[HN Gopher] Google's AI doesn't understand restaurant menus
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Google's AI doesn't understand restaurant menus
Author : edent
Score : 156 points
Date : 2022-06-12 11:49 UTC (11 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (shkspr.mobi)
| logicalmonster wrote:
| Regarding the price discrepancies, why can't they program some
| kind of outlier check into this type of system? If an average
| burger costs $12.00 in an area, but the system interprets the
| price as either $1,200.00 or $0.12, it should be relatively easy
| to flag that as a likely error.
| mellavora wrote:
| until you get to the upscale restaurant which is selling $150
| burgers, skewing the statistics.
|
| or a crazy synthetic meat burger, how much did the first one of
| those cost, wasn't it in the millions?
| edent wrote:
| That doesn't come up on LeetCode so must be pretty difficult to
| implement.
| hoosieree wrote:
| If it's not on LeetCode it's not a real problem.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| New problem: invert this menu and sort it by the third letter
| converted to lower-case, filtering out seafood. Present all
| item descriptions with infix notation.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| What, do you mean reversing an octree in the 4th dimension
| doesn't solve that ? But it's the only thing I practiced for
| my interview!
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| I'm not sure if you're being satirical or not but I
| definitely chuckled.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| I'm sorry, no, you must be mistaken about the sheer scale at
| which google operates. Sanity checks simply don't scale, you
| see.
|
| By necessity, it'll be "pour it into this big stew of linear
| algebra" or nothing. Any kind of sensibility is simply
| impossible when you're as big as google!
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Incidentally, a continuously updated average price of a burger
| (et al.) in different cities would be a valuable data set on
| its own.
| mellavora wrote:
| something like the big mac index?
| ethbr0 wrote:
| The Big Mac Index simplifies McDonald's into a perfectly
| efficient burger producing machine, in all possible
| countries, and then evaluates purchasing power parity
| between currencies by normalizing against a Big Mac.
|
| An average burger price in a given city would be different.
| There the intent would be to assume profit margins are
| consistent (albeit perhaps not hyper-thin) from city to
| city, and thus get a sense of the relative costs of burger-
| related inputs (chiefly: labor, real estate, utilities,
| taxes, and transportation).
| ape4 wrote:
| Google Maps already asks regular users questions. It could ask if
| the menu is accurate.
| dash2 wrote:
| Actually, "plain paper" could easily be a "plain poppadum", since
| the Hindi word is pronounced papaD, with a deep D that is close
| to an R (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papadam#Spelling_and_pronu
| ncia...). I've seen this mistake before on restaurant menus, so
| it may not be Google AI at fault.
| abrax3141 wrote:
| Fortunately, misreading a menu won't drive you into a tree. A
| friend of mine told me that he can't use his un-named supposedly
| intelligent car on the side roads near his home because it reads
| the house numbers and thinks they're speed limits. It's okay
| going up the long hill to his place when the numbers go down, but
| going down hill the last number before a down hill sharp curve is
| house number 65!!! The many joys of our modern AS (as in AI, but
| not so much) world.
| [deleted]
| tgv wrote:
| They'll just train an even bigger network.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| They can't because grokking restaurant menus is a moving
| target. Restaurants are constantly looking for new ways to
| describe new things and new ways to describe slightly updated
| things.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| I've found adjective count on the menu to be inversely
| correlated with food value (quality/price). And am not
| joking: it's pretty damn reliable.
|
| E.g. "chicken" vs "locally-raised, hormone-free poultry"
| briandear wrote:
| Why can't a restaurant simply have an RSS feed for the menu
| and google use that? Very easy to do. Can simply use the menu
| data from the POS system.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| I wonder how things would look like if the 'semantic web' (the
| actual web3?) had taken off and we had regular and rich, machine-
| readable metadata for just about everything rather than having to
| rely on what is largely subpar scraping and 'AI' systems.
