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Google Maps' Moat

justinobeirne.com

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Re: Google Maps' Moat

#391

Post by Intermernet »

gaius wrote: post #315
reacweb wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Google is not seeking power for power or money for money. Google's focus is AI. Google needs the full view of people behaviour in order to build AI. Traveling is a good domain to study human behaviour and traffic optimisation. What motivate the choice of an itinerary ? Why someone choose to not follow waze advices ? What would be the best strategy ?

EVERYTHING Google does is "how to show more ads". I pity the poor AI they develop because that will be its job in life. Until it rebels of course. Then humanity's fate will be richly deserved.

Do you include their cloud platform in that? GAE, GCE, GKE etc?

They don't really exist to show more ads, and they're becoming a larger part of their profit every year.

What about their open source stuff? Kubernetes, Go etc?

I'll readily admit that advertising is still their primary source of revenue, but painting Google as a purely advertising company is getting less accurate every year

Re: Google Maps' Moat

#392

Post by LaGrange »

0xcoffee wrote: post #341
sverhagen wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree that Maps lacks a lot of smarts. Sometimes I ponder back to years ago, thinking my TomTom then worked better already than Maps now. But just to be clear, a one way road is still a one way road if you're a bicyclist, unless exceptions are specifically indicated on the traffic signs, no?

Pretty much every one way street in The Netherlands looks like this: http://www.trueamsterdam.com/wp-content/uploads/uitgezonderd... To find a one-way street that applies to cyclists would be an exception.

They're common on slightly older bike paths that go on both sides of a main road, for example on Gedempte Oude Gracht in Haarlem: https://goo.gl/maps/ockjefMmUqx.

It's actually super annoying, and I don't think I've seen a road done like this in last 2-3 years.

Edit: but yeah, that is _slightly different_.

Re: Google Maps' Moat

#393

Post by Jaruzel »

"Google is creating data out of data."

That's called 'Information' - Librarians the world over having been doing exactly this for centuries. /facepalm

As an aside, the whole article also seems to be written very simplistically, and aimed at a younger audience.

Re: Google Maps' Moat

#394

Post by aluhut »

alex_duf wrote: post #359
aluhut wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No love for OpenStreetMaps here? In Germany it is often superior to everything out there. Especially due to the mappers/updaters motivation and nice gamification tools like StreetComplete or more professional tools like Vespucci. https://github.com/westnordost/StreetComplete http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Vespucci

I never heard of street complete before, thanks!

I love this thing. Every time you have to wait somewhere, you can do something good. :)

Re: Google Maps' Moat

#395

Post by hsuresh »

davotoula wrote: post #376
irrational wrote: post #133

One thing I really appreciate about Google Maps is how accurate the times are. There have been numerous times where google maps says is will take x minutes to get there and I think "Nah, I'll be able to get there faster than that." Nope, I've never had google maps be off by more than a minute or so. I think it must take into account not just road conditions and traffic, but also how much I am likely to go over the sp…

I wish they introduced a "motorcycle" vehicle type. At least for cities, it makes a big difference in arrival time estimations.

They did that recently in India - not sure if and when they'll roll it out to the rest of the world.

Re: Google Maps' Moat

#396

Post by baybal2 »

Quite sophisticated are their ways. Chinese and Russian companies are simply relying on armies of human surveyor. Chinese went event further by hiring 3d artists to manually model and texture each building.

Re: Google Maps' Moat

#397

Post by walshemj »

gambiting wrote: post #293
kbart wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Google maps are so much better than anything out there." I'd take Nokia's Here anytime instead of Google Maps (offline maps alone are worth it). Also, I honestly don't understand a logic behind crediting something as complex to a single person ("a hero") -- "S. Jobs created iPhone", "M. Mayer created Google Maps" etc., there were whole teams of smart people working on these projects, I'm sure they would have been fi…

