, thank you for reminder, I have added manual breaks.

I've added some more. Sorry; it's our bug.

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#343

Post by jhowell »

wpietri wrote: post #191
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…

Google's fundamental relationship with users is statistical, and I think it shows. They're very good at optimizing metrics; their search, for example has remained the leader 20+ years on. In that world, if you lose a few users or give a bad experience, well, there are plenty more where those came from, and the ones who leave will often come back. I think they mistakenly bring that attitude to their consumer businesse…

> very good at optimizing metrics... shoot themselves in the foot with some short-sighted action.

Their optimization strategy informed them to shoot their customers in the foot.

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#344

Post by jhowell »

wpietri wrote: post #326
notyourwork wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any store that uses a rewards, loyalty card or phone number when you checkout does the same. I'm not sure why Amazon is the bad guy when grocery stores have been distributing private brands of mainstream products and shopper loyalty has been used to optimize revenue streams. Amazon does it on a bigger scale, not sure the scale makes it right or wrong though.

Your theory is that if other large companies do something, it must be morally acceptable? Even if that's true, which I'm not persuaded of, Amazon's enormous market power makes a big difference. As a consumer, I don't want Amazon to "optimize revenue streams" when that reduces the reward to market participants to be innovative and deliver high quality.

> Your theory is that if other large companies do something, it must be morally acceptable

You left something out, "as long as it doesn't effect me (yet), and large companies do it, it must be morally acceptable." I don't know why we defend them. Without Google we still go on. Without us, or support for their practices, they dramatically change or they disappear.

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#345

Post by kaba0 »

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.

Small creators who need income will get barely anything, while the ones the youtube algorithm prefers will get all. So yeah support them directly if you want but not google so I think vanced and the like is perfectly fine solution.

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#347

Post by 17a9f4a4f4e5b3f »

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”.

Yeah bit of a brain fart when I wrote this, I probably searched for that but I tried a couple of terms in each.

Actually I probably was searching "photography" at some point because "camera" was bringing up general retail more and I was hoping an actual repair business would hav photography as a keyword more than a retail business would. Just further illustrates how frustrating this is.

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#348

Post by Strom »

dwild wrote: post #329
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…

I means it's always good to reduce reliance on anything, so I won't argue against that, but I won't agree much with your reasoning. The cost we were actually paying on the Google Maps API was hidden. The cost was mostly paid using user data and advertising. As a matter of fact, the API is still free on smartphone ;). They just realized that it wasn't worth it to get that data on the web and thus increased the cost to…

Unexpected pricing changes have already happened to Google Cloud offerings in the past. Google completely redesigned their App Engine pricing scheme in 2011. In practice this meant a 65x price increase for one of my small services. [1] Among the changes was that the 2008-2011 pricing was based on CPU usage, while in 2011 they stopped charging for CPU usage and instead introduced a slew of other pricing metrics, including the classic VM instance idle time.

While the pricing changes frustrated me, they did not drive me away. What ended up having a much bigger impact was that Google just deprecated everything. Some parts of classic App Engine still run in legacy mode, but get no updates and instead you get constant notifications that you should rewrite your app to fit the new Google Cloud model.

--

[1] https://www.kaurkuut.com/blog/google-app-engine-is-a-classic...

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#349

Post by everybodyknows »

y-c-o-m-b wrote: post #161
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…

> how much clutter Google Maps has accumulated on the screen I have to use Google Maps "Go" (the light-weight version) on my phone because of all the clutter in their mobile version. Granted I have an older phone - Galaxy S7 - but for something that worked just fine on even older devices, I don't think that's a valid excuse for it being nearly unusable on an S7 now. Thankfully Maps Go is pretty quick, but the biggest…

Maps Go requires Chrome -- after download, the installer tells me Firefox is "not supported".

Re: Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating

#350

Post by 17a9f4a4f4e5b3f »

brendoelfrendo wrote: post #266
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…

Adding to the anecdata, this was actually infuriating recently while I was on a road trip. I was searching along my route for gas stations and it seemed to be prioritizing Chevron stations. I ended up at a sketchy gas station in the middle of nowhere where half the pumps didn't work and the other half had broken card readers. Come to find out there was a Love's less than 5 miles up the road, right off the highway, wi…

Was also having this recently. Apple for some reason was failing at finding anything along the main stretches of highway I was on (with pit stop style gas/convenience combos) whereas Google was recommending gas 5 minutes off the highway but also recommending Subway which was located in the pitstops with the lesser known gas so then I'm just searching for Subway to find the rest stations instead of gas...
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