|
| People have pointed out recently how Google search seems to
| struggle as sites on the internet turn more and more into apps
| rather than standardized documents and they just go and search on
| reddit. Having a standard to encode semantics seems honestly
| necessary at this point if you want to keep things interoperable.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| I think Google Search struggles because of SEO/spammed, not
| webapps. Not sure why SEO will go away in the semantic web.
| warning26 wrote:
| If anything, the semantic web would probably have been
| _easier_ to do SEO spamming with.
| ghaff wrote:
| The semantic web came out of a very academic tradition
| where scammers and spammers weren't lurking around every
| corner. Yeah, in addition to its other problems, it wasn't
| especially attuned with the Internet as it actually came to
| exist.
| lmm wrote:
| Google "won" in the first place by being _less_ semantic than
| their competitors (who used meta keyword tags etc. which made
| them very vulnerable to spam) and just reading the text of the
| page (and especially of links to the page) instead.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Does anybody actually rely on Google for this sort of info?
| Hours, menu, etc are so flaky that I always go to the restaurants
| website for more info.
| lemursage wrote:
| This reminds me of a story my father used to tell us. Once he
| travelled to Finland (70s) with my grandfather and they ended up
| in some restaurant. Having no clue what was in the menu, as
| neither of them spoke Finnish, they decided to go for the
| cheapest thing on the menu first.
|
| The waiter brought them heated plates.
|
| Turns out that the cheapest thing on the menu was a heated plate
| service.
| jahnu wrote:
| While travelling around China and speaking none of the local
| languages I resorted to either pointing at other peoples food
| or picking random items on the menu. I had learned how to ask
| for rice and beer so that worked well with what was usually a
| bunch of random but very interesting and tasty dishes.
|
| One day while in a border town in the south near Laos, my wife
| and I were in a suitability weird and humid restaurant with a
| slow ceiling fan keeping us a bit cool. On the only other
| occupied table sat a bunch of police with what looked like the
| local police chief due to the hat on his head but otherwise
| naked torso. They were just getting drunk so we couldn't point
| at food and order. We asked for a menu. I pointed at 6 random
| things. They gave me a funny look. I then asked for 2 beers in
| Chinese. They confirmed "two beers?" with an inquisitive look.
| I confirmed. Then I asked for rice and remembered how to ask
| for spicy cucumber, a delicious side in china I had come to
| love. Eyebrows were raised.
|
| Shortly thereafter out came two beers, spicy cucumber, and 6
| mocktails in tall sundae glasses with umbrellas and curly
| straws.
|
| The police table almost died laughing. Good times :)
| idk1 wrote:
| I did a similar thing, I assumed a cheaper item was the side,
| and ordered four Dosa as a side in India. Needless to say
| breakfast was taken care of.
| bigwheeler wrote:
| Even if the restaurant has bothered to create the appropriate
| machine-readable descriptions, google doesn't bother doing
| anything with them. Even if the descriptions literally mirror the
| visual display on the page. I see it all the time, like, on this
| page (https://www.anthonyspizzabelmar.com/menus/menu), which is
| easily parsed as valid menu schema through the schema.org
| validator.
|
| If restaurants were rewarded with actual updated menus on google,
| you can bet the restaurants would care about creating the micro
| data, but it's a waste of time.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| The restaurant owners don't need to go through the effort. I'm
| in a consortium of companies that use ML in their business. One
| of the companies is a competitor to GrubHub. They use ML to:
| read scanned menus, understand items, look at pictures... then:
| predict what ingredients items have; populate if the item is
| one of entree, meal, desert, or snack; populate if the item is
| one of gluetn-free, vegetarian, or some other similar stuff
|
| All of this without the mom-and-pop restaurant owners lifting a
| finger. It gives them a competitive edge over their
| competitors. All of this to say: Google doesn't care - but
| GrubHub, UberEats, and the ilk _do_ care
| mattcwilson wrote:
| Warning: potentially biased opinion. Speaking only for
| myself, but informed by my job.
