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on Gopher (inofficial)
(HTM) Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
(HTM) How Google Maps allocates survival across London's restaurants
chatmasta wrote 2 min ago:
This reminds me of a post earlier this year, âLooksmappingâ [0],
where the author ranked restaurants by the attractiveness of the
reviewers according to their profile photos.
[0]
(HTM) [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44461015
anti-soyboy wrote 18 hours 31 min ago:
Google develops all kind of bullshit because it is funnier than working
psadri wrote 19 hours 12 min ago:
Google Maps or any other aggregator has an inherent interest in market
participant diversity. A lot of suppliers would mean competition,
which results in ad spend, which result in higher revenue for the
aggregator. Same with Google Search.
It's an interesting equilibrium point. They want local businesses to
suffer enough to pay up for ads. But also not too much that they die.
A good local business that does not need to advertise because it is
simply good is actually a burden to the aggregator even though it is
exactly what the end users want to see.
In the past, when I was a in position to build a search engine, we took
the trouble of always including organically ranked results that were
genuinely good, regardless of whether we got paid or not. I felt it
was a long term investment into creating real value for our end users
and therefore our service.
itissid wrote 20 hours 11 min ago:
Nicely done. I think from a product perspective it is interesting that:
- Humans really value authentic experiences. And more so IRL
experiences. People's words about a restaurant matter more than the
star rating to me.
- There is only one reason to go somewhere: 4.5 star reason. But there
are 10 different reasons to not go: Too far, not my cuisine, too
expensive for my taste. So the context is what really matters.
- Small is better. Product wise, scale always is a problem, because the
needs of the product will end up discriminating against a large
minority. You need it to be decentralized and organic, with communities
that are quirky.
All this is, somehow, anethma to google maps or yelp's algorithm. But I
don't understand why it is _so_ bad â just try searching for 'salad'
â and be amazed how it will recommend a white table cloth restaurant
in the same breath as chipotle.
There are many millions that want to use the product _more_ if it was
personalized. Yet somehow its not.
bloppe wrote 18 hours 42 min ago:
> People's words about a restaurant matter more than the star rating
to me.
I find that both offer an incredibly poor signal. I can usually get a
much better idea of the quality of the place by looking at pictures
of the food (especially the ones submitted by normal users right
after their plate arrives at the table). It's more time consuming to
scroll through pictures manually than to look at the stars, but I'm
convinced it's a much better way to find quality.
Maybe that could be a good angle for this kind of tool. At least
until this process becomes more popular and the restaurants try to
game that too by using dishonest photography.
a3w wrote 22 hours 27 min ago:
"rating to low by 1.3" for a restaurant rated 5/5.
WTF? One and zero are not probabilities, and 6 out of 5 is not a
rating.
shellfishgene wrote 1 day ago:
I often think it would be cool if there was a widely understood hand
sign for asking people in a restaurant how they rate it. You stand
outside the window and make the "Is it good?" sign, and whoever sees it
from inside would hold up 1 to 5 fingers to give their star rating.
WOTERMEON wrote 22 hours 29 min ago:
Point twice to them. Point to the space in front of your lap. Point
to your face and mimic sad face and later happy face, while pointing
your thumb down then up, Ã la Roman emperor.
tylervigen wrote 1 day ago:
> Google Maps Is Not a Directory. Itâs a Market Maker.
I understand the author's meaning, but this isn't what the term "market
maker" means. To "make a market" is to stand ready to buy and sell,
usually a security, in order to create liquidity in a market. Usually
this resolves the issue of timing, because it is unlikely that someone
wants to buy at the exact moment someone else wants to sell.
So to "make a market" in London restaurants, Google could buy food
during the day and sell it at night when the shops are closed but
people are hungry. (This would be silly.)
Perhaps a more precise term is "algorithmic gatekeeper."
whywhywhywhy wrote 1 day ago:
Google Maps is up for the dethroning to the first competitor that has
the same information and shows it all at the closest zoom level.
zacharybk wrote 1 day ago:
This is incredible, thank you for putting in the time to create it.
badgersnake wrote 1 day ago:
Google Maps is just advertising now. Not sure why anyone chooses to use
it over better alternatives.
boyka wrote 1 day ago:
Someone chose to ignore Google Maps terms and publicly blog about it
pjs_ wrote 1 day ago:
Google Maps is the mind killer. We all worry about social media
controlling the way we think, feel, vote etc. but Google Maps literally
manipulates where people physically go in real life, what they do on
holiday, where they hang out, what they eat etc. I got so sick of
feeling like a four point five star Google Maps automaton I had to
mostly stop with it. In addition to OSM, personal recommendations etc.
the best substitute for me for a 4.5 star review is my nose, eyes and
ears
virtualritz wrote 1 day ago:
> One practical problem I ran into early on is that Google Maps is
surprisingly bad at categorising cuisines. A huge share of restaurants
are labelled vaguely (ârestaurantâ, âcafeâ, âmeal
takeawayâ)
It's not only that; cuisines are also difficult to label as certain
countries simple do not exist for Google when it comes to that.
I recall last year I wanted to change the type of "Alin Gaza Kitchen",
my ex (closed now, unfortunately) fav. falafel place in Berlin from the
non-descript "Middle-Eastern" to "Palaestinian" category.
I assumed this was available for any country/cuisine, like "German",
"Italian" or "Israeli". But "Paleastinian" didn't exist as a category.
gniv wrote 19 hours 58 min ago:
The vague categorisation is likely on purpose, done by the business
owner thinking that it would attract more clients.
You can change it yourself and Google will accept it but if the owner
is adamant they will change it back.
kiney wrote 1 day ago:
of course not. There is not such country after all.
jackbrookes wrote 23 hours 33 min ago:
By that logic, 'Basque', 'Cantonese', 'Cajun', and 'Tex-Mex'
shouldn't exist either
jrflowers wrote 1 day ago:
Gotta love an âI personally know better than pretty much
everybody else on earthâ post
(HTM) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_recognition_of...
kh_hk wrote 1 day ago:
Post could benefit from a terser writing that has not gone through AI.
It took me extra effort to distil useful information from all the noise
of what otherwise would be a great post.
qweiopqweiop wrote 1 day ago:
I'll go against the grain slightly and say that usually Google ratings
are quite reliable for me. At times I notice they're exaggerated and it
usually coincides with someone coming to ask me to rate them at the end
of the meal.
dazc wrote 1 day ago:
There are good businesses out there that don't get a lot of reviews
because they don't ask for them. Relying upon customers to do this
without a prompt is not something I'd recommend.
sunnyam wrote 1 day ago:
I don't think this is saying that the ratings are unreliable, but
rather that searching by rating isn't a guarantee that a high-rated
restaurant will show up due to the other factors at play.
You don't get a sorted list from highest rated to lowest rated, but
rather, momentum of reviews, number of reviews, changes in rating
etc.
My suspicion is that there probably is also a noticeable difference
between companies that advertise on Google vs. those that don't.
Anecdotally, the gym closest to me has higher ratings than all the
other gyms in my area, but when I moved to the area it never showed
up on Google Maps for me. It was only by walking by it that I decided
to look it up on Google Maps specifically by name that it showed up
for me.
DeathArrow wrote 1 day ago:
Not sure if it's a London thing. In my city neither I, nor the people I
know rely on Google maps reviews for picking restaurants. We either
know the place, follow a recommendation or try the place based on menu,
price, looks, vibe, position etc.
A week ago I went to Venice and I only looked on Google maps to see
what the menus and prices are, but I wasn't interested in the reviews
themselves or the grade, bacause IMO, people have biases. One evening
we went to one of the restaurants I spotted on Google maps but the rest
of the evenings we wandered the streets, and picked what was close, if
we liked the menus, the prices and the atmosphere.
One of the restaurants had only 3.4 grade on Google maps, few reviews
and mostly locals ate there. The food was very good and the service was
great.
I do not generally make my mind based on reviews from Google Maps,
Booking, Amazon. Of course, if the overall grade is very low, I will
give it some thoughts and maybe read some reviews. But generally I
don't make a decision based on reviews.
