[HN Gopher] A new way to discover places with generative AI in Maps
___________________________________________________________________
A new way to discover places with generative AI in Maps
Author : ChrisArchitect
Score : 27 points
Date : 2024-02-01 18:47 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.google)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.google)
| hightrix wrote:
| This sounds like a feature that could be really nice, being able
| to search for something in a new city where you have no frame of
| reference on what to search for and getting good results sounds
| really nice!
|
| That said, I expect the worst from this update. My expectation is
| that it will serve recommendations based on AdWords or other
| advertising tech. And this will then transform Google Maps into
| even worse of a product that will be even more covered in ads
| than it already is.
|
| I hope this beats my expectations, but I'm not optimistic.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I think every major update to Google maps in the last decade or
| so has made it worse. I expect no different with this one.
| gretch wrote:
| I think you vastly underestimate how much baseline experience
| has improved on the internet in the last 10 years.
|
| Here's a talk that google gave on improvements happening in
| Maps 10 years ago:
| https://youtu.be/HrLyZ24UcRE?si=t0J0FToLO5fBsdA7
|
| It feels like when people say "they used to make cars better
| in the 1950s; now those were REAL cars"
| JohnFen wrote:
| > I think you vastly underestimate how much baseline
| experience has improved on the internet in the last 10
| years.
|
| I honestly don't think it's that at all. It's that google
| maps has gotten worse at addressing my particular use case.
| gretch wrote:
| Well do you want to tell use about your use case at all
| or do you just want to be mysterious and indignant?
| JohnFen wrote:
| I explained in a different comment, and I'm very, very
| far from indignant about any of this. You seem to be
| taking offense, and I don't know why.
| gretch wrote:
| Because your original comment is very low quality
|
| >I think every major update to Google maps in the last
| decade or so has made it worse. I expect no different
| with this one.
|
| I just hold our community to higher standards.
|
| You know offline maps came out in 2015? Because I suppose
| that wasn't in your rubric for what's good and not.
| aniforprez wrote:
| Decade? I disagree. A lot of the changes to highlight places
| with more commercial activity to give a high level overview
| of places to visit, the reviews and ratings system, the
| highlighting of landmarks, transit directions with live
| train/bus updates, local guides and so on were immensely
| helpful features that make trip planning these days so much
| easier and I think most of these were post 2014 and they made
| substantial and positive changes during 2014 to 2019 at least
|
| I'd agree in the last 4-5 years the changes have been worse.
| Post-COVID they seem to have focused on making a lot of
| negative changes by stuffing it with too many ads, worse
| color schemes and a lot of "features" that are half baked to
| try and capture users and send them to paying businesses on
| the platform
| JohnFen wrote:
| > A lot of the changes to highlight places with more
| commercial activity to give a high level overview of places
| to visit, the reviews and ratings system, the highlighting
| of landmarks, transit directions with live train/bus
| updates, local guides and so on
|
| Interestingly, that list is mostly what I had in mind when
| I said that maps was getting worse.
|
| I suppose that it entirely depends on what you want out of
| a map application. For me, all that stuff just gets in my
| way. That you think those things are great tells me that
| maps is no longer aiming to solve the problems that I want
| solved, and is addressing other problems instead.
|
| That's not saying Google Maps is bad or wrong, just that
| it's a different product now, and one that isn't going to
| provide what I want.
|
| So I should just pipe down. I'm not the target demographic
| anymore. I just need to move on to a different application
| and be done with it.
| aniforprez wrote:
| I still have no idea what problems you want solved
|
| The problems most people have are finding places and ways
| to get to those places. All the changes I outlined,
| including continuing improvements to their directions,
| served that purpose for quite a while. Reviews, the
| commercial areas highlighting and local guides helps find
| shopping and food spots and I used this extensively
| during multiple trips with great success. Same with the
| transit directions and landmarks highlighting and I fail
| to see any reason how these made maps worse. I cannot
| possibly think of why adding bus and rail timings made
| maps worse. They are incredible features. Things I didn't
| originally include are also traffic conditions and
| suggesting routes based on that by factoring in timing
| which is somewhat hit or miss but still leaning towards
| hit in my experience
|
| I can point specifically to things like their new
| Business Messaging, the ramped up difficulty to
| contributions and reducing them primarily to photos and
| reviews, and the new experimental color schemes as
| decidedly worse changes
| JohnFen wrote:
| > I still have no idea what problems you want solved
|
| My problem is very basic: I want to see an uncluttered
| map, to be able to search for a particular address or
| street and be shown it on that map, and to get driving
| directions.
