[HN Gopher] Announcing the Pollen API
___________________________________________________________________
Announcing the Pollen API
Author : ohmyblock
Score : 127 points
Date : 2023-08-29 08:21 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cloud.google.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (cloud.google.com)
| cumshitpiss wrote:
| [dead]
| koliber wrote:
| When allergies act up, we need to start polling the pollen in
| Poland.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| https://mapsplatform.google.com/maps-products/pollen/
| schnable wrote:
| Thought Pollen was going to be another bad Google product name,
| but it's actually just a very literal name.
| themedes_ wrote:
| Have they released a date this service will shut down yet?
| [deleted]
| evujumenuk wrote:
| It's both funny and sad how "Google" has become synonymous with
| "time-limited". You start treating a new API like a pop-up
| store downtown -- it's okay or even good to be interested, but
| relying on it would be folly.
| frou_dh wrote:
| How bored are you to register an account just to post that
| formulaic comment?
| fullstop wrote:
| I completely agree with you, but there is a kernel of truth
| to what they say. I would be apprehensive about using this
| API for anything serious.
| kubb wrote:
| It could be a black PR effort of a competing company.
| Remember Scroogled? That, but a bit more subtle.
| moooo99 wrote:
| Could be, but unfortunately, this isn't an entirely
| unreasonable question regardless. Given Google's track
| record, I would be very hesitant to integrate new APIs
| right after launch.
| whalesalad wrote:
| Before clicking I assumed this was going to be some kind of fancy
| LLM API with a fun codename but nope it's literally an api for
| pollen data.
| [deleted]
| seatac76 wrote:
| Any word on pricing? Would love to use it a personal app.
| waddup_ wrote:
| At the surface this looks cool but I wonder if the data is
| actually reliable.
|
| That heatmap is pretty.
| miked85 wrote:
| I wonder how long this offering will last before being shutdown?
| tech-historian wrote:
| Fan of these interesting APIs, even if they feel experimental.
| Google also used to have a Flu Trends API [1], based on search
| query data in 25 countries.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Flu_Trends
| neom wrote:
| Accuweather API is pretty decent and relatively affordable(free)
| for personal use: https://developer.accuweather.com/apis
| sgammon wrote:
| [flagged]
| VeejayRampay wrote:
| vitriolic comment voicing your own little issues that adds
| nothing to the conversation about the topic at hand
| pritambaral wrote:
| 1. Threads on HN aren't expected to remain on-topic,
| especially top-level comments (like the one you're replying
| to). HN's content guidelines place no restriction on comments
| to be on-topic, let alone decide what on-topic is.
|
| 2. I see no vitriol in your parent comment. Sarcasm yes, but
| employing sarcasm alone does not make speech vitriolic.
|
| 3. You commented _about_ your parent, rathering than
| responding to the content of it, adding nothing to the
| conversation it started.
|
| 4. That you interpreted your parent's sarcasm much more
| strongly -- as, instead, vitriolic -- perhaps voices one of
| "your own little issues".
| criddell wrote:
| > HN's content guidelines place no restriction on comments
| to be on-topic, let alone decide what on-topic is.
|
| Do you really think there needs to be a guideline saying
| "comments should be on-topic"? Wouldn't you assume that
| based on both the guidelines and how we generally conduct
| ourselves in the comments? The guidelines don't say
| anything specifically about _racism_ but surely you would
| agree that racist comments have no place here, right?
|
| But despite all that, the guidelines _do_ ask us to avoid
| generic tangents and to not post shallow dismissals. I 'd
| say the comment at the top of this thread qualifies on both
| counts.
|
| Now we're many messages deep here arguing about what
| belongs and that itself is a violation of the most
| important guideline: this is boring to read.
| sgammon wrote:
| Are you comparing my very reasonable comment to racism?
| Or... ?
|
| Just because you think a comment isn't relevant doesn't
| mean others do.
| sgammon wrote:
| These aren't my own issues! I don't use Firebase or Bazel
| anymore. But thousands of developers do or need to.