DeathArrow wrote 1 day ago:
So if you had an online business, you had to do SEO and optimize for
search engines. Now, if you have a brick and mortar business you still
have to keep the algorithms happy? Sounds like life becomes harder for
some business owners.
komali2 wrote 1 day ago:
We had a bizarre time as a brick and mortar being even allowed to be
on Google Maps. We had to take multiple pictures and videos of
outside of our business with our sign, and then schedule a call with
someone not in our country (or didn't speak mandarin anyway), then
show them in a video call our outside of the restaurant, us locking
and unlocking the door of our restaurant, us opening our cash drawer,
then showing receipts, then our back storage room. It was super
uncanny.
DeathArrow wrote 1 day ago:
>Because once you start looking at Londonâs restaurant scene through
data, you stop seeing all those cute independents and hot new openings.
You start seeing an algorithmic market - one where visibility
compounds, demand snowballs, and who gets to survive is increasingly
decided by code.
Seems a bit weird. That would mean most people in London would chose
the restaurant based on Google maps reviews.
ozbonus wrote 1 day ago:
Google Maps stopped being a reliable way to find good restaurants a
long time ago. Any time in my city when I see a place with a high
rating and suspiciously large number of reviews, searching for "five
stars" in the reviews inevitably finds customers helpfully mentioning
that they got free food in exchange. I've even seen places advertise
the bribe openly on Maps. It would be trivial to detect this and punish
offenders, but Google chooses not to.
I've been mulling over starting a boutique social network focused on
location reviews with real life friends exclusively.
entuno wrote 1 day ago:
I've seen several places that have a note printed on their menus
offering a discount for a positive review.
nomilk wrote 1 day ago:
Delivery apps like Grab and Uber Eats are even worse since they have
even more perverse incentives (minimising delivery time and maximising
'sponsored' listings).
Other than being willing to scroll a lot, I haven't found any great
ways to find new restaurants when using delivery apps, and I'm sure I
use them far less because of the tedium involved. I think scraping
listings and re-doing the algorithm yourself (as per post) is perhaps
the best approach. E.g. Just being able to rank by user rating and
filter for no less than 200 reviews and within 5km would be an
outstanding improvement on the status quo, which is always the 50
closest restaurants to the delivery address - what a coincidence! -
with a few 'sponsored' listings thrown in.
delichon wrote 1 day ago:
The solution is what Lauren did, she rolled her own. Once that took
teams of experts and big bucks. Now a single ML expert can do it for
small bucks because she "needed a restaurant recommendation" and didn't
trust the available ones. Soon any mild mannered programmer will have
the same capability, and then the muggles will get it, in a mass, just
for the asking of their favorite chat bot.
If the progression holds, oodles of recommendation engines can bloom,
and it'll be trivial to fork and customize a favorite with a prompt. As
the friction of doing large analysis jobs tends toward nil, the Google
moat dries up and their commanding height subsides. Too optimistic?
DeathArrow wrote 1 day ago:
>then the muggles will get it, in a mass, just for the asking of
their favorite chat bot
I guess you can do it right now if you tell a llm your preferences.
gleenn wrote 1 day ago:
The data is the key though. How did they effectively scrape the data?
Does every restaurant have a website? I bet half rely on Google Maps.
So IMHO you are too optimistic because regularly and effectively
getting the data is the hard part, not the model.
TrackerFF wrote 1 day ago:
This right here. Every time I see these types of articles, I jump
straight to the chapter regarding data, and it usually a single
line of "I scraped the data", sometimes with explanation, most
times not.
In this case it seems like she used their API to get the data. But
as she notes, scraping can quickly mean having to spend money. And
that's where the scraping dream ends for many people - if they have
to spend money in any way, shape, or form, it's a non-starter.
andai wrote 1 day ago:
There's a couple different threads here.
Can we make a decentralized search engine. Which breaks down into two
questions, is it technically feasible and is it socially feasible?
(Maybe the word search would be a bit more broad than retrieving web
pages. It could be for everything right.)
I don't know but I'm inclined to say that the difficulty will be more
on the social side than on the technical side.
The web was very decentralized 20 years ago, and we had all manner of
peer to peer systems already. There just doesn't seem to be much
appetite for that kind of thing, at least in the mainstream.
Although there might be something to it, with the AI part of the
equation.
Like we had self hostable services for a long time, most people just
don't want to be a sysadmin.
Well, I gave Claude root on my $3 VPS. Claude is my sysadmin now. I
don't have to configure anything anymore. Life is good :)
class3shock wrote 1 day ago:
Can anyone recommend an alternative to GMaps for searching for
restaurants, services, or general "discovery" near a location?
kccqzy wrote 1 day ago:
Yelp is the classic. The old Foursquare was also good for discovering
where people check in, which is basically a proxy for discovery.
theahura wrote 1 day ago:
Pretty sure this whole post is generated by AI
dash2 wrote 1 day ago:
> This disproportionately rewards chains and already-central venues.
Chains benefit from cross-location brand recognition. High-footfall
areas generate reviews faster....
I think this is very likely false if you mean compared to the status
quo ante. Before Maps, a well-loved but hard-to-find venue just
wouldn't ever be seen by most people, and the absence of reviews made
branding more important because it was all you had to go on. I'd be
very doubtful if the proportion of independent cafes and restaurants
decreases when Google Maps enters an area. (Couldn't find any causal
research designs though....)
The more general point that the algorithm is not neutral (and probably
never could be) must be right.
(I asked ChatGPT but it ended up with: "We have almost no clean
exogenous variation in Maps rankings or feature rollouts at fine
geographic scales that would let you estimate impacts on entry,
survival, or market structure in a neat DiD/IV way.")
secabeen wrote 1 day ago:
Before GMaps, we had the Zagat Guides, which were an important way
for many restaurants to start pulling in traffic.
noitpmeder wrote 1 day ago:
Who the hell cares what garbage chatgpt vomited based on your
unspecified chain of prompts?
thimkerbell wrote 1 day ago:
It's a little funny that no one is a human face of (interface to)
Google Maps, or any platform with longevity these days. Talk to the
faceless pretend person if you have a problem, maybe you'll feel
better.
thimkerbell wrote 1 day ago:
(they don't fix things anymore, do they?)
willtemperley wrote 1 day ago:
I donât think the effect Instagram and TikTok has on this attention
market can be ignored. Living in a big Asian city I will check those
first.
shalmanese wrote 1 day ago:
I never understood why the "collaborative filtering" approach never
took off with most review options. Google Maps shows you what the
average person thinks is a good restaurant, meaning the rich get richer
faster and tiny statistical noise converts to durable competitive
advantage.
Instead, I'd love for Google to understand me well enough to show me
which restaurants I would disproportionately love compared to other
people based on its understanding of my taste profiles. That way, the
love can be shared amongst a much wider base of restaurants and each
distinctive restaurant could find its 10,000 true fans.
On top of that, it actually gives me an incentive to rate things. Right
now, you only rate from some vague sense of public service instead of
"this can actively improve your experience with our product".
It's not just Google Maps, Netflix used to operate on the model of deep
personalization that they've slowly de-emphasized over the years. I'm
still waiting for Letterboxd to introduce a feature to give me
personalized film recs based on the over 1000 ratings I've given it
over the years as a paying customer but they seem in no hurry to do so.
Amazon used to take your purchase history into account when ordering
search results but I think that's also been significantly
de-emphasized.
About the only arena this is widespread is streaming music services
like Spotify.
jwr wrote 1 day ago:
The reason is money. Google (in spite of what they would have you
believe) does not show you what is "good" for you, it shows you what
it gets paid to show you (paid in various, sometimes very complicated
ways).
I am sad that Google services are so popular, because it makes the
world a little bit worse for everyone. This includes not only Google
Maps, but also Gmail (did you know that Google is quite active at
censoring your E-mail and you will never see certain E-mails?).
I would really like to see more competition, ideally without the
ever-present enshittification (I'm pretty sure Apple Maps will go
down the drain, too, because KPIs and money).
Workaccount2 wrote 21 hours 21 min ago:
Ain't nobody want to pay for shit.
ErroneousBosh wrote 1 day ago:
> Instead, I'd love for Google to understand me well enough to show
me which restaurants I would disproportionately love compared to
other people based on its understanding of my taste profiles. That
way, the love can be shared amongst a much wider base of restaurants
and each distinctive restaurant could find its 10,000 true fans.