|
| There are lots of problems with scraping-based approaches.
|
| One, yes, you need some really good tech to scrape data from
| menus, which, even though they are "structured", next time
| you're at a sit-down restaurant, pay attention to all the
| subtle discrepancies in formatting between different
| sections/categories on the menu.
|
| Two, if the menu isn't html, but is an image or a pdf upload,
| now you need some strong OCR on top.
|
| Three, the website is generally not likely to be current with
| what's actually on offer in the establishment itself.
| Specials, seasonal dishes, or items that are out of
| ingredients ("86'd") will still appear on the menu. That's
| going to lead to complaints, refunds, or generally bad
| customer experience from whoever's consuming your data /
| using it to buy food.
|
| Four, you're going to want to to be paid for all this tech
| and customer support you're electing to intermediate between
| the end purchaser and the restaurant, as a service, and so
| you're going to tack on some fees and either jack the price
| up on the consumer or try getting the restaurant to pay you a
| finder's fee, cutting in to their already narrow margins.
|
| Five, if you're trying to provide ordering service and not
| just menu data, you still need to submit the order into the
| store itself, somehow. Which either means calling it in,
| robo-submitting an online order (if you're lucky), or sending
| a courier to place the order and wait. And then, on the other
| side, whoever's taking orders for the restaurant has to punch
| in the request to the register to actually complete the
| transaction. Which means the system you really want to talk
| to isn't the website, it's the point-of-sale.
|
| Good luck with all that.
|
| Source of bias: I work for a company that helps restaurants
| enable online ordering and POS integration so they can pay
| much less in fees and focus on making exceptional food.
| passivate wrote:
| >In the glorious future, every website will be chock-full of
| semantic metadata. Restaurants won't have a 50MB PDF explaining
| the chef's vision for organic cuisine
|
| That is a good idea, especially for visually impaired users - but
| why can't we have both? I sometimes like seeing the fancy fonts,
| and images if I have never eaten that dish before, etc.
| StevenWaterman wrote:
| You can do all that with HTML (with semantic markup) and CSS
| though
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| I've found that these sorts of annotations are a lot better in
| the US than in other industrialized countries. In foreign
| countries, points of interest in Google Maps are often missing
| basic info like opening hours or even telephone numbers. Often
| times the actual location is misplaced on the map.
|
| When it comes specifically to restaurant menus in the US, most
| seem to be manually transcribed by the restaurant staff. The
| items and prices are correct (but often out of date), and food
| descriptions faithfully reproduce non-native spelling/grammar
| mistakes. In addition, I almost always see user-uploaded photos
| of the menus.
|
| This does not point to a difference in Google's automatic parsers
| or in the level of Google-generated content; it seems that US
| users contribute to map and PoI content a lot more.
|
| I wonder why this is. My guess is that there are far fewer staff
| members at Google curating crowdsourced content outside of the
| US, which makes non-American users much less likely to
| contribute, since their contributions will appear much more
| slowly, if at all. I've contributed my own corrections to PoI
| data in the US (e.g. opening hours updates) and seen it reflected
| on the map in a few days. This probably wouldn't happen elsewhere
| in the world.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Your guess is probably right.
|
| Outside of curation, I think Maps lacks polish from non-US
| devs, and that results in weirdly unconvenient maps for a lot
| of cities, leading to people using it and contributing less to
| it.
|
| For instance train station mapping (where are the
| entries/exits) is a feature available in some local map
| services and is a big quality of life improvement in europe or
| SEA cities, but never made it to Google Maps.
|
| Same for the lack of multi-story building mapping, where
| there's only a single shop for a single address, which can
| still work out for shopping malls (they have their own site),
| but is crazy for densely packed neighborhoods. Looking for
| restaurants in Paris or Tokyo through Google Maps is just
| frustrating.