|
| How many developers are going to use the Pollen API, do you
| think?
| capableweb wrote:
| The title mentions "Providing actionable info" but I don't see
| what's actually actionable here? The text also mentions
| "Actionable tips to minimize pollen exposure", what besides avoid
| going outside or wearing a mask could you actually do?
| carstenhag wrote:
| I don't know about their tips, but generally you should start
| medication some weeks/days before exposure.
| gdsdfe wrote:
| Someone should make an app to bet on how long until a Google
| service or product will go to the graveyard
| bilekas wrote:
| If this does take off, it might actually turn out to be extremely
| dangerous.
|
| Lets say you buy into all the marketing nonsense about how it can
| value add to your business and maybe even someone decides to
| create something genuinely useful for people with crippling
| alergies, maybe different routes, or some kind of alert system.
|
| Then Google in their usual way shuts down the api service with no
| recourse or alternative. Now you've left people who were using
| it, maybe heavily during certain seasons etc, stranded.
|
| I agree with the other posts, this smells of a "POC" that was
| pushed forward to demonstrate work done. Will be interesting to
| see how good the data is, but moreso how long the service will
| last.
| dbbk wrote:
| Literally nothing lasts forever.
| bilekas wrote:
| There's a difference between 'lasting forever' and pulling
| the plug without warning as Google are known to do after
| people/companies have invested into the services.
| h1fra wrote:
| So random (but useful). With this name I was expecting an AI
| Model.
|
| Is there a theory that at some point we will have an API for
| every environmental event?
| krzyk wrote:
| OK, Pollen API, but maybe also add this to google maps so people
| can use it now, not wait for others to integrate it?
| criddell wrote:
| I initially thought _Google partnered with Matthew Butterick on a
| publishing system?_ then clicked through and was a bit
| disappointed.
| londons_explore wrote:
| > According to the World Health Organization, up to 1/3 of the
| global population suffers from allergic rhinitis,
|
| Has anyone yet figured out _why_ so many humans suffer from an
| allergy to many natural plants which we have lived around for
| millions of years?
|
| It looks like the first documented case of Hayfever was March
| 1819[1], and at the time it was considered a very unusual and
| rare affliction. When and why has it now become so common?
|
| [1]:
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3110966/#:~:tex...,
| mvdwoord wrote:
| Exposure, especially kids. Also food it I had to guess.
|
| It seems that we are shielding ourselves ever more from
| exposure to nature. Which has tremendous benefits, but
| allergies seem to play into that.
|
| As for food, I have now seen too many people cure themselves
| from hayfever and other allergies by ditching carbs, or other
| significant dietary changes. No accident if you ask me. And
| would line up somewhat with industrialization of food
| production post 1800 or so.
| jkukul wrote:
| There was a very interesting discussion recently on this topic.
| [1]
|
| There are various hypothesis:
|
| * changes to gut microbiome composition due to modern diets and
| overuse of antibiotics
|
| * excessive cleanliness and hygiene. The "hygiene hypothesis"
| suggests that lack of exposure to diverse microbes leads to
| improperly trained immune systems
|
| * increased exposure to chemicals, plastics, and pollutants
| that may disrupt immune function
|
| * Cesarean sections and formula feeding rather than vaginal
| birth and breastfeeding
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37195905
| pbnjeh wrote:
| Exposure to cigarette smoke was also considered a candidate
| or reason, when I was younger. I haven't kept up with the
| thinking on or about this, but I believe it's still
| considered valid.
|
| Remember, a few decades ago, a lot of the "Western" world
| smoked, including in public spaces and around kids. As I
| understand it, a lot of the rest of the world has caught up
| and still does so. And the Western world isn't exactly rid of
| the behavior, either.
|
| P.S. I wonder whether anyone's studied possible multiple-
| generation, genetically-communicated knock-on effects of
| this.
|
| P.P.S. "Pollen" is also a Racket language based blogging and
| authoring tool or environment. A bit sorry to see the name
| become overloaded.