This kind of ties into "but your computer is broadcasting a cookie
and you're being tracked" paranoia though.
People have been convinced by uninformed twaddle that somehow folk
are looking through their screen at them to see what they're doing
and that this is bad, but it also means you get fed an awful lot of
adverts that really don't fit your demographic.
I don't mind if advertisers or supermarkets are profiling me based on
things I like. You want to show me things I like? Good. The flip side
is I'd prefer you not to show me things I don't like.
Youtube seems to be hilariously bad at this latter part, and all I
get are adverts for a bank I'm already with and have been for 30
years, adverts for online gambling sites which I will never be
interested in, adverts for Google's AI slop which I will never be
interested, and adverts for online grammar-checking services that
don't work in the UK because they convert everything into some weird
North American creole dialect, which - again - I will never use.
Yes, take a look at my restaurant-using profile. Recommend stuff I
like.
DeathArrow wrote 1 day ago:
>Instead, I'd love for Google to understand me well enough to show me
which restaurants I would disproportionately love compared to other
people based on its understanding of my taste profiles.
I don't want for Google to collect data on me, build a profile and
"understand" me. I want Google just to return relevant search
results.
davedx wrote 1 day ago:
> Instead, I'd love for Google to understand me well enough to show
me which restaurants I would disproportionately love compared to
other people based on its understanding of my taste profiles.
I mean... this sounds like the perfect use case for a third party app
like "My taste restaurant finder"? There are undoubtedly apps out
there like this.
I don't think Google Maps (a general purpose maps app) should try to
be everything for everyone. It's good enough for what it is.
splonk wrote 1 day ago:
I was part of the team that built exactly this. It launched in 2010.
Some Googlers of that era are probably still annoyed at all the
internal advertising we did to get people to seed the data. This is
one of the launch announcements: [1] > Google Maps shows you what the
average person thinks is a good restaurant
I'm fairly sure this isn't true. At least, I still get (notably
better) results searching while signed in. Couldn't tell you what
the mechanism for that is these days, though. But at least back in
2010, the personalization layer was wired into ranking. You can see
in the screenshots how we surfaced justifications for the rankings as
well.
Pretty much immediately after launch, Google+ took over the company,
the entire social network we had was made obsolete because it didn't
require Real Names(tm), and a number of people who objected
(including me) took down all our pseudonymous reviews. Most of the
team got split off into various other projects, many in support of
Google+. As best as I can tell the product was almost immediately
put into maintenance mode, or at least headcount for it plummeted
like 90%. Half of my local team ended up founding Niantic, later
much better known for making Pokemon Go.
As for why collaborative filtering didn't take off, I can offer a few
reasons. One is that honestly, the vast majority of people don't
rate enough things to be able to get a lot of signal out of it.
Internally we had great coverage in SF, London, New York, Tokyo, and
Zurich since Geo had teams in all those places and we pushed hard to
get people to rate everything, but it dropped off in a hurry
elsewhere. The data eventually fills up, but it takes a while. I'm
told we had 3x the volume of new reviews that Yelp had at the time,
but Yelp mostly only covered the US, while Google Maps was worldwide,
so density was quite low for a long time. It was probably 5-10 years
before I started hearing business owners consistently talk about
their Google reviews before their Yelp reviews.
Another thing is that people are really bad at using the whole rating
scale. On a 1-5 scale, you'll probably find that 80% of the reviews
are either 1 or 5 stars. Even more so in a real life situation where
you meet the humans involved. While you can math your away around
that a bit, at that point you're not getting a ton more signal than
just thumbs up/down (anecdotally I've heard that's why Netflix moved
away from 5 stars). And then at that point, you might be getting
better signal from "were you motivated enough to rate this at all?",
which is why there's the emphasis on review counts. Many people just
won't review things badly unless things have gone terribly wrong. I
sat in on a few UX interviews, and it was really enlightening to hear
users talk about their motivations for rating things, many of which
were way different than mine.
(HTM) [1]: https://maps.googleblog.com/2010/11/discover-yours-local-rec...
Stratoscope wrote 23 hours 18 min ago:
Interesting reading, thanks!
BTW I'm familiar with linkrot, but I just discovered link
poisoning.
I was reading the blog post on my Android phone and saw the Maps
links to Firefly and Home Restaurant. So I tapped the Home
Restaurant link and it took me to the Google Maps app in my normal
home position with my home in the center. I thought for a moment
that maybe it confused Home restaurant with my home.
So I tapped the Back button and nothing happened. Tapped it several
more times with no luck. Finally I used the ||| button and swiped
Maps up to kill it.
Then I tried the Firefly link, with the same results.
On the web, both links work fine, but someone forgot to test that
these old links still work on Android.
Turns out that Home Restaurant is closed, but Firefly is alive and
well. Their menu looks tasty, and the FAQ is something to behold:
[1] If anyone here ever wants to write an FAQ with charm and grace
and humor, read this one and learn. It is the gold standard!
(HTM) [1]: https://www.fireflysf.com/faqs
gennarro wrote 1 day ago:
Thanks for the insights. Nice to hear the facts of a situation in
addition to all the guesses and assumptions (which can be
interesting too of course)
stubish wrote 1 day ago:
I think Spotify and other streaming services have a problem very
similar to the restaurants. Take an artist with a 40 year career and
a dozen acclaimed albums and bags of songs almost everyone loves, and
when that artist comes up it is always the same one or two songs. The
most played songs, causing feedback and making the problem worse. In
my mind, one of the core reasons for asking for recommendations is to
discover something different, which means ignoring or maybe even
penalizing popularity, because you are likely already familiar with
the popular by definition.
magicalhippo wrote 22 hours 17 min ago:
I found Spotify surprisingly good at recommending new music. Not
amazing, but considering how low the bar is thanks to other
services like Netflix I'veveen pleasantly surprised.
For example it recommended a band with just a hundred monthly plays
which I loved. Almost all bands it recommends has less than 10k
monthly plays, so not huge "safe bets", and most are quite decent.
RobotToaster wrote 1 day ago:
If the service actually shows you things you want to see, then you're
less likely to click on ads (or "sponsored results") which you also
don't want to see.
Perhaps more importantly, if such organic growth is possible, it
lowers the incentive for businesses to buy ads.
arvindh-manian wrote 1 day ago:
Beli is a pretty popular app with this functionality
B-Con wrote 1 day ago:
I have a theory: They realized the right approach is to focus purely
on the yes/no of what you choose to consume, rather than trying to
optimize the consumption experience itself.
Remember how YouTube and Netflix used to let you rate things on 1-5
stars? That disappeared in favor of a simple up/down vote.
Most services are driven by two metrics: consumption time and paid
subscriptions. How much you enjoy consuming something does not
directly impact those metrics. The providers realized the real goal
is to find the minimum possibly thing you will consume and then serve
you everything above that line.
Trying to find the closest match possible was actually the wrong
goal, it pushed you to rank things and set standards for yourself.
The best thing for them was for you to focus on simple binary
decisions rather than curating the best experience.
They are better off having you begrudgingly consume 3 things rather
than excited consuming 2.
The algorithmic suggestion model is to find the cutoff line of what
you're willing to consume and then surface everything above that line
ranked on how likely you are to actually push the consume button,
rather than on how much you'll enjoy it. The majority of which (due
to the nature of a bell curve) is barely above that line.
encom wrote 23 hours 17 min ago:
YouTube doesn't have ratings any more, because people disliked the
wrong things which made Susan very sad.
I stopped rating things on Netflix, because after doing so for a
long time, Netflix still thinks I'd enjoy Adam Sandler movies, so
what's the point?
johannes1234321 wrote 20 hours 39 min ago:
YouTube got ratings, you may still up- and downvote. They however
don't show down votes anymore.
encom wrote 19 hours 47 min ago:
Yes, you can vote but only the uploader can see it, making it
pointless and equal to no ratings.
ssl-3 wrote 18 hours 47 min ago:
They're only useless in that they aren't displayed for your
peers, but that was always the least-useful function.
