[HN Gopher] How Google designed its wildfire feature for Maps
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How Google designed its wildfire feature for Maps
Author : agomez314
Score : 92 points
Date : 2021-11-22 14:24 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (about.google)
(TXT) w3m dump (about.google)
| andylynch wrote:
| It's nice I'm sure but when I saw this appear while standing in
| the centre of town in the rain I wondered whether this is really
| the most useful layer option to add? (On a more constructive note
| in this part of the world _flood_ warnings would generally be
| more useful. )
|
| Even better once activated it glitches out if you're not in
| California and asks you to zoom out until it's on the map.
| bit_logic wrote:
| This is nice, but can Google do a better job covering the basics?
| Their weather widget used to display air quality (AQI) a few
| years ago (2018), then it suddenly disappeared one day:
| https://9to5google.com/2018/11/11/google-weather-missing-air...
|
| It seems they care enough about wildfire data to make this big
| update for Maps, but can't do something this basic? Their
| headquarters is in one of the most affected regions in Caifornia
| by wildfires (they had an orange sky last year), and no one at
| Google headquarters thought that maybe showing AQI in the weather
| widget should be restored? (it's not even a new feature, just
| bring back the old AQI panel). What's the problem here, too
| simple for someone's promo-packet?
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| On iOS and iPadOS the weather app displays the information (you
| will have to scroll.down from the location).
| Angostura wrote:
| Also shows on Maps
| yegle wrote:
| Looks like this is returning at least on Google Home Hub/Max:
| https://9to5google.com/2021/09/06/google-nest-hub-aqi/
|
| I've switched to use PurpleAir instead. It's likely the AQI on
| Google Home Hub/Max is also sourcing the data from PurpleAir.
|
| Disclaimer: I work for Google but not on anything this AQI
| related.
| hnburnsy wrote:
| This is great but why is there not a weather radar layer in
| Google Maps? Is it because they don't want to compete with the
| plethora of weather apps?
| thedougd wrote:
| Always wondered the same. This feature would be amazing on
| Android Auto.
| jerlam wrote:
| Can you describe why it would be useful in Android Auto?
|
| Google Maps seems quite car-centric to me, and most weather
| doesn't affect people who are traveling via automobile. Rain
| would not change my plans; but freeway closures would, and
| the latter is already present.
| macintux wrote:
| Fog, rain, sleet, ice, snow, tornadoes can all impact
| travel plans. Not often, admittedly, but I've changed my
| route based on most of those.
| hparadiz wrote:
| Would be nice if I could zoom out on the entire state of
| California and see at least a label showing where the fire is and
| not force me to zoom in to see it.
| legitster wrote:
| > Yossi Matias and others from his team immediately took action
| and within hours launched the first emergency OneBox on Google
| Search. It included emergency information and a hand-drawn map of
| the fire's location, which was manually updated in collaboration
| with a local TV station throughout the fire's 77-hour duration.
|
| I love this. Do the thing, and worry about doing it the right way
| later.
|
| You would not believe the amount of multimillion dollar products
| or features started out as a Excel spreadsheets being mailed back
| and forth and manually input to something.
| mulmen wrote:
| Is this really the best policy with time and safety critical
| situations? Wildfire maps already exist, why not link to that?
| Who cares if you get it right _eventually_ if you get it wrong
| when it matters?
| jlarocco wrote:
| Okay. But https://inciweb.nwcg.gov/ has been around for years and
| gets its data directly from the firefighting teams working the
| fires.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Yeah, as someone who watches the California fires live, Google
| was very late to the game with this one and their maps aren't
| very detailed. There are dozens of good providers of MODIS and
| VIIRS maps with loads of additional features (like histories)
| that update immediately. Google's is the most bland and slow of
| them all.
| tholman wrote:
| All for extra tools to help in emergency situations, that said I
| would also like it if I could see street names without zooming to
| a microscopic level which could be helpful in these situations
| especially.
| dmckeon wrote:
| I would be happy with a brief persistence of street names at a
| larger scale when zooming in. IOW, when zooming, street names
| to persist at the larger, zoomed in size for 400..800 ms or so,
| then shrinking to the typical size. Don't know if that is
| possible with whatever map layers are now in use.