|
| The driving directions are OK, but the uncluttered map
| isn't a thing anymore. Now, the map is obscured with with
| quick-search buttons, that pull-up thing showing "places
| of interest" at the bottom, and is populated with
| irrelevant (to me) pins showing random businesses.
|
| It all just makes actually using the thing as a map more
| difficult.
|
| > The problems most people have are finding places
|
| Fair enough. That's why I say that Google Maps is not
| aiming at people like me. I want basic navigation, in a
| way that is as friction-free as possible. I also have
| zero interest in things like reviews, local guides, and
| that kind of thing.
|
| Again, I'm not saying that what you want isn't important,
| or even that what you want isn't what most people want.
| It's just not what I want, and the presence of those
| things makes using the app for my use case more
| difficult.
|
| So I just need a different product that is aimed more at
| my needs.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Traffic integration with Waze has made a big improvement.
|
| And, of course, Android Auto.
|
| But for discovery? When I look around my neighborhood, I see
| Circle K, Walgreens, and Wendy's, all with their colorful
| logos. I don't know for sure, but now it feels like a yellow
| pages of advertised businesses where it used to be a map.
|
| When I use OSM or Google Earth, I see the parks and street
| names. I can search for Wendy's if I want that, but it's not
| promoted info.
| tnel77 wrote:
| The updates are only good if you are a shareholder. It's a
| bummer.
| oxfordmale wrote:
| The best choice might be to avoid the places recommend by
| Google as everyone will be there. The current AI is not clever
| enough to handle crowd control.
| mFixman wrote:
| I expect SEO to break Google's AI soon, like they broke
| PageRank.
|
| Imagine finding guides on HN about how to make your shop appear
| first when searching for any of the top 500 words.
| acdha wrote:
| Yeah, given how bad the SEO problem already is I'm setting my
| expectations low. It seems like it will be a big problem
| dealing with fake reviews if the LLM makes it harder to see the
| source and how trustworthy it looks.
|
| This is an incredibly hard problem since businesses have such
| strong incentives to game the system, so it's hardly new but I
| think AI is going to make it even harder to spot fake accounts.
| anotherhue wrote:
| Oh yes, I do look forward to driving on hallucinated roads.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| Certainly! I can save 10 minutes on your route to the beach by
| jumping off this strategic high ground!
| vnchr wrote:
| Apple Maps came out with that feature years ago
| ijhuygft776 wrote:
| Didn't Apple maps kill a few people too?
|
| edit: maybe I was thinking of Google
| (https://www.2gb.com/mans-family-sues-google-maps-after-it-
| di...)
|
| Some Apple maps events: https://www.theregister.com/2012/12/1
| 2/another_apple_maps_me...
| dmonitor wrote:
| Am I going to one day miss the era when I could just type "pizza"
| and get adequate results? I don't see what benefit more language
| processing is going to give me.
| crazygringo wrote:
| When I type in "pizza", I get everything from dollar slices to
| Italian fine dining. That's not very helpful -- at no point am
| I ever trying to decide between a $1 slice and a $29 pizza for
| one.
|
| Language processing gets me an immediate answer to, "hey, I'm
| looking for a cute date spot with pizza, high quality pizza but
| where you still eat it as slices".
|
| That's a massive benefit.
| henriquecm8 wrote:
| Now you can type pizza, google will cross-reference it with
| the data they collected about you and show only the cheapest
| place.
| exclusiv wrote:
| More likely just show you the place with the highest
| effective cost per click bid lol.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| Does it actually get you that though?
| crazygringo wrote:
| It hasn't come out yet.
|
| But if they're training it on the reviews people leave as
| well as on the user-submitted photos, I see no reason why
| it _wouldn 't_.
|
| After all, when I do an analagous query about historical
| events or technological products in Google Bard it works
| just fine.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| Because on top of kind of sucking generally; the reviews
| data will frequently be of garbage quality.
|
| We don't have the ability to extract the ideas you're
| discussing from photos imo.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| When I type "pizza" I am given a filter that allows me to
| choose between "$, $$, $$$". That's a little vague but
| generally I would MUCH rather interact with software with
| good filtering, grouping and sorting controls than any of
| this natural language bullshit.
| Symbiote wrote:
| I recently searched "vegan brunch" in an unfamiliar city.
| Several results looked reasonable -- the kind of decor and
| branding I'd expect from a vegan restaurant.
|
| After the long walk to the third restaurant, I looked
| closely through the results to see why Google was giving me
| useless results. It was reviews! It had matched variations
| on "Great food but no vegan options."