Being able to see a counter that reads as "Twenty-three
thousand other people also didn't like this video!" doesn't
serve me in any meaningful way; I don't go to Youtube to seek
validation of my opinion, so that counter has no value to me.
(For the same reason, the thumbs-up counter also has no
value to me.)
But my ratings remain useful in that the algorithm still uses
the individualized ratings I provide to help present stuff
that I might actually want to watch.
As we all know, investors and advertisers love growth;
Youtube thrives and grows and gathers/burns money fastest
when more people use it more. The algorithm is designed to
encourage viewership. Viewership makes number go up in the
ways that the money-people care about.
Presenting stuff to me that I don't want to watch makes the
number go up -- at best -- slower. The algorithm seeks to
avoid that situation (remember, number must only go up).
Personally rating videos helps the machine make number go up
in ways that benefit me directly.
---
Try to think of it less like a rating of a product on Amazon
or of an eBay seller; try not to think of it as an avenue for
publicly-displayed praise or admonishment. It's not that.
(Maybe it once was -- I seem to recall thumbs-up and
thumbs-down counts being shown under each thumbnail on the
main feed a million years ago. But it is not that, and it
has not been for quite a long time.)
Instead, think of it as one way in which to steer and direct
your personalized recommendation algorithm to give you more
of the content you enjoy seeing, and less of what you're not
as fond of.
Use it as a solely self-serving function in which you push
the buttons to receive more of the candy you like, and less
of of the candy that you don't like.
encom wrote 17 hours 23 min ago:
I have literally not rated anything at all, ever since
YouTube removed dislikes, and my recommendations are
working fine. Ratings indicate(d) if a given video was
likely to be a waste of my time or not, and in an age of AI
slop, this feature is more desirable than ever.
Someone should make a SponsorBlock/Dearrow-type addon to
flag AI slop.
ssl-3 wrote 16 hours 47 min ago:
> I have literally not rated anything at all, ever since
YouTube removed dislikes, and my recommendations are
working fine.
How can you know how green the grass is on the other side
of the fence if you've never even seen it?
Isn't it like Shrodinger's Grass, or Green Eggs and Ham,
at that point?
(And if your recommendations are working fine, then what
is this "AI slop" that you're complaining about? I don't
find any of that on my end.)
encom wrote 14 hours 50 min ago:
You only assume recommendations are based on ratings,
but you don't know. And I have seen your metaphorical
green grass, because actual ratings were a thing up
until about 4 years ago, remember?
>I don't find any of that on my end.
Good for you. The true crime genre has been hit hard by
AI slop.
ssl-3 wrote 14 hours 28 min ago:
> And I have seen your metaphorical green grass,
because actual ratings were a thing up until about 4
years ago, remember?
I remember this conjecture of yours (that ratings
unilaterally ceased to matter as soon as they stopped
being displayed to users) very well.
And unlike you, I can see over to the other side of
the fence -- in the present day -- at a whim: All I
have to do is fire up YouTube in a private session on
a disused device. It's fucking awful over there;
it's complete bedlam.
encom wrote 14 hours 10 min ago:
Yes, a blank YouTube session is the 10th circle of
hell Dante didn't know about. What's your point?
ssl-3 wrote 13 hours 59 min ago:
Same point as always: That it definitely doesn't
have to be that way at all.
(I can't make you take the blinders off and use
that utterly useless, vestigial Thumbs Down
button, though. You're free to live your life
with as blindly and with much suffering as you
wish, no matter what anyone else thinks.)
encom wrote 13 hours 45 min ago:
Please take your meds. I told you my
recommendations are working fine, my YouTube is
not a default bottomless pit of despair.
ssl-3 wrote 12 hours 21 min ago:
We all get the YouTube experience that we
deserve, I guess.
rkomorn wrote 16 hours 42 min ago:
> Shrodinger's Grass
Fantastically apt, IMO. Kudos.
Spooky23 wrote 1 day ago:
Yes! It started changing when the shifted from DVD which are sold
based on the physical asset to the contract deal for content.
Their objective shifted to occupying your time, and TV youâll
accept vs. movies youâll love is a cheap way to do that.
_petronius wrote 1 day ago:
I mean, if you read about how current industry-standard
recommendation systems work, this is pretty bang on, I think? (I am
not a data scientist/ML person, as a disclaimer.)
If e.g. retention correlates to watch time (or some other metric
like "diversity of content enageged with"), then you will optimize
for the short list of metrics that show high correlation. The
incentive to have a top-tier experience that gets the customer what
they want and then back off the platform is not aligned with the
goal of maintaining subscription revenue.
You want them to watch the next thing, not the best thing.
ozbonus wrote 1 day ago:
I think Netflix realized that reducing ratings to a simple thumbs
up/down was a bad idea after all. A while back they introduced the
ability to give double thumbs up which, if you can treat non-rating
as a kind of rating, means they're using a four point scale: thumbs
down, no rating, thumbs up, double thumbs up.
xnorswap wrote 1 day ago:
Netflix are right that 5-stars is too many, it translates to a 6
point scale when you include non-rating, and I don't think there
is a consistent view on what "3 stars" means, and how it's
different to either 4 stars or 2 stars ( depending on the person
).
For some people 3 stars is an acceptable rating, closer to 4
stars than 2 stars. For others, 3 stars is a bad rating, closer
to 2 stars than 5 stars. And for others still, it doesn't give
signal beyond what a non-rating would be, it's "I don't have a
strong opinion about this".
Effectively chopping out the 3-star rating, leaves it with a
better a scale of:
- Excellent, I want to put effort into seeking out similar
content
- Fine, I'd be happy to watch more like it
- Bad, I didn't enjoy this
- Terrible, I want to put effort into avoiding this
With the implicit:
- I have no opinion on this
But since it's not a survey, it doesn't need to be explicit,
that's coded into not rating it instead.
These are comparable to a 5 point Likert scale:
"I enjoy this content"
- Strongly agree
- Agree
- Neither Agree nor Disagree
- Disagree
- Strongly Disagree
The current Netflix scale effectively merges Disagree and
Strongly Disagree, and for matters of taste that may well be
fine.
It would be interesting to conduct social science with a similar
scale with merged Disagree and Strongly disagree to see if that
gave it any better consistency.
Someone wrote 1 day ago:
When given a 5-star choice âvery bad/bad/ok-ish/good/very
goodâ, I rarely pick one of the extremes.
I suspect there are others who rarely click âbadâ or
âgoodâ.
Because of that, I think you first need to train a model on
scaling each userâs judgments to a common unit. That likely
wonât work well for users that you have little data on.
So, itâs quite possible that a ML model trained on a 3-way
choice âvery bad or bad/OK-ish/good or very goodâ wonât
do much worse than on given the full 5-way choice.
I think it also is likely that users will be less likely to
click on a question the more choices you give them (that
certainly is the case if the number of choices gets very high
as in having to separately rate a movieâs acting, scenery,
plot, etc)
Combined, that may mean given users less choice leads to better
recommendations.
Iâm sure Netflix has looked at their data well and knows more
about that, though.
unbalancedevh wrote 18 hours 34 min ago:
I apply my own meaning to the 5-star rating, and find it to
work really well:
1 = The movie was so bad I didn't/couldn't finish watching
it.
2 = I watched it all, but didn't enjoy it and wouldn't
recommend it to anyone.
3 = The movie was worth watching once, but I have no interest
in watching it again.
4 = I enjoyed it, and would enjoy watching it again if it
came up. I'd recommend it.
5 = a great movie -- I could enjoy watching it many times,
and highly recommend it.
crote wrote 1 day ago:
> The current Netflix scale effectively merges Disagree and
Strongly Disagree, and for matters of taste that may well be
fine.
I'm a bit skeptical about this.
To me there's a big difference between "This didn't spark joy"
and "I actively hated this": I might dislike a poorly-made
sequel of a movie I previously enjoyed, but I never ever want
to see baby seals getting clubbed to death again.