| mulmen wrote:
| No thanks. Make the names visible at all times. Apple Maps is
| infuriating to use while driving because there is no clear
| indication of scale and it constantly zooms in and out. Do I
| need to turn now or in a few seconds or a minute? Impossible
| to tell at a glance. Changing scale should be done rarely. I
| don't look at my cell phone every 800ms while driving.
| mulmen wrote:
| Both Google and Apple Maps are poorly named. They are not maps
| at all. They are navigation services at best. Location
| sensitive marketing platforms at worst.
| lucasisola wrote:
| Lol. I was coming to the comments section for this. There must
| be some challenge here that isn't immediately obvious because I
| feel that no one has solved this well.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| Apple Maps does this really well (at least for NYC). It's the
| only reason I keep it installed, to look at street names
| while using Google Maps
| [deleted]
| rudian wrote:
| I'm confident it's two reasons:
|
| - too many street names make for a noisy/busy/ugly map, and
| we all know maps _must be beautiful and nothing else_
|
| - streets don't pay for ads, businesses do, so between the
| two they prefer showing the latter.
|
| Technically now you can tap anywhere on the map once to place
| a pin and get more info; In practice tapping in Google Maps
| has become horrendous, it never does what you expect. One
| such example is tapping on a business near a "walkable area":
| you can't. The area will always focus instead, even if
| painted behind the business.
| bsedlm wrote:
| > There must be some challenge here that isn't immediately
| obvious
|
| the challenge is profit maximization, this to emphasize it is
| not a technical challenge (earlier versions of maps were good
| at this)
| gordon_freeman wrote:
| And adding STOP and road SIGNAL signs to the maps please too.
| Apple Maps does it for a while.
| lucb1e wrote:
| If you're willing to sacrifice other features in favor of
| configurable display* and better hiking trail coverage,
| OpenStreetMap has the kind of design that tries to show
| everything at once that most people find awful to look at. I've
| gotten used to it and to me Google Maps is just empty, I can't
| find anything, basically the problem you describe.
|
| * with OsmAnd at least, the most popular app for it. The
| official website at osm.org is more of a demo to show what's in
| the database than really meant to be a gmaps replacement,
| though there are still a few rendering styles to choose from on
| the right.
| topkai22 wrote:
| I've been getting some sort of advocacy ads using wildfire maps
| on Google as an example of something that pending US legislation
| would take away. The details eluded (the ads may need work.) But
| I suspect this article is tied to that. campaign.
|
| Anyone know exactly what legislation Google is worried about?
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Too many to count.
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=google%20antitrust+law
| jeffbee wrote:
| They're talking about the "Ending Platform Monopolies Act"
| popularly known (in my circles anyway) as the "Yelp Welfare
| Act". The bill would make it effectively impossible for Google
| to have any features that overlap with any conceivable
| competitors, so if for example there was some wildfire maps
| service, anywhere, no matter how obscure or useless, then
| Google Maps would have to give it equal billing over its own
| wildfire maps. This is because the Act makes it an illegal
| conflict of interest to own a platform and "exclude from, or
| disadvantage, the products, services, or lines of business on
| the covered platform of a competing business or a business that
| constitutes nascent or potential competition to the covered
| platform operator".
| dgaudet wrote:
| FWIW the peakbagger app (android, ios) includes excellent fire
| and smoke layers. andrew has added these features over the past
| few years as fires have complicated the quest for peaks.
|
| caltopo.com is another great tool with fire layers, useful for
| planning hikes in affected areas.
| jyu wrote:
| Is there an alerts feature for this, similar to Ring neighbors?
| etskinner wrote:
| Meanwhile, Google shut down its crisis map earlier this year[1].
|
| So now, instead of being able to go there to see if there was any
| information about a developing crisis, you have to first know
| what's going on so you know what to search, and only then will it
| show you some information.
|
| [1] https://9to5google.com/2021/02/17/google-crisis-map/
| bsedlm wrote:
| I highly doubt they shut it down, they probably just closed off
| public access
| jvvw wrote:
| I remember going to a talk given by the developer of
| something similar (can't remember the name of the site,
| sorry, but was given at a university, so probably a charity
| or public sector project of some sort) and apparently there
| are lots of issues with making data about this type of thing
| publicly available because there are malevolent parties who
| will try and take advantage of information about such
| situations in certain ways. Think they said a lot more - the
| talk was a while ago, but it was an angle that I hadn't
| thought about and I recall they had to have a screening
| process for whom they made information available to.