|
| I'm sure Google Maps used to have a "Cuisine" filter, which
| isn't really correct in this case but is a lot closer than
| what they're doing now.
| alisonatwork wrote:
| You probably already know about this, but if you're
| looking for vegan stuff specifically, Happy Cow is a
| pretty good site to point you in the direction of decent
| options.
| crazygringo wrote:
| For price, sure.
|
| But a lot of the time you're looking for things like "cute
| date spot", "trendy", "chill atmopshere", "cozy", "good for
| a large birthday group", and so forth.
|
| There aren't filters for these. That's my whole point.
|
| There's a ton of information that can be gleaned from
| people's reviews and photos, but that simply aren't exposed
| in anything filterable. And keyword search often isn't
| available but also doesn't often work -- e.g. searching for
| "budget" gives you lots of reviews that say "definitely not
| budget". But AI is perfect for this.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > There's a ton of information that can be gleaned from
| people's reviews
|
| Extremely unreliable information. Isn't that made worse
| if what you're looking for is subjective descriptors like
| "cozy", "chill", "cute", etc? Those are the kinds of
| things that there won't be a lot of agreement on.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Not my experience at all. An individual review isn't
| much, but when you see the same ideas getting repeated
| across reviews, it's always accurate in my experience.
|
| There's enough common agreement on what cozy or chill
| mean. There's plenty of signal in the noise of reviews.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Interesting. Our experiences about the reviews are very
| different.
|
| > There's enough common agreement on what cozy or chill
| mean.
|
| Maybe? I don't know. I do know that I often see people
| using the same subjective descriptors in ways that are
| contradictory to each other. What one person thinks is
| "cozy", another person thinks it "claustrophobic", for
| instance. Unless you know the mindset of the person using
| those sorts of words, it's hard to know how to interpret
| them.
| dmonitor wrote:
| > hey, I'm looking for a cute date spot with pizza, high
| quality pizza but where you still eat it as slices
|
| that's still so many words, though, and i'm a lazy person. i
| want to just type "pizza" and, if it's a really fancy app,
| hit a single button to filter by "casual" "takeout" "formal"
| etc
| crazygringo wrote:
| As a lazy person, it's a lot easier to type that out than
| wade through 20 different listings, browsing photos and
| reviews to figure it out.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| The problem for years now has been that google will hide
| results that don't meet their standards, much of which boils
| down to how much advertising the restaurant has paid for.
| jowa983j wrote:
| I think you're missing the bigger picture. When you search for
| "pizza", is pizza really what you want? Maybe you actually want
| a recurring service from one of google's outstanding partner
| companies! Google Maps Assistant could help you find that!
| maxglute wrote:
| I just sort by food type and 4+ stars. That usually filters
| list down to something where algos can't inject too much
| weirdness. Or at least I assume it doesn't. I think my medium
| density city has not enough options that a filtered list won't
| return almost everything, confirmed by me being familiar with
| my neighbourhood and what is returned. But I imagine in denser
| cities it would be PIA (how much results return for 4 start
| sushi in middle of Tokyo). All of which is to say, unlike other
| Google services, so far I can't tell if default Google Maps is
| getting better or worse over time and I use it all the time.
| superultra wrote:
| I was working on an obsidian datatviewjs with ChatGPT and just
| not getting that I wanted so I asked Google Bard, "can you take a
| look at this code" and pasted the code block. It's response, "As
| an AI, I do not have eyes and cannot look at anything so
| unfortunately I cannot help you."
|
| So, yeah, I am not sure Google "supercharged" AI id going to work
| for a product that requires a precise but fast user feedback
| loop.
| happytiger wrote:
| I be predict it's going to be useful at first and then end up
| becoming overdone and eventually burdening the product -- unless
| they find a way to make it essential to the UX.
|
| Like all hype cycles, the syrup ends up everywhere. You need _an
| actual user need_ to have the long-term product justification to
| add features.
|
| There probably is one with maps. It just may not be this early.
| jetrink wrote:
| I see a lot of negativity, but this is actually one of the first
| things I tried to do with ChatGPT when it got Bing integration. I
| was in an unfamiliar town for a wedding and I had forgotten my
| tie. I asked ChatGPT where I could buy one downtown. (If you're
| curious, it utterly failed, with two of the three suggestions not
| selling men's clothing at all, let alone ties.) I would love to
| be able to be on the highway and ask how far the next rest stop
| is or if there are any places coming up where I could get a
| sandwich. Google has that information, including menus in many
| cases, but it's difficult to access, especially while driving.