Every series has that one bad episode you have to struggle
through during a full rewatch. Very few series have an episode
bad enough that it'll make you quit watching the series
entirely, and ruin any chance at a future rewatch.
locofocos wrote 1 day ago:
I have horrible news for you. Google had it, then they killed it
(HTM) [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleMaps/comments/1737ft9/google_...
johanyc wrote 17 hours 13 min ago:
Woah I remember this. Totally forgot about the feature.
samlinnfer wrote 1 day ago:
From the comments it seemed that it didn't work well for everyone?
scratchyone wrote 1 day ago:
related to your letterboxd suggestion, [1] is quite good! it uses
trakt instead of letterboxd but it's given me quite a few good
suggestions. their FAQ describes a similar approach to what you've
been talking about, it tries to find movies and tv you like
disproportionately like.
(HTM) [1]: https://couchmoney.tv
modeless wrote 1 day ago:
Google's Maps search ranking doesn't seem sophisticated to me. In fact
it seems unbelievably naive. Ranking is Google's core business and yet
they seem to forget how to do it when a map is involved.
When I want to find something that's actually good, I use this site:
[1] . At first glance it looks like an unremarkable SEO spam site, but
it's actually a great way to get properly ranked Google Maps reviews.
It uses proper Bayesian ranking, so it won't show you a 5 star place
with two reviews over a 4.9 star place with 2,000 reviews, as Google
often will. And it has good sorting and filtering options so you can,
for example, filter or sort by number of reviews.
(HTM) [1]: https://top-rated.online
LocalH wrote 21 hours 46 min ago:
No, advertising is Google's core business.
xandrius wrote 1 day ago:
Maps's search as a whole is terrible even from a UX perspective:
search something with some filters, realise that you want to change a
letter in the search? Byebye filters.
Some filters are available with a specific subset of words but not
with another.
Zoom in a location, look for a common word? There are good chances it
will zoom out and send you to the other side of the globe instead.
Then pan back, hit "Search in this area" and bam it works.
Some devices can make reviews and some can't (tested on different
devices, even Google ones).
Search for a specific word which might be in a review (say, "decaf")
and you get even stuff which doesn't even remotely contain the word
(I'd expect an empty result if no place has mentioned my keyword).
And many more.
It's just insane how a huge company just seem focused in making a
"good enough" experience instead of being the leader. Maybe it's for
the best but if they went 1 sprint/quarter into "let's fix glaring BS
UX issues in our products", they would probably destroy so many
alternatives out there.
Maybe it's on purpose to avoid some anti-trust kind of response?
We'll never know.
modeless wrote 18 hours 11 min ago:
Years ago I worked on the Google Maps team. IMO Google has
underinvested in Maps UI for a long time due to a lack of
competition and a lack of appreciation for the value of the product
because the amount of direct revenue attributable to it is low.
It's practically in maintenance mode.
shalmanese wrote 1 day ago:
I've said for decades that Google is terrible at search in every area
except Google Search. Youtube search? Terrible! Chrome history
search? Abysmal! Gmail search? Atrocious! Google Maps Search? At some
point, standing in a middle of a mall searching for "coffee" returned
only 3 SERPs despite me standing in front of a coffeeshop that I
could not get to show up.
DeathArrow wrote 1 day ago:
>I've said for decades that Google is terrible at search in every
area except Google Search.
From my point of view Google Search is terrible, too. Is hard to
find relevant results, you mostly get results optimized to make
money, or junk. You have to explore tens or hundreds of results to
find the needle in the haystack.
dieortin wrote 1 day ago:
SERP = Search Engine Results Page. Iâm pretty sure what you mean
is simply â3 resultsâ, and not â3 search engine result
pagesâ
modeless wrote 1 day ago:
I find YouTube search to be serviceable. At least it has decent
filtering and sorting options. Gmail search is just OK, but I
haven't found anything much better. Chrome history search, though,
is completely worthless. Especially since it got merged into that
myactivity thing that is utter garbage, completely non-functional
for any purpose. There's so much potential in searching a complete
history of everything you've ever personally seen online, and it
would make Chrome more sticky. Incredible fumble by Google here.
shalmanese wrote 1 day ago:
Youtube search does a baffling thing where it shows you 5 SERPs,
then a bunch of unrelated things it thinks you like, then another
5 SERPs. It used to only show you the top 5 SERPs before
switching to "suggested videos" for the rest of the scroll. Truly
a terrible product when that was the design.
jerlam wrote 1 day ago:
Youtube is not in the business of giving you accurate search
results or information. It's now in the business of getting you
to watch any video, related or not to your query, in order to
serve you ads.
Workaccount2 wrote 21 hours 12 min ago:
> It's now in the business of getting you to watch any video,
related or not to your query, in order to serve you ads.
Youtube was in this business from day 1. Even before Google.
Youtube was never going to be anything other than an
ad-platform with videos to lure in the products.
Vid.me tried to be a video platform with videos to lure in
users, but it went bankrupt, because nobody wanted to pay and
nobody wanted to watch ads.
data_marsupial wrote 1 day ago:
It is a very crude method for injecting diversity into search
results (and the browsing experience). It can't be turned off
and still shows up even if very specific search terms are
used.
Hard to believe it is the best possible video search
implementation for their ad serving goals.
vintermann wrote 1 day ago:
They fear tiktok is outcompeting them with even more aggressive
attention hijacking, I guess, so they can't resist showing up
something "This wasn't what you were looking at but can I get
you to click it?"
charcircuit wrote 1 day ago:
To be fair those "unrelated" videos are sometimes videos I'm
also interested in, sometimes more than what I'm searching for.
fsckboy wrote 1 day ago:
>To be fair those "unrelated" videos are
the unrelated videos it shows me are so far from anything I'm
interested in that I can only conclude it's showing both of
us the same stuff, just lowest common denominator popularity.
>videos I'm also interested in, sometimes more than what I'm
searching for
therefore, based on my argument, you must have horrible taste
doctoboggan wrote 1 day ago:
It's always annoyed me that zooming in on a building will not reliably
show the business that operates there. I understand that at low zoom
levels you may need to filter what is displayed based on the high
density, but when I zoom in I want to see everything that is there.
Sometimes I am forced to go to street view to read the sign, then type
the company name into the search box to force the business marker to
show up and get clickable.
I've found Apple Maps is a little better in this regard. They show a
higher density of business markers at any given zoom level.
glandium wrote 7 hours 21 min ago:
I don't know about other countries, but in Japan, maps will show
underground passages from e.g. the metro, with exit annotated with
their numbers...
Unfortunately, not all numbers are shown, even when all the exits are
non-overlapping at the displayed zoom level.
SomeUserName432 wrote 17 hours 16 min ago:
> It's always annoyed me that zooming in on a building will not
reliably show the business that operates there.
It's actually much worse than that.
I will often see the business name as I'm zooming in, but if I zoom
too far, it's no longer available. You have to find "just the right
zoom level" for displaying the given business.
As if it were some weird mind game they were playing with you.
Perepiska wrote 18 hours 5 min ago:
There are two 40-floors buildings nearby to each other in Tbilisi,
Georgia, that are missing on Google Maps. All businesses have to put
POI just "somewhere".
One man from Google told me that there are staff members responsible
for Georgia maps but they are chilling :)
vladvasiliu wrote 19 hours 25 min ago:
Even trying to see the street name has a very high probability of
failure, so I don't know what you expect.
wlesieutre wrote 22 hours 48 min ago:
A few days ago I was trying to see if a anything new had taken over a
vacant restaurant space yet, previous occupant had closed in July.
When I zoomed in, it would still only show me the Permanently Closed
business listing for the old restaurant.
Searching by address, they do have a listing for its replacement. But
they were prioritizing the dead restaurant on the map because why
would I want to know current info from a map when they can be useless
instead?
And it's not like this is a restaurant in the first floor of a tower
with a bunch of businesses stacked on top of it competing for map
space. It's a single floor, there's only one occupant.
bschne wrote 22 hours 55 min ago:
information density of online maps is, in general, quite low compared
to old paper maps: [1] I guess there's various reasons, ranging from
"it's hard to make auto-layout algos produce stuff as dense as
painstakingly handcrafted maps" to "let's make it harder to
scrape/copy data"
(HTM) [1]: https://x.com/patrickc/status/1738646361128792402
tokai wrote 22 hours 41 min ago:
Back then it was dedicated map makers that created maps. Now it's
mainly programmers. So its not surprising that quality tanks when
you go from disciplinary expert staff to IT day laborers.
kccqzy wrote 23 hours 11 min ago:
A lot of these place names are user-created and Iâve definitely
seen completely wrong and bogus place names on Google Maps. It seems
that they hide a lot of these when the business owner doesnât
actively take control of the business page. I suppose itâs partly
for accuracy, partly to encourage businesses to verify the listing on
their maps.
pmdr wrote 1 day ago:
> It's always annoyed me that zooming in on a building will not
reliably show the business that operates there.