| lozenge wrote:
| If I get public transport directions in Tokyo using Google it
| advises on exits, best train boarding position, and fares. In
| London none of these are available. Admittedly, I think the
| first two are deliberate, but surely London can provide fare
| data.
|
| Another bias I've noticed is US sites "collapsing" opening
| hours as if there is no siesta, ie opening hours are just
| displayed as 10am-11pm.
| briandear wrote:
| Does most of the world have a siesta?
| [deleted]
| kuschku wrote:
| Even in Germany pretty much any pharmacy, doctor's
| offices, and even phone repair shops will close for
| lunch. It's not like this only affects a few people.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| It's not just Google Maps. Google gives absolutely zero shits
| about any country that is not the US. Actions for Google
| doesn't let you make custom intents if it's not in en-US. The
| Pixel for the longest time released US-only/US-first. Features
| are always locked and only available for the US.
| yeputons wrote:
| > points of interest in Google Maps are often missing basic
| info like opening hours or even telephone numbers.
|
| To be fair, sometimes neither of these exist. A place in some
| parts of the EU may be open whenever the owner feels like it.
| You can't even approximate opening hours and holidays unless
| you actually ask the person over the counter when they're
| actually open.
| elijaht wrote:
| Tangential but Google will call restaurants with their
| automated assistant to verify hours
| notahacker wrote:
| I imagine this often gets treated with the same disdain I
| treat Google's emails asking me if my family's structural
| engineering business is open on Christmas Day. (Funnily
| enough, no human has ever asked this!)
| ramchip wrote:
| In Japan Tabelog is a lot more popular than Google Maps for
| restaurant reviews, photos, etc. I think it caters better to
| the local market.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| > it seems that US users contribute to map and PoI content a
| lot more.
|
| I can't point to an example or cite a source (as this is just a
| guess), but maybe US users unknowingly contribute via Google
| Photos doing OCR (and other analysis) and combining it into
| Maps data, while Google is more careful about running AI
| against every photo taken by EU users (and using it to help in
| ways that go beyond exclusively the UX of the photographer) for
| data privacy compliance reasons?
| [deleted]
| visarga wrote:
| > Google has discovered that it takes 90% of the effort to get
| 90% of the way there - but the last 10% takes the next 90% of the
| effort.
|
| I can confirm, I am working on information extraction and 90% is
| the glass ceiling for current models. With much labelled data you
| can get higher scores but they don't generalise from one vendor
| to another.
| faddypaddy34 wrote:
| The biggest problem with Google and restaurant menus IMHO is the
| fact that the actual restaurant website (if the have one) is
| often several links below or often off screen to a bunch of
| review sites and other sites like Google maps with unreliable
| information.
| jthrowsitaway wrote:
| Google likes to push you into a textual/parsed format of the
| menu, which is often incomplete and difficult to navigate. Just
| show me the pictures of the menu, please.
| dawnerd wrote:
| And make it obvious when the menu is from. Too often menus
| are years old. And with prices going up overnight everywhere
| pricing has gotten really hard to figure out.
| amelius wrote:
| Google's AI doesn't understand much. For example, a Google search
| for "Jeans $BRAND waist $WAIST length $LENGTH" already is too
| much to ask.
| yunohn wrote:
| This is actually very true. Any such query that is specific
| gets normalised into something uselessly general.
| visarga wrote:
| It seems to be unable to parse word order, like a "bag of
| words" model from 2000.
|
| For example, if I search "similar pairs of sentences", it
| replies with "similarity between two sentences". No, I want a
| pair of sentences (A1, B1) that is similar to another pair (A2,
| B2). I am not talking about similarity between sentences, but
| between pairs. The distinction is lost on Google. And they
| claim to be using transformer neural nets for search. Pfft!