| [deleted]
| f6v wrote:
| In addition to other answers, I'd speculate there's no strong
| negative selection against moderate allergies. There might
| simply be no evolutionary disadvantage to being slightly itchy
| and having running nose for H.sapiens.
| n2d4 wrote:
| According to Wikipedia [0], Hayfever was already described in
| the 10th century. It is less common among people who grew up on
| a farm and more common with rising temperatures and air
| pollution. Hayfever is also significantly more common in urban
| areas.
|
| Assumably all of these factors play a role in the prevalence
| today, though that doesn't rule out the existence of other
| undiscovered factors (e.g. a disease, as some people
| speculated).
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allergic_rhinitis#History
| tzs wrote:
| > Has anyone yet figured out why so many humans suffer from an
| allergy to many natural plants which we have lived around for
| millions of years?
|
| For those of us in the Americas most of us aren't living in the
| same places our ancestors lived for millions of years and so
| are living around a different set of plants than humans evolved
| with.
|
| For example I've lived all my life in the western United
| States, about 30 years in California and 30 years in
| Washington.
|
| According to DNA testing I have very little Native American
| ancestry, so it is very likely that almost all of my ancestors
| from more than around 300 years ago were not from here. The DNA
| tests say my ancestors were almost all British and German, so
| almost all of my ancestors from 600 or more years age weren't
| even on the same continent that I am.
|
| How many generations does a population have to live in a new
| area before they adapt sufficiently so that the native plants
| don't give them allergic rhinitis?
| zackmorris wrote:
| People often plant more male than female trees in cities to
| avoid having to pick up fruit, which perhaps doubles the pollen
| load. So it's a cultural problem that overlaps with the
| homelessness crisis, because the status quo applies pressure to
| keep everyone working within the system to feed themselves
| rather than adopting stuff like permaculture and no-till
| agriculture.
|
| Also the immune system can get confused by two or more
| simultaneous stressors. So maybe a child has a cold while
| pollen is present, and develops too many antibodies to the
| pollen. I saw an animation once showing a normal immune system
| destroying cells covered in viruses. Then it showed a confused
| immune system destroying cells covered in allergen molecules.
| Which releases histamine and triggers a positive feedback loop.
| Multiple triggers may also be a root cause of many cancers,
| which can be thought of as autoimmune disease in the extreme.
| So for example, rheumatoid arthritis responds to methotrexate
| the way cancer does. Western medicine is often blind to this
| because it's too hard to do root cause analysis without large
| epidemiological studies, which are funded through the
| government and vulnerable to anti-government spending
| sentiment. Nobody wants to pay for it so we self-medicate
| rather than solving the underlying mystery.
|
| In my case, I never had seasonal allergies until I was about
| 11-12, when my elementary school sprayed broadleaf herbicide to
| kill the dandelions. By coincidence, a family friend had me mow
| a lawn overtaken by dry cheatgrass, and all I had was a weed
| eater, so I was out for hours breathing the dust. From that day
| forward, I had flu-like symptoms for the entire month of May in
| my hometown, until I reached about 40 and grew out of it. I
| believe that the herbicide was the second stressor. So my
| quality of life was impacted by someone else's judgment call
| which categorized dandelions as weeds instead of, say, bee
| food. I finally found peace with this when I realized that
| saving the life of a child who is deathly allergic to bee
| stings is worth the other students suffering a lifetime of
| allergies.
|
| I feel now that all questions that seem unanswerable, even with
| our considerable economic advantage, speak more about our
| cultural failings than our technological limitations.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Some allergies are triggered by a disease[1]. It is possible
| that hayfever is an outcome of a disease which has become
| common since 1819. The disease may have no other symptoms, and
| hay fever a symptom in only some people, and therefore be very
| hard to track.
|
| [1]: https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2023/p0727-emerging-
| tick-...