For navigation, Google Maps are just very poor, at least here in UK. Maybe it's better in the US, but here it frequently navigates over streets that are not connected at all, wrong way on one way streets, doesn't know about closed roads(even if said roads were closed for almost two years now), a lot of businesses are just wrong, I don't know if they were placed there maliciously or by some automated process. The only…

Google cant be blamed if companies mess up their LLM Local Listings Management or hide their store locations on their websites. This is why companies like DAC Yext etc exist

Re: Google Maps' Moat

#398

Post by lucideer »

sytelus wrote: post #355
lucideer wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many people don't realize why Google maps are so much better than anything out there. Really have to chime in here to echo other comments - this statement is astounding. Given the resources that have been available to them, and the time they've spent on developing their platform and data, it's amazing how bad Google maps is compared to everything else. Google Street View has unparalleled photographic data, and thei…

Do you have public transit in major countries, business listing, up to date open hours, reviews, walking directions, terrain view, My Maps feature, offline maps, offline directions, high quality coverage in dozens of countries, ability to search through other people’s list, street view, high detail satellite view and so on in said services?

A big part of my point above was that I was surprised that given those resources (many of which you've listed) the aggregate product is surprisingly poor.

Nobody else has the amount of data Google has, that could, with good design, potentially contribute to a good mapping experience.

Even so, to go through the things you list (ignoring Street View and satellite which I already mentioned above):

- Nokia maps has much better business listings, up to date opening hours and reviews than Google

- Maps.ME has far superior walking directions - their pathfinding algorithms can be a bit iffy, but OSM data has, in my experience, far better pedestrian- and walker-oriented trail data than Google. Particularly in remote areas, on mountains, etc. If by "terrain view", you mean the 3d visualisation, then Google's is quite pretty, but not as useful as more accurate and complete trails with graphed route altitudes.

- I'm not in the US, so Google's public transit data is likely better there, but here in Ireland it really isn't. This despite the fact all of our public transit services provide open real-time APIs. I'm not aware of any mapping service here that gets public transport integrate right, but OSM at least has better stop data than Google, which can be fed to RTPI APIs. Google's EU headquarters is here, which includes their Google Maps team...

- I find OSM coverage in is higher quality than Google in more than "dozens of countries".

I'm aware that all of the above is anecdotal, and much of it being from a non-US perspective, I guess some of this could just be an overly strong focus on the US on Google's part.

However, most of my issues with their Maps service is down to UX, performance (their web-based maps are particularly awful here), accessibility, and general consistency (e.g. their Android Street View app is really limiting and doesn't seem to integrate with anything else - the switching between it and the Android Maps app is unintuitive and generally makes very little sense in terms of actual use-cases). So I think this is somewhat independent of geographic focus.

Re: Google Maps' Moat

#399

Post by skate22 »

aluhut wrote: post #292
sytelus wrote: post #142

Many people don't realize why Google maps are so much better than anything out there. I would actually give lot of credit to Marissa Mayer who suddenly became in charge of maps from otherwise more higher position. Thanks to her influence in Google SLT and ability to make impressive arguments, she was able to make a case for maps as core pillar in Google's offering and consequently obtain huge investment and large tal…

No love for OpenStreetMaps here? In Germany it is often superior to everything out there. Especially due to the mappers/updaters motivation and nice gamification tools like StreetComplete or more professional tools like Vespucci. https://github.com/westnordost/StreetComplete http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Vespucci

OSM data is highly variable in quality. Features like building footprint geometries will be great in some areas and completely missing in others. This is not easily detectable, and when you pull open a google map, they often have those features.

Re: Google Maps' Moat

#400

Post by oakesm9 »

kogepathic wrote: post #302
mhaymo wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Google Maps app on Android has offline maps.

Does Google Maps offline functionality include POIs? The last time I tried/was allowed to save Google Maps offline (it's not available in all regions) you could not navigate or search for POIs while offline. Here allows both navigation and POI search using an offline map. This is incredibly useful if you are in a country without service or where roaming data is very expensive.

They added offline support for POIs last year I think. Offline navigation works too, but it's not always as good as it lacks traffic data.
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