| s1mon wrote:
| I would be happy if Google and Yelp could even get the opening
| hours of restaurants correct. With Covid, and even now that
| things have been re-opening and getting busier, so many places
| have incorrect hours or are outright closed for good, despite
| active listings. I've defaulted to at least trying to call first
| if I'm set on going to a particular place, because inevitably if
| I don't, the restaurant isn't open or is about to close. Of
| course then the issue is half the time no one answers the phone
| anymore at restaurants and they don't bother with voice mail. If
| they do have voice mail, it's still probably got an announcement
| about the special meal that they offered for Valentines day or
| Christmas. Sometimes the only solution is just to go see if they
| are open.
|
| To some degree the real issue is that each restaurant can change
| hours (or menus) at a moments notice, and at many places, the
| staff and management is not super computer savvy. So no one
| thinks to update these sources of info, and/or they don't know
| how. Google has the added data (from tracking phones) of how busy
| the restaurant is at a given time, but that is presumably some
| sort of moving average over time, and not necessarily current or
| accurate.
|
| When I first saw the headline for this post, I thought it was
| going to be about a related issue: even if AI is really good at
| understanding general spoken/written languages, the names and
| wording of menus is its own weird thing. If you're then trying to
| auto-translate that to another language it can be next to
| impossible. Ethnic restaurants in different places which
| supposedly speak the same language can have all kinds of
| spellings and ways of describing the same dish. In the US we call
| a long sandwich a sub, grinder, hero, or hoagie (to name a few),
| depending on where you live etc. Or the same name can mean wildly
| different things.
| splonk wrote:
| I've never bothered looking at Google's interpretations of menus
| on Google Maps. When available, I'm just always going to go to
| the actual restaurant website and look there instead.
|
| What I have found occasionally useful is the (presumably
| automatic) categorization of photos into a menu category. Those
| at least generally let me know whether something's up to date
| (especially useful the last couple years as restaurant concepts
| have fluctuated wildly), and are very helpful for places that
| don't have much online presence - street food stands, pubs, local
| fast food places, that kind of thing.
| robswc wrote:
| Seems people rediscover every few years that despite how awesome
| the AI is now, its still just the same statistics under the hood.
|
| This is not at all to detract from the hard work and
| accomplishments made... its just still fairly easy to confuse
| even the most advanced AI. I guess its impressive that its only
| easy if you know how they work though, might take the average
| person awhile to find a way to trip them up.
| chillingeffect wrote:
| Previous generations knew this and left it alone. This
| generation is happy to provide 90% quality. Neither is wrong,
| just instances of values
| jeffbee wrote:
| So this guy is just angry that Tesseract isn't perfect? I hardly
| see the point of this post.
| asveikau wrote:
| To me it points out that they could put additional filters
| (something to flag entries for the PS2000 meal, or USD being
| used in the UK), or greater manual review, maybe when an
| algorithm detects such absurdities.
| progfix wrote:
| Does Google ask the restaurants for permission to do that?
| Couldn't they get sued for damage of reputation when they show
| wrong prices?
| hackmiester wrote:
| I'd hope so, but who's got that kind of money?
| mrweasel wrote:
| It is also a potential copy-right violation, not the I think
| Google care.
| nmstoker wrote:
| No, generally it won't be, since you cannot copyright facts.
| mrweasel wrote:
| What about titles on signature dishes?
| nmstoker wrote:
| No again :)
|
| https://copyrightservice.co.uk/services/knowledge-
| base/kb_na....
| nmstoker wrote:
| They could possibly register a trademark, but few
| restaurants seem to.
|
| I can't imagine this creating much of a barrier - Google
| would stop if told to by the restaurant but then they
| might not list the restaurant, and what restaurant would
| see that as worth it?
| izacus wrote:
| Even with a trademark, you can't prevent people from
| talking about the facts related to it. Despite the crazy
| reach of IP law, they still can't silence you from
| uttering "Big Mac(tm) costs 4.99$ here."
| nmstoker wrote:
| Highly unlikely, as Google would say it was a mistake and point
| out that they correct details when venues notify them.