8-10 years ago it was way more reliable. The decline started with
them adding the option to promote a business. Frustrating.
zdc1 wrote 23 hours 15 min ago:
Yes, I've noticed their results are definitely becoming more opaque
and driven by what they want to show you. (This is even when there
isn't a sponsored option on the map.)
Fricken wrote 21 hours 51 min ago:
Yesterday I was having the same issues as the top commenter
except I was having trouble getting Google to label various
mountain peaks I had zoomed in on.
liveoneggs wrote 15 hours 0 min ago:
yeah but I'll bet it showed you the closest starbucks
kevin_thibedeau wrote 21 hours 36 min ago:
It would be nice if they'd fix the missing labels on roads,
even at the highest zoom with no clutter. Likewise, highway
speed limits that were changed over a year ago.
iso1631 wrote 1 day ago:
advertising ruins everything, users don't want to change to other
services, news at 11.
ginko wrote 1 day ago:
The most annoying thing is when you search for instance for "Chinese
restaurants" and Google maps shows me Japanese restaurants while
hiding actual Chinese restaurants.
specialist wrote 17 hours 6 min ago:
My search for thrift stores did not include Goodwill. Had to search
for Goodwill explicitly.
Clever.
decae wrote 20 hours 57 min ago:
In Tokyo when I search for convenience stores, a lot of the time
Google Maps will also show ATMs, assuming that's the reason I want
to go to a convenience store. Inversely, if I search for a bank
branch, it'll show convenience stores. The fuzzy search results can
be very frustrating sometimes.
jdycbsj wrote 1 day ago:
Its not possible to be better because its not possible for even
Google or Apple to verify anything anyone claims which is not static
btw. The info keeps changing all the time with biz
disputes/divorces/inheritence wars etc etc.
potato3732842 wrote 1 day ago:
Nobody is asking for the data to be perfect at the margin. Just
for it to be readily visible at all.
nicoburns wrote 1 day ago:
OpenStreetMap-based maps tend to be much better in this regard.
Although this is counterbalanced by the fact that they tend to have
less data on businesses in general.
szszrk wrote 1 day ago:
Which is not surprising, as those two have very different
priorities.
- OSM want's a detailed and reliable map.
- Google maps tries to either sell your data to clients, or make
you buy from them.
Their business data is their priority for maps. You can see that
clearly when you look at location history changes over past decade
or so. It used to be actual user location history and it was
glorious. Now it's "near what businesses you were more or less,
help us rate them".
It's a great moment to again remind about existence of low-friction
tools that you can use to add business data (among others) to OSM,
like StreetComplete app, available on F-droid and Google Play :)
[1] In my region OSM business data starts to be on par with google,
better (more up to date) sometimes.
(HTM) [1]: https://streetcomplete.app/?lang=en
DanOpcode wrote 3 hours 43 min ago:
I have recently tried to navigate with OsmAnd a few times where I
live. Once I ended up in the wrong location, and a few times I
have had to look up the business in Google Maps to find their
address.
I would love to use OsmAnd more. StreetComplete sounds great and
looks like a nice way to be able to contribute fixes to OSM.
Thanks for the recommendation!
szszrk wrote 2 hours 37 min ago:
It is smooth and kind of "I'm doing my part!" but with low
friction.
> a few times I have had to look up the business in Google Maps
to find their address
Exactly my point - Gmaps taught us to expect *businesses" on
maps. Not addresses. Pins and stars, instead of streets and
numbers. Arrival time and traffic, instead of distance,
elevation and road type (size).
I use gmaps still, mostly for businesses, but to actually know
where I am I have better options. Gmaps hides most of typical
map features - you see less of trees, water, buildings, height
elevation. On Comaps/Osmand you suddenly can correlate map with
things you see (without street view! :P).
eisa01 wrote 22 hours 43 min ago:
If you just want to add POI data, then Every Door is a good
choice that also works on iOS
CoMaps would be a good map app, and it will also display when
POIs and opening hours were last confirmed (the only OSM app to
do so AFAIK) [1]
(HTM) [1]: https://every-door.app
(HTM) [2]: https://www.comaps.app
fsckboy wrote 1 day ago:
>I am forced to go to street view to read the sign, then type the
company name into the search box to force the business marker to show
up and get clickable. I've found Apple Maps is a little better in
this regard.
the way you juxtapose them calls for pointing out, Apple Maps don't
have streetview which makes Apple Maps a lot less convenient.
encom wrote 23 hours 27 min ago:
As interesting as StreetView is, it's such a colossal privacy
invasion, it's absurd. In my neighbourhood, you can literally see
in peoples windows, into their living rooms.
psunavy03 wrote 18 hours 33 min ago:
And how is this any different from walking down the sidewalk?
They're on the road, they're not stuffing cameras into your
living room window to try to catch you walking around nekkid or
anything. It is literally documenting what public view looks
like.
jen20 wrote 15 hours 5 min ago:
The difference, as usual with this kind of thing, is scale.
amanaplanacanal wrote 17 hours 52 min ago:
The biggest difference is that you would have to actually
travel there and look, rather than scanning the whole city from
your recliner.
baxtr wrote 1 day ago:
Actually⦠last time I checked some local addresses Apple Maps had
newer streetview data than Google.
lewisgodowski wrote 1 day ago:
Apple Maps has had "Look Around" (their implementation of Street
View) for a while now.
fragmede wrote 1 day ago:
Where are you? Apple street view coverage isn't as extensive as
Google's but there's a binoculars button for it if they do for a
given location.
SigmundA wrote 1 day ago:
Hardly anything unless in a major city, no way to easily tell if
there is any coverage other than randomly clicking until it
shows, also doesn't tell you the date taken.
Google street view has the 2d overlay letting you know where
there is coverage, shows the date taken along with previous
imagery, and they have coverage nearly everywhere in the US at a
least, although some of its pretty old.
Apple Maps does seem to have more up to date satellite / aerial
imagery though.
Hard to overstate how valuable all that street view coverage is
on the Google side.
robin_reala wrote 1 day ago:
My little Swedish village has full Look Around coverage, and
clicking on the ⯠icon shows an âImageryâ menu item that
tells me the month and year the coverage was last updated. I
think youâre underestimating where theyâre currently at.
SigmundA wrote 23 hours 38 min ago:
In the US is has basically zero coverage outside any major
city. Google on the other hand has exentiqive coverage into
rural areas, albeit some of it old, at least its there, where
it has newer coverage it usually has multiple one at
different times allowing one to look back in time as well,
very useful.
robin_reala wrote 16 hours 3 min ago:
I just double-checked my village. Every single road and
cul-de-sac that I could find, with no exceptions, has full
coverage on Apple. Google on the other hand, has coverage
for maybe 50-55% of the roads. The worst example is a
residential area on the outskirts where theyâve driven
the car in, down one side-street, then given up and gone
home.
On the other hand, they do have historical coverage, have
to give them that.
SigmundA wrote 10 hours 48 min ago:
Yeah so not sure why but Look around coverage is much
better in Europe than the US for some reason which seems
odd since Apple is US based.
You can see the very poor US coverage here: [1] Of course
compared to Google Street view there is no comparison on
a world wide basis as you can see on the same page.
(HTM) [1]: https://brilliantmaps.com/apple-look-around/
plorkyeran wrote 1 day ago:
In areas with partial coverage Apple Maps has basically the
same overlay showing where Look Around is available. It just
doesn't have a great indicator as to why the option is greyed
out when there's no coverage.
SigmundA wrote 23 hours 39 min ago:
I mean in Google Maps you can drag the little man over the
map and it has a map layer that highlights all the roads
available, so you can easily see where it is and is not. Not
randomly picking a point and seeing if indicator is
available.