| castlecrasher2 wrote:
| It would be excellent if it worked. Considering generative AI's
| current reputation, the skepticism is entirely warranted.
| ZoomerCretin wrote:
| Like the 10 previous AI-related Google announcements, this
| sounds great, but is unlikely to ever materialize.
| acomjean wrote:
| I was looking to buy a backgammon board locally. Using google
| was unsuccessful, but google maps oddly worked for me
| (excepting one big box store which had them online..).
| Karellen wrote:
| What do you think an LLM should be able to better than regular
| search results (possibly with speech-to-text input, and text-
| to-speech output - which is how the interface to an LLM would
| work anyway) for this kind of use case?
|
| If the answer is "regular search results are crap because of
| irrelevant sponsored placements being put before the thing I
| want", that's not a function of the search engine; that's
| revenue-maximising choice the search engine provider makes...
| so why do you think that won't happen to LLM results by the
| company that provides it?
| nonameiguess wrote:
| It's always interesting to me to see people get excited by ideas
| like this. While the idea is clearly useful, I think it suffers
| from the same limited market as directions. Unless you're a
| nomad, most people eventually settle into a routine and know what
| is in the area and how to get there. What continues changing are
| live event schedules and traffic conditions, neither of which
| requires AI to serve. What is needed is what Google already has,
| a large-scale sensor network that gives you the location and
| velocity of many people and the computing infrastructure to
| process it in real time and serve it back to the same devices the
| data is collected from.
|
| You end up in this situation where the app is adding features
| useful to visitors, but the vast majority of users just want a
| drive time estimate.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >What continues changing are live event schedules and traffic
| conditions, neither of which requires AI to serve
|
| Finding the optimal route given the current and historical
| traffic conditions along with information of what is happening
| that day (e.g. A festival or sporting event) is an AI problem.
| tomrod wrote:
| Actually, its a quantitative problem that people normally use
| operations research algorithms to resolve.
|
| Can AI be trained to solve it? Sure, but it's a weird and
| perhaps un-needed use case when there are several better
| understood and more efficient algorithms that approach lower
| bounds.
|
| I work in the AI space, love the challenges it presents and
| the use cases it enables. We have to be careful to not hype
| into AI -- applying it to places where it isn't necessary or
| could never work -- because it will absolutely continue to
| technically improve but may be overly scrutinized from a
| regulatory perspective.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >Actually, its a quantitative problem
|
| So is the rest of AI because we are using computers which
| operate on numbers. OR algorithms are one tool to emulate
| intelligence.
| cyberninja15 wrote:
| I'm hoping their example is just the surface level and the
| technology is much richer. I'm very interested to see how they're
| adding: - real-time data to LLM retrieval - validation of
| recommendations (hallucination reduction) - enriched metadata for
| recommendations
| hayst4ck wrote:
| AI's main value to companies is to launder bad behavior.
|
| "We fed it into this black box, and this is what we got, _we don
| 't know how it works_". Of course the training data will probably
| be a weighted output of who pays google, rather than what will
| make the user happiest.
|
| It's pretext to violate reviewing systems without looking
| obviously corrupt.
|
| I just want to see the top 10 most rated things per category,
| then I want to see the top 10 things over a given threshold of
| reviews. I don't want googles mangling of the data, I just want
| to be able to query the review data.
|
| If whatever google displays isn't _better_ than the top 10
| results in a given area sorted by number of reviews, it 's clear
| there is a reason why. Whether it's devs creating unnecessary
| complexity to justify their employment, or a system designed to
| weight results in favor of who pays google, or the need to inject
| 'randomness' in order to be able to inject paid advertisements
| without them being 100% ignored, or to provide a reason to keep
| scrolling allowing more ads to be displayed, it's all anti-user
| behavior. This will just be another tool to manipulate a user
| rather than help them.
| jayrot wrote:
| I don't disagree with the point you're trying to make, but this
| puts an awful lot of weight and importance on "reviews", which
| tend to be highly problematic, in my experience at least (cf.
| Amazon, Yelp)
| AlienRobot wrote:
| >I just want to see the top 10 most rated things per category
|
| That is the problem. You do not want a web search engine that
| gives you a WEB PAGE for your query. You want an answer AI.
|
| Google can not find a page nobody has written, and if several
| people write about a topic, there is just no way Google can
| figure out which one should be the first result correctly.
|
| When Google talks about finding relevant results, they just
| mean if you type "hacker news" on Google the first result will
| probably be this website instead of news about hackers who
| hacked a bank or something. That is what "relevancy" means.
| When there is a single, canonical, unambiguous web page that
| matches a query exactly.