|
| On a slight tangent: bear in mind also that Google is not party
| to whatever agreement there is between venue and customer,
| which is why it's so foolish that one frequently sees people
| asking questions on Google Maps as if they are directly
| communicating with the venue. Eg people ask "Can i get a
| child's cot in my room" - all it takes is for some joker to say
| yes, the naive asker to proceed to the venue and then find out
| that they offer no cots, at which point naive person has no leg
| to stand on (venue quite rightly says we've no idea what you're
| talking about).
| jwilk wrote:
| > they correct details when venues notify them.
|
| Do they? The article says there's "no way for a user to
| contact Google".
| nmstoker wrote:
| The articles not strictly right that there's no way for
| users (ie the public) to contact Google in this regard;
| Google Maps Local Guides certainly can contact them and
| anyone can become one of those.
|
| However, putting that aside: Venues/business owners can
| contact Google and i suspect would get a slightly better
| response rate (not saying it'll be perfect or even super
| easy for an owner to get through but they can as there are
| often links indicating "Are you the owner of this
| business?")
| mattzito wrote:
| Fwiw, this at least partially not google's fault. Just about
| everybody uses one of a few companies for restaurant menu data,
| and the biggest one is far and away SinglePlatform.
| SinglePlatform is still powered largely by scanning menus and
| having contractors enter them by hand, which is where many of
| these errors happen.
|
| More forward-looking restaurants manage this all themselves as
| part of their digital strategy, but it's still a small percentage
| and disproportionately located in the US.
|
| I'm not saying Google doesn't also scrape or use other sources,
| I'm sure they do, but this is one of those situations where the
| whole system is broken. Tbh one of the bank shot benefits of
| having all of these digital delivery services is that some
| restaurants are using aggregators that can also publish menu
| data.
|
| As far as the authors idea about markup for menus, that's great,
| but highly improbable for a bunch of reasons: most restaurants
| don't update their menu frequently, dishes are often difficult to
| represent structurally, POS systems are often modeled differently
| than the printed menus, etc.
| tialaramex wrote:
| The most notable restaurant near me, (Garden Restaurant) can't
| even spell its own name correctly on its expensive
| professionally produced menus in the restaurant, your chance of
| _scraping_ good enough menu data from their web site is
| negligible.
|
| I actually went to the web site just to see, and it's worse
| than I thought. Even their Western menu, the stuff random
| Westerners think is "Chinese food" is presented as JPEGs of
| photographs (sometimes out of focus) of the physical menu,
| which is itself strewn with typographical errors and mysterious
| annotations.
|
| So, to get even the bad text an actual patron has in the
| physical restaurant you need to scrape the site, download the
| images, and successfully OCR from low resolution out-of-focus
| photographs. It's not _impossible_ but good luck to you, and at
| the end the results will still be pretty unsatisfactory.
| "Frind pok" is actually what they wrote, they _meant_ Fried
| Pork, but that 's not an OCR error it's really what they paid
| to have printed.
| passivate wrote:
| Since its near you, have you tried going there and explaining
| it to the manager?
| tialaramex wrote:
| My friend Chris spends a _lot_ more time in their
| restaurant and is at least as pedantic about this sort of
| thing as I am, also he knows the people who own it fairly
| well, so I 'm confident he's mentioned it.
|
| However while the restaurant's manager might care, as I
| understand it her husband is the hard core chef who ensured
| it's a success, why should he give a shit? Presumably the
| errors are just in the text for stupid barbarians like me -
| many of them don't even order from his real menu anyway.
| His taste is what matters, nobody comes to the restaurant
| because of the typography or web site design, they come to
| eat his food.
| briandear wrote:
| Does the manager not know their menu is misspelled?