DANmode wrote 1 day ago:
Click on the building, it populates âbusinesses at this addressâ
- at least, when Iâve tried.
pests wrote 1 day ago:
Just tested - slightly different UI but still works the same. Also
useful for taller buildings with a lot of tenants.
DANmode wrote 11 hours 42 min ago:
Businesses inside hospitals, businesses at shared addresses,
businesses underground, all sorts of great uses.
bbno4 wrote 1 day ago:
pretty cool, i'll check some of these out thanks!
fersarr wrote 1 day ago:
+1 to "We audit financial markets. We should audit attention markets
too"
tacker2000 wrote 1 day ago:
Very interesting, ive always wondered how google decides to show
restaurants or other POIs if they overlap and there is a large density.
Im sure they favour the ones that use google ads, but i would not think
that they are bullying places a la yelp.
Anyway its pretty crazy that nowadays your success as restaurant is so
dependent on one huge platform. (⦠and actually, lets not forget the
delivery platforms also)
mistercheph wrote 1 day ago:
What's google maps? I use OSM
RivieraKid wrote 1 day ago:
> Google Maps is not just indexing demand - it is actively organising
it through a ranking system built on
This is where I stopped reading.
nicbou wrote 1 day ago:
In Germany, businesses routinely bully reviewers into deleting negative
reviews, so the scores are meaningless.
I only trust what friends recommend.
tailsdog wrote 23 hours 3 min ago:
I've had this happen to me, posted a factual restaurant review 12
months later threatened with defamation and it's auto removed by
Google. It seems there are agencies that use legal framework to do
bulk removal requests to Google for any low reviews no matter the
content. The in-authentic Korean restaurant in Cologne went from a
1.9 to a 4.6. It's impossible to trust reviews in Germany due to
these corrupt bully tactics.
alpineman wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah, reviews are useless in Germany as a result. If anyone from
Google is reading this, PLEASE add a tag to establishments that
remove reviews by legal means!
chamomeal wrote 1 day ago:
Iâve almost moved on from online reviews. So many are fake, so many
these days are slop. Half the time a 3.5 place is rated so low
because people pick the most random ass reasons to slap it with 1
star.
Also Iâve decided I donât want to live my life by following what
Google says I should do as a default. Sometimes I go to a place that
sucks. But that happened when I checked Google reviews anyway!!
wat10000 wrote 1 day ago:
I mostly ignore the ratings and spot-check some reviews with good
and bad ratings. If the good reviews actually describe something
concrete and the bad reviews are nonsense, I take both of those as
a good sign. If the good reviews are vague and the bad reviews are
actually justified, then the place is probably not so good.
Similar with online shopping. If all the one-star reviews are
complaining about the shipment being lost in the mail or other
irrelevant nonsense, the product is probably pretty good.
pixl97 wrote 1 day ago:
About the only reviews worth reading are 4-2 stars out of 5. 5s
are overblown or fake. 1s quite often are about something dumb. A
3 for for example is apt to at least be thoughtful
patrickmay wrote 1 day ago:
Serious question: How do they bully online reviewers?
bay_baobab_ii wrote 1 day ago:
This happened to me a few times for my reviews in Germany. My
1-star reviews were flagged by the business as "defamation"
although it contained only facts and personal opinions. I provided
additional proof like screenshot of their documents (one of them
was a language school), but they deleted my review at the end.
I was so frustrated, I even considered deleting all of my two
hundred something reviews from Google Maps.
vintermann wrote 1 day ago:
I already deleted all my reviews from Google Maps. Spent all that
money and effort installing a wheelchair elevator in a listed
building, then when updating the info to say basically, "it's
still not exactly wheelchair-friendly as a 120 year old building,
but there is a wheelchair elevator and a HC toilet now", Google
algorithmically accused me of lying.
NoboruWataya wrote 1 day ago:
Nearest hidden gem to me is a Domino's Pizza...
lpribis wrote 1 day ago:
Sample of 1, but the hidden gem near me I would actually consider a
"hidden gem" that only people from the area know about, and it's a
very good family run business.
cons0le wrote 1 day ago:
I'll blow your mind. Go in there and get the pasta primavera. It
slaps ( to be fair you can make it at home real easy )
cheesyted wrote 1 day ago:
Someone hasnât tried the cheesy bread!
bromuk wrote 1 day ago:
Username checks out
0_____0 wrote 1 day ago:
I have gotten so sick of Google Maps that I've done the unthinkable,
and have started walking around the city trying establishments at
random.
It has yielded quite good results basically immediately. People (myself
included) have gotten too used to living In The Box. Putting aside the
time to just go for a walk around and pop into random shops and pubs
has been wonderful.
monerozcash wrote 1 day ago:
At least in central London, the "underrated gems" feature does not seem
to be very good at finding underrated gems.
That might just be a feature of the area though.
dzdt wrote 1 day ago:
Google maps is doing the same thing to local business success that
social media algorithms are doing to political success. The algorithm
controls what you perceive as the consensus of others. It is a
dangerous world to have such power so highly concentrated.
websiteapi wrote 1 day ago:
How exactly would you fix this? Seems no different than any arbitrary
person or groups ranking.
cons0le wrote 1 day ago:
First off, let me see ALL the restaurants in my city, not just the
10 recommended ones.
Second, stop moving the map when I search for things. Why does
google maps on both mobile and desktop, change your search area. I
put the map in one place because I want to search there.
Third, stop scrubbing bad reviews. When every restaurant is 5
stars, theres no point
stavros wrote 1 day ago:
> stop moving the map when I search for things
Are you saying that if I want to find, for example, where Athens,
Georgia is, I need to basically find it manually in the world
map?
michaelt wrote 1 day ago:
> Second, stop moving the map when I search for things.
When I search for 'chicago' I like having the map move to
Chicago, even if there's a Chicago Grill, Chicago Pizza and
Chicago Trading Company closer.
tkel wrote 1 day ago:
Perhaps such things should be controlled democratically instead of by
a single person or a small group of people whose companies are
organized as dictatorships.
Ferret7446 wrote 1 day ago:
It is controlled democratically. The people have democratically
ceded their knowledge gathering to large companies. Because people
are above all else lazy
tkel wrote 1 day ago:
That's not what democracy is. The algorithm is developed in an
organization that is structured as a dictatorship.
Ferret7446 wrote 1 day ago:
And each user decided of their own volition to use the service
under the pretense of delegating to such an algorithm.
komali2 wrote 1 day ago:
"Decide" is a heavily weighted word here. From what did they
decide? Was the field from which they were deciding, perhaps
monopolized, or ologipopalized? Was there information skewed
by the entities hoping to be chosen? Do said entities have
stunning amounts of capital and power that let them prevent
competition?
sinuhe69 wrote 2 days ago:
Very interesting. But I wonder how much Google (and other) Maps can
actually shape the scene. For tourist hotspots with a lot of visitors,
it IS clearly the driving force. But for locals, I donât think it has
an overwhelming effect. Locals know their restaurants and they visit
them based on their own rating. They could explore total strange and
new ones, but then they will form their own rating and memory
immediately and will not get fooled/guided by algorithm (the next time)
tacker2000 wrote 1 day ago:
I disagree, iâm always using Google to find new restaurants and
places to go to in my own (fairly large) city.
embedding-shape wrote 1 day ago:
I think it's less about tourist vs local, and more about the breadth
of restuarants you have available. I live outside of a major
metropolitan area in South Europe, there are restuarants going out of
business and opening up every day in the city, no one can keep track
of all them.
If you can just say "Peruvian" and it finds all restaurants around
you within 2km, you might get 30 options. At that point, using the
wisdom of the crowd for some initial filtering makes a lot of sense.
Personally I love going to completely unknown restaurants that has
just opened and have zero reviews yet which Google Maps helps with
too, but looking at how others around me use Google Maps, a lot of
them basically use it for discovering new restaurants to try, and
we're all locals.