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Or a virus. A lot of autoimmune diseases are thought to be
| triggered by a virus.
| captn3m0 wrote:
| > Pollen data presents a unique opportunity for businesses-
| whether it's an opportunity to build brand loyalty and trust,
| increase engagement and product value, or become a catalyst for a
| more resilient community.
|
| Such a perfect example of Google-speak. Every data point is an
| engagement hack.
| danjc wrote:
| It's such a ridiculous statement that without context you'd
| have thought it was a parody of corp speak.
| piva00 wrote:
| As time passes it feels like Google slowly morphs into a Hooli-
| esque enterprise. Google's corpspeak has become insufferable...
| rvnx wrote:
| Sometimes the company is a parody of itself. I got shouted at
| by People Operations for saying "Merry Christmas"...
| daedlanth wrote:
| [dead]
| thearrow wrote:
| I'm guessing this is a direct result of their acquisition of
| BreezoMeter: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/breezometer
| cvp wrote:
| Yep, and the Breezometer homepage now redirects to Google's map
| platform page (subpages still seem to work, such as
| https://www.breezometer.com/air-quality-map/air-
| quality/unit...) and they had previously announced plans to
| sunset the Breezometer app in September.
|
| Breezometer is also the air quality data source for Apple Maps
| and I'm sure other weather apps too, so assuming the pricing is
| comparable there's probably a decent business here just from
| existing customers.
| sauercrowd wrote:
| Google: We're shutting down Google domains cause we need to
| focus.
|
| Also Google: Here's the pollen API you guys have been asking for
| for ages.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| Came to the comments for this. A pollen API smells exactly like
| the sort of product that Google will rug in a few short years
| when it inevitably turns out that nobody is building apps that
| need pollen data.
| [deleted]
| rinze wrote:
| "Quick! Use this in your app before we shut it down!"
| graupel wrote:
| The Air Quality and Pollen data in these APIs are from Google's
| fairly recent purchase of Breezometer, the same company Apple
| uses for AQI across iOS weather products.
| LastCovidWave wrote:
| It's not allergies. It's COVID.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I'm a bit surprised to see a single geodata theme packaged as a
| whole "thing." And goodness the marketing fluff is quite
| repetitive given they have so little to talk about.
|
| Call me jaded but it feels like someone's really announcing, "I
| shipped something! Give me my promotion!"
|
| > Our Pollen API is based on a model that calculates the
| seasonality and daily amount of pollen grains on a 1x1 km2 grid
| in over 65 countries worldwide, supporting an up to 5-day
| forecast, 3 plant types, and 15 different plant species. The
| model uses various inputs like land cover, climatological data,
| annual pollen production per plant, and more to deliver reliable
| output predictions of the local pollen level and exposure risk.
|
| The maps look like what you get when you throw Ordinary Kriging
| at a dataset of very limited coverage. I'd be skeptical of this
| model without thorough analysis.
| Raed667 wrote:
| I'm disappointed as i thought they'd use actual sensors instead
| of guessing using old data.
| INTPenis wrote:
| Yeah same here, a much more challenging project would be to
| aggregate data from the thousands of individual pollen
| services in various countries. I know of at least two here in
| Sweden. Isn't this what we should use AI for?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| > Isn't this what we should use AI for?
|
| Nah, this is just data collection and statistics.
| INTPenis wrote:
| No I mean we should use the potential flexibility of AI
| to gather data from many varying APIs that might change
| at any moment without prior warning. Some of these
| national pollen sites may not even have an API, may
| require scraping.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| There's nothing wrong with building a model using related
| data if the thing you care about is hard/expensive to measure
| at that scale (which I don't know if that's true or not). But
| you'd want to validate your model using actual pollen
| samples.
|
| The data here is pretty much worthless without a paper
| explaining the model and the validation.
| zo1 wrote:
| Imagine if they said that about street view? At this point,
| with so much capital at google, it probably makes sense to
| just have measuring equipment shipped, installed and have
| hosted/maintained at these locations. At the very least,
| snap some kalmann filters together with these "models" and
| adjust your model predictions with real-time actual values.