|
| (Edit: this is the talk: http://stadium.open.ac.uk/stadia/pre
| view.php?s=29&whichevent...)
| wodow wrote:
| https://www.crisiscleanup.org/map is a kind-of alternative,
| based on private data. It lets you start from a list of recent
| natural disasters (in the US).
| lucb1e wrote:
| Tangentially related: there is also a loosely organised team
| helping to map crisis areas for getting aid and charting
| where people live(d) that might need help.
| https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Humanitarian_OSM_Team
| notatoad wrote:
| it seems like the only useful information conveyed on that view
| is somebody wondering where in the world there is a crisis that
| they can spectate on. a colour-coded map of where you can go in
| the world to find a problem seems like it's feeding an
| unhealthy way of consuming information.
|
| google maps does an excellent job of showing crisis information
| _where it 's relevant_. if you don't know enough about a crisis
| to google it or find it on a map, it's probably not relavant to
| you.
| PeterCorless wrote:
| There _does_ need to be a global crisis "weather map." I
| proposed such a solution back in the 2011-2012 timeframe. It
| needs to be a data-centric system similar to Wikipedia, and,
| in fact, could and should integrate with other open source,
| public and crowdsourced information systems like Wikipedia.
|
| Whether the maps are provided by Google Maps or Open Street
| Map or any other project should matter less than there should
| be a publicly discoverable way to find out how current and
| emergent crises will affect their lives.
| exabrial wrote:
| I found this to be one of the most annoying features ever
| implemented in Google Maps. I was traveling across Colorado last
| summer and the persistent, annoying, inaccurate, irrelevant, and
| useless wildfire alerts made us switch to Apple maps, which has a
| whole slew of legit complaints and missing features. There wasn't
| a single scenario where this provided any value and only stood to
| make get vital information harder. To make things worse, like
| most things from Silicon Valley, there was no way to opt out, as
| ego reigns supreme.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| But the wildfire layer is just that, a layer. You can turn it
| off. It's not even on by default.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| They might have been useless to _you_ , but I'd personally err
| on the side of enabling it by default in the affected areas.
| I've relied on it in the past for updated info about available
| escape routes during wildfire season.
|
| There's merit in adding a toggle, but map applications
| (including g maps) are already very settings-heavy. I'm sure
| some team is constantly trying to balance against configuration
| overload.
| mulmen wrote:
| "Functions at the most basic level" seems like a low bar for
| making a feature opt-out.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| My bar is that safety-relevant information should probably
| be enabled by default. Wildfire spread certainly qualifies.
|
| Here's two examples:
|
| During the 2020 fire season Google maps was helpful in
| tracking the fire spread until we eventually received evac
| orders via notification. Very useful.
|
| Contrast that with the experience before they had a well-
| developed crisis program. I had the misfortune to be in
| Nice for Bastille Day 2016. Google _didn 't_ promptly warn
| about the terrorist attack and I had to find out from FB /
| friends. There was a long period of utter confusion because
| I had personally disabled FB notifications and no one
| understood the situation or extent of danger.
| mulmen wrote:
| > I was traveling across Colorado last summer and the
| persistent, annoying, inaccurate, irrelevant, and useless
| wildfire alerts made us switch to Apple maps
|
| In a safety-critical situation if the alerts are
| "persistent, annoying, inaccurate, irrelevant, and
| useless" are they really beneficial?
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| As I clarified in the original response, while they might
| have been "persistent, annoying, inaccurate, irrelevant
| and useless" _to the OP_ , I'd personally err on the side
| of annoying people vs not providing important information
| to people who need it.
| lucb1e wrote:
| Similar experience here with the recent-ish flooding overlay.
| Icons were more in the way than helpful or accurate. I guess it
| was helpful for someone who's not from here to get an overview,
| similar to how I am vaguely interested in where the worst air
| quality is on a worldwide scale, but this overlay was shown at
| way more local zoom levels.
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