| philsnow wrote:
| Perfect spelling and/or beautiful layout on a Chinese
| restaurant menu is a bit of a red flag for me.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| Why? I can understand cutting Chinese restaurants some
| slack because of a possible language barrier with owners,
| but what's wrong with ones who are fluent in English? Or
| have the resources to hire a good agency to put together
| their menu and proofread it?
| philsnow wrote:
| Sibling post by Moru has it mostly right
|
| Additionally, I have it in my head that not bothering to
| fix menus shows a certain admirable pragmatism. "Frind
| pok" is not correct but it _is_ correct enough.
| Moru wrote:
| Not GP but I have the same red flag system. If it's
| perfect english (or whatever native language you use)
| it's more likely that not the restaurant is run by a
| native, not a real chinese family. So warning flags, most
| likely not the best the chinese kitchen can deliver :-)
| wincy wrote:
| If my family is any indication, the menu won't get
| corrected until the restaurant owner sends their child to
| American schools and the kid gets old enough to fix it.
| Just give it 11 or 12 years.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| I think it's a strike against our industru thay we failed to
| define a way to publish standard platform independant menu and
| price list file that any apply application could parse and
| represent
|
| Instead eveyone is busy building their own little feudal
| kingdom and they call it platform even if it's actually just a
| toll booth
| mattzito wrote:
| The issue isn't one of format, it's distribution. Menu data
| is usually in hard copy form, and the utility to a restaurant
| in going to the trouble to duplicate it online and keep it up
| to date is almost certainly not worth it (in their eyes).
|
| So I'm sure you could sign up yelp and google and Uber eats
| and everyone else for a common data standard, but you'd then
| still have to go chasing the restaurants to go put that
| information in a system somewhere.
|
| We haven't even really been able to convince businesses to
| put their opening hours online, it's still such a problem
| that one of my interview questions at google in 2018 was
| "name as many ways as possible you might be able to discover
| a business's opening hours online"
|
| Menus are about an order of magnitude more complex than that
| - it's a tough thing to get restaurants to do.
| mellavora wrote:
| maybe menus and price lists have edge cases?
| onurcel wrote:
| This is 100% Google's responsability. If you claim to have a
| feature but it is broken it's your fault, you should just not
| claim that you can actually do this. The restaurant guys
| provide exactly what they want: a pdf menu, if google can't
| parse it correctly it should show the raw information instead
| of trying to do something fancy
| mattzito wrote:
| Except that Google isn't doing the parsing, it's a third-
| party, who is then providing the data to Google (and a bunch
| of others). Sadly, mixed in with the parsed/PDF-scanned data
| is accurate data that was hand-edited or auto-uploaded from a
| restaurant POS or kitchen management system.
|
| So, Google and these other companies, the option is - build
| it yourself and try to do better, or buy data from the
| companies that do this at varying degrees of quality, or
| don't have menu data at all. Except the last option, people
| _want_ menu data, it's one of the most common things people
| want to know about a restaurant.
| enos_feedler wrote:
| I don't trust Google's extraction of anything. I follow links and
| read myself. I got burned too many times for open hours
| especially.
|
| Example:
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=stanford+dish+hours&ie=UTF-8...
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| The hours appear correct for me
|
| On the site it says "April-August Public Access Hours:
| 6:00am-7:30pm"
|
| And I see the same on Google
| enos_feedler wrote:
| So actually, it's either fixed or its a broken clock is right
| twice a day. I google regularly to get to the page at the
| beginning of each month and it doesn't extract based on time
| of year. It just picks one. But maybe it's been fixed! :D
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| I don't think the hours are pulled from the webpage. You
| can even go and suggest changes to the hours yourself on
| Google
| thomasahle wrote:
| 6am to 7.30pm. That seems correct from the website for June.
| Though I guess it may get confused some months, or lag behind?
| nikolay wrote:
| Sentient AI is not interested in food... which it cannot consume.
| marsven_422 wrote:
| Sreyanth wrote:
| I see a CAPTCHA opportunity here. Show the line item and ask
| people to type both the dish name and price in two boxes. Or may
| be give a couple of options that the end user must confirm before
| they can proceed.