| flir wrote:
| I feel like once upon a time, "blanket the world with a mesh
| of pollen sensors" would absolutely have been Google's
| approach.
| Raed667 wrote:
| Or use an open-data approach from the millions of
| hobby/scientific weather stations.
|
| That would make it harder to sell the data though so why
| bother ?
| flir wrote:
| I think crowdsourcing data's more of an open source
| thing. I don't think Google's ever been into that? Their
| approach is more "we're gonna scan all the books in the
| library/photograph every street in the world".
| (Interested to hear counterexamples).
| gbear605 wrote:
| They've crowdsourced a lot of their Maps data for
| information on specific businesses through the Local
| Guides program.
| goosinmouse wrote:
| Also we local guides provide streetview maps where there
| previously were none.
| dylan604 wrote:
| crowdsourcing data is exactly what the Googs does.
| CAPTCHA to train it's models of data of dubious origins
| is the SEP (someone else's problem) nobody wants to talk
| about
| vineyardmike wrote:
| Once upon a time, google was obsessed with aggregating the
| worlds data. Today, google is all about AI generated or
| sourced data. And building a complex model to estimate
| pollen levels is definitely what they'd do.
|
| (Plus the cost of those sensors would not be justified for
| such a small product).
| xnx wrote:
| If Google deployed a bunch of sensors of any type the
| headlines would certainly be "Google is now spying on the
| air!".
|
| Google has put a air quality sensors in some of its
| Streetview cars
| (https://www.google.com/earth/outreach/special-
| projects/air-q...). Hopefully, they will do the same for
| Waymo vehicles.
| gorbachev wrote:
| I have doubts about the accuracy of the data as well. Pollen
| can be very localized. I'd love to see an independent study on
| it.
| taco_emoji wrote:
| Yeah given that they don't describe any sort of innovation on
| the sensing side of thing, I'm guessing they just trained a
| neural net with nebulous inputs and expect everybody to believe
| in the output.
| jug wrote:
| I think this should have been the link:
|
| https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/maps-platform/going-b...
|
| It's a new initiative with multiple new API's: Solar API, Air
| Quality API, Pollen API. And that link gives an overview for them
| all.
| a_square_peg wrote:
| Solar I sort of get since I don't think anyone does it the
| scale like Google Sunroof, but not sure what the added value is
| for Google to create the APIs for Air Quality and Pollen? There
| are service providers and models that do these already at
| global scale (e.g. https://atmosphere.copernicus.eu/air-quality
| & https://silam.fmi.fi/).
| lgeorget wrote:
| If a company already uses Google APIs, integrating a new API
| from Google may be easier than integrating a new provider. So
| for Google, there's certainly a market, even if they have to
| source the raw data.
| httpallthe wrote:
| I get that defining an endpoint Tom all and managing a
| token is some overhead but is it that much to manage that
| using Google offers that much benefit? my point is that
| this is trivial to setup
| mushufasa wrote:
| To an engineer, maybe it's trivial.
|
| To a business owner, that's a whole other vendor to
| diligence the security, privacy, terms, and, if it is
| used at scale, negotiate a deal with.
| dylan604 wrote:
| But if Google introduces something new, there's a strong
| likelihood that it will be killed off in 18 months. Going
| with a new provider that has been around longer than that
| would be a much more logical idea.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| This is certainly true for consumer products, but it's a
| lot less true for enterprise. Google Cloud had a few
| missteps with product shuttering (domains?), but largely
| google has a better track record serving enterprise
| customers.
|
| Google has to slowly build better trust among customers,
| clearly. But "new provider" may sound like it's logically
| obvious but the benefits of an established relationship
| goes deep into the complexities of businesses managing
| contracts and payment relationships. It's a huge effort
| for random teams in big companies.
| tfeldmann wrote:
| We had a lot of trouble with the IoT Core shutdown.
| is_true wrote:
| They show the data in search results
| promiseofbeans wrote:
| No Aotearoa coverage :(
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-08-29 23:01 UTC)