Bjartr wrote 1 day ago:
Unless, as a local looking for new spots to try, your first step is
going to Google Map and searching "restaurants". I'm certainly guilty
of this sometimes.
dataflow wrote 1 day ago:
I did exactly this < 10 minutes ago. For my local area.
tokioyoyo wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah, canât comment about London, as Iâve only been a tourist
there, but assuming it works like in Tokyo. In a big city, with
basically unlimited amount of dining options, a lot of people will
try different places. In the past year, I donât think Iâve
repeated a single dinner spot more than 3 time, and I basically eat
out every day. This is always a discovery problem, and word of
mouth/google maps/tabelog/etc. is a major sales driver here.
Now, if I think about the time I lived in Vancouver, it was the
opposite. You donât have that many options, after a while you
basically make a list of your favourites and rotate.
tkgally wrote 1 day ago:
Long-time Tokyo/Yokohama resident here. Iâm basically the same:
Especially if Iâm by myself and near a train station or retail
area, I just walk around to see whatâs available and choose
someplace to eat. Only if I am planning a meal with others do I
look for options online, and then, in addition to Google and Apple
maps, I also use sites such as tabelog.com and restaurant.ikyu.com.
I havenât been outside Japan for nearly a decade so I canât
compare it with other countries, but my impression is that Japan
has more small restaurants than some other places. Itâs not
unusual to go into a ramen, curry, gyoza, soba, or other eating
place with fewer than a dozen seats and staffed by just one or two
people.
The existence of such small places increases the eating-out
options. I donât know why such small food businesses are viable
here but not elsewhere; perhaps regulatory frameworks
(accessibility, fire, health, tax, labor, etc.) play a role.
tokioyoyo wrote 1 day ago:
Totally. Weâre definitely lucky over here. From my talks with
people in restaurant industry in NA, itâs just extremely
expensive to start a business, on top of the regulatory
restrictions that youâve mentioned. And obviously the holy
grail of money making - liquor. I can get beer in almost every
random ramen shop near me. It takes months/years of approval to
open a place with a liquor license in Vancouver, Canada. Margins
on alcohol are huge, that gives breathing room to little margins
places make from food.
asdff wrote 1 day ago:
Depends if you live in a big city with a lot of restaurant turnover
or not.
This is actually a big frustration for me how I can search food and
get totally different results over the same area in the frame. I seem
to remember in the old days of google maps you'd see, you know,
everything in the area. Like pins on pins on overlapping pins. And
you'd click through them or zoom in as appropriate. You found
everything. It all worked.
Then someone had the brilliant idea that this was all too busy, and
you should have pins omitted until you have sometimes zoomed so far
in you are filling your map viewer frame with the doorstep of that
business...
I wouldn't be surprised to learn businesses get charged to appear
first. Seems like it tends to be things like fast food or national
chains over new locally owned restaurants that pop up more often on
google maps.
lmz wrote 1 day ago:
I'm not sure the overlapping pins idea would work for e.g. a 5
floor building with no multilevel maps and 6 businesses to a floor.
Which is a common thing in some of the places Google maps.
immibis wrote 16 hours 54 min ago:
Works for me. If I search "restaurants", and I see a building
full of pins. I can now go to that building and look at all the
restaurants.
You don't want to show every business as a default view, of
course.
harvey9 wrote 1 day ago:
The writer is in London where even locals often eat outside their
immediate neighborhood.
Bowes-Lyon wrote 2 days ago:
I love the idea! And I want to have it for my city :)
Is there a project on GitHub or somewhere that I could clone?? (smiling
face with halo)
_ink_ wrote 1 day ago:
Looks like she might publish it:
(HTM) [1]: https://laurenleek.substack.com/p/how-google-maps-quietly-al...
HanShotFirst wrote 1 day ago:
Same!
dddw wrote 1 day ago:
Same here!
zem wrote 2 days ago:
super interesting project. I would love to generate a similar list for
my own neighbourhood
digitalPhonix wrote 2 days ago:
Yeah!
> "I scraped every single restaurant in Greater London"
How hard is that now? I assumed that Google is very protective of
that data
_ink_ wrote 1 day ago:
I would be interested how this was done as well. She mentioned the
was using a free tier from Google, so maybe the data is not
protected.
conartist6 wrote 2 days ago:
The other commenter thought the work was silly, but I think it's
brilliant. Keep at this!! You're making me hungry :)
x0x0 wrote 2 days ago:
Interesting work, but ultimately silly: of course google maps ranks
results. No one (yes, yes, I'm sure like 3 people) want a list of all
results, unordered or ordered by something useless like name, when they
type in restaurant. And I cannot put into words how uneager I am to
have the city or state government manage what comes up when I put
indian or burrito into a map.
csoups14 wrote 1 day ago:
Nowhere in the article is the author suggesting that local or state
governments manage these algorithms, just that they be audited for
fairness given the amount of power these algorithms hold in the
market. Google operates something of a monopoly in Google Maps and
its recommendations. You don't find an attempt to understand the
efficacy of its rankings or how Google or market participants could
be manipulating the rankings to benefit themselves interesting?
x0x0 wrote 1 day ago:
You clearly didn't read it. A direct quote:
> At minimum, ranking algorithms with this much economic
consequence should be auditable.
"At minimum". Immediately preceded by a paragraph starting by "For
policy", with sentences like "If discovery now shapes
small-business survival, then competition, fairness, and urban
regeneration can no longer ignore platform ranking systems" or
"tools of local economic policy".
That's perhaps not an outright call for regulation, but it's
certainly suggesting it's warranted.
asdff wrote 1 day ago:
Uhh, I want a list of all the results. I want to be able to search
comprehensively within my map viewer frame.
jeffbee wrote 1 day ago:
Over small areas you can get that, but the API only returns 20
results, so you will either need a ranking signal over a large
area, or a grid search over tiny areas.
tehjoker wrote 1 day ago:
I just looked at google maps and (I didn't realize this
previously), but you can scroll the results and it will change
the map when you bump against the bottom of the list.
asdff wrote 1 day ago:
What is wrong with alphabetical? It's how the yellow pages used
to work.
x0x0 wrote 1 day ago:
Useless but also stupid.
A1 steak house.
AAA1 steak house.
00AAA000 steak house.
febusravenga wrote 1 day ago:
Aaaand that's clear signal to avoid those
digitalPhonix wrote 2 days ago:
> No one (yes, yes, I'm sure like 3 people) want a list of all
results, unordered or ordered by something useless like name
That's not what the author was suggesting (or indeed, what they
built). They were trying to untangle the positive feedback bias
showing up first in the rankings gives.
I think there's probably a lot more to untangle, but as a first pass
it's super cool!
x0x0 wrote 1 day ago:
It's the feigned surprise and sort of attitude that google is doing
something malicious or it's a subterfuge. Starting with a bolded
"Google Maps Is Not a Directory. Itâs a Market Maker." and
inishing with eg
> the most important result isnât which neighbourhood tops the
rankings - itâs the realisation that platforms now quietly
structure survival in everyday urban markets.
For any service like this, _of course_ ranking is at the core of
it. A more honest article could have started there, eg "since you
can't display all results, and doing so is useless to everyone, the
heart of these products is their ranking algorithm and choices.
Let's examine Google's."
shermantanktop wrote 1 day ago:
A tone of breathless wonder is now the coin of the realm.
Quality research and interesting analysis gets the same treatment
as everything else, because that's what gets clicks and
responses. Dinging an individual article for this is arbitrary
and capricious.
Don't hate the player, hate the game. I hate the game too, fwiw.
x0x0 wrote 1 day ago:
Still a lie though. If you don't know / aren't familiar with a
ranker, the author is priming you through the entire article to
believe google is doing something wrong or malicious by ranking
the results. Rather than the same thing search engines have
been doing for 30 years. Whether their ranker is good or bad
(and for whom) is separate.
Including, of course, the way many popular chain restaurants
got there is they make food a lot of people like.
rendx wrote 2 days ago:
Where in the post do you see the author arguing about "a list of all
results"? To me, it merely draws attention to the fact that there is
only one algorithm available in Google Maps, and you rely on Google
to calculate "relevance" based on (to us) unknown and intransparent
metrics. It draws attention to the kind of power Google has over
businesses and our daily lives, without necessarily presenting
alternatives. Nothing about that is "silly". It might be more
relevant to me to learn about new, small, independent restaurants,
but I don't have that choice. If I had access to the full data set,
like e.g. OSM, I would.
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