| mellavora wrote:
| Hoy, boy, is that going to be fun! Imagine having to properly
| label thai food items to view websites! Or register for
| government services!
| hunter2_ wrote:
| Yep, anyone remember having to key in house numbers from street
| view photos? Similar idea. But I think human/bot
| differentiation no longer demands so much effort of users
| lately, so this labor pool could be a relic of the past.
| enos_feedler wrote:
| I worked at Google helping news publishers add metadata to
| extract live/evolving news coverage for the real time / breaks
| coverage carousel above the search results. Google will never
| believe what authors use for meta data. It is just a hint and
| that will always be the case. There is too much opportunity for
| deception.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| Sorry, but Google is so stupid at times that it mistakes date-
| like strings in URLs for publication dates. Heuristics my ass.
| enos_feedler wrote:
| Yes that is a problem. And the worst part is because the
| heuristics are a black box there are no developer controls to
| fix it yourself. You are the whim of Google's ability to
| correctly interpret what it sees. Sometimes its wrong
| edent wrote:
| I can understand that problem for some sectors. But what's the
| advantage to a restaurant in publishing an inaccurate menu
| (fake foods!)?
| splonk wrote:
| I've worked in this field. In every sector there will be
| someone trying to game the system one way or another. Someone
| will publish a menu including items they don't actually have
| in order to try to rank higher in a search ("oh, we don't
| have that any more, but since you're here, why don't you try
| X..."). Someone will publish a menu with lower prices to get
| someone in the door ("oops, Google must have an old menu of
| ours"). Someone will publish a menu including something with
| their competitor's name in hopes of hijacking their searches.
| A steakhouse will mark a steak as vegetarian in hopes of
| tricking someone into thinking they have a vegetarian entree.
|
| You'd be lucky if 50% of the restaurant supplied data is
| accurate, 40% is out of date, and 10% is actively incorrect.
| Personally I'd guess that the ratio would be more like
| 20/60/20.
| madisp wrote:
| perhaps instead of nefarious usecases it could just be out of
| date
| enos_feedler wrote:
| Yes this too
| wzdd wrote:
| I'm not really convinced by the "intentionally inaccurate"
| arguments (if they want to deceive, then surely they could
| also just serve a fake PDF to Googlebot). But I suppose it's
| reasonable to assume that restaurants would be less likely to
| keep their metadata up-to-date than they would their PDF
| menu. Unintentional inaccuracy, in other words.
| enos_feedler wrote:
| Maybe not intentional but more like "inflation has raised
| our burger prices by $5 in the last 3 years and the meta
| data is wrong. Do we fix it?" Hmmm
| vander_elst wrote:
| Maybe fake prices... It could help lure customers in.
| enos_feedler wrote:
| I don't know, but maybe the metadata prices are inaccurate so
| that the query "burgers under $8" surfaces that menu. There
| are just all kinds of reasons to game the system to get your
| results in the page. Trusting meta data over user visible
| information just opens a portal to these kind of things where
| you tell the search engine one thing for SEO and show the
| user something else. You could police this of course, but
| it's much easier to just extract the info from the page since
| there is more incentive to be accurate for readers.
| marban wrote:
| Google News is a strict whitelist AFAIK so what's the problem?
| rightbyte wrote:
| > Google will never believe what authors use for meta data.
|
| Then why trust the site at all if it fakes metadata?
|
| This fuzzy we-know-better algorithms has wrecked Google search.
| lmm wrote:
| The whole web runs on the principle of taking crazy tag soup
| and extracting as much as you can out of it. I wish XHTML had
| succeeded but the market has spoken.
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| Chances are the restaurant doesn't want to mislead people
| looking at their website. After all, that will just lead to
| disappointment and lost revenue.
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(page generated 2022-06-12 23:00 UTC)