|
| Everything else is just expecting more from Google than it can
| feasibly provide and then getting angry when it tacks AI on
| everything because it can't do magic.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > You want an answer AI.
|
| As a separate service distinct from web search, sure. But I
| also want to be able to search the web and get lists of
| pages.
|
| > That is what "relevancy" means. When there is a single,
| canonical, unambiguous web page that matches a query exactly.
|
| This is what I _don 't_ want in a search engine. Unless that
| search engine figures out a way to read my mind, anyhow,
| which would bring up a whole host of other issues. Google
| trying to guess at what I want rather than just giving me a
| list of pages that match my query is the main problem that I
| have with Google search.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| Again, it's because you are the use case that is
| unfeasible.
|
| It's a SEARCH engine, not a BROWSE CATEGORY engine.
|
| And I get it, I get frustrated at this too. Sometimes I try
| to search for a category of something, like free image
| editors, and Google just can't give me an answer I'd like..
| And it's really not a hard query to answer. It just lists
| me a bunch of names with zero info about what platform they
| are for, or what features they have. It's an useless list.
| It's simply beyond the scope of what it is made to do.
|
| I mean, seriously, I know Google is a blackbox, but Google
| is really just a single textbox. We're expecting too much
| from a single textbox.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > it's because you are the use case that is unfeasible.
|
| Not at all, as evidenced by other search engines that are
| successful at this and the fact that Google used to be
| successful at this.
|
| > It's a SEARCH engine
|
| Precisely. I want it to search the web and return a list
| of sites that match my search criteria. I don't want it
| to to answer a specific question for me, nor to try to
| guess what I "really" want. That should be done by a
| different tool.
|
| > We're expecting too much from a single textbox.
|
| I'm not sure what you think that I'm expecting, but what
| I'm expecting is much simpler than what Google seems to
| be trying to do.
|
| I suspect that I've failed to adequately explain my use
| case and we're talking about different things, but I'm
| not sure where I went wrong so don't know how to clarify.
| hayst4ck wrote:
| You are arguing that google is a tool. The other person
| is arguing that google is more like an opinionated
| contractor.
|
| "You don't want a tool, you want to remodel your
| bathroom" is what the other person is arguing. That's
| kind of true.
|
| We're arguing that we don't want someone tell us how to
| remodel our bathroom, we just want a tool we can use to
| remodel our bathroom ourselves.
|
| Google said that providing a tool doesn't make enough
| money, so they transitioned into being a contractor.
|
| The crux of the issue is the "-" operator. As a tool, it
| removed any search result with the word after the "-"
| operator on the page in a very specific way. If you
| weren't getting the results you wanted, it's because you
| didn't think of how to use the tool in the right way. As
| a contractor, they try to interpret what you want to
| subtract and then give you what they think you want.
|
| The person you are responding to might be too young to
| remember that google was actually a very good tool at one
| point.
| hayst4ck wrote:
| This isn't meant to be a personal attack so much as it's to
| understand where you are coming from. What age bracket do you
| fall within? I guess you don't have to say, I wouldn't.
|
| If you're old, then I think you are weirdly defending google
| and wrong.
|
| If you're young, then your post makes more sense. You never
| got to experience when google _actually could_ do magic.
|
| Google used to have a lot of the functionality of grep and
| now it does not. So we come from a place where functionality
| was taken away. Rather than being able to perform discrete
| raw text queries, we are now only able to perform fuzzy
| "idea" queries.
|
| As for the category/search stuff in regards to maps reviews.
| I could definitely come up with queries for googles raw data
| that are vastly better than the results they return. Those
| queries are trivial, but google denies the ability to perform
| them for business reasons that are more important than good
| product reasons.
|
| Mostly I feel like your analysis doesn't take into account
| that yelp/google/amazon/etc all used to be much better than
| they are right now, so it's not that we are imagining that
| these services could be better, they actually used to be
| better. Enshitification was Cory Doctrow's word for this
| process. If you haven't seen what these services can be like
| when they were trying to get more users, well they can all be
| better than they are right now.
| kccqzy wrote:
| I don't see why this feature needs to be powered by generative
| AI. As the article itself says you can very well just "search
| "vintage store SF" in the regular Google Maps search bar." Google
| just needs to analyze place descriptions and reviews and look for
| synonyms of "vintage" among them. The only AI related task might
| be to look at street view photos and user-uploaded photos to
| detect whether what's depicted in the photo could reasonably be
| called "vintage".
|
| From a user perspective, it's a much better experience to see a
| list of places rather than generative AI generating some text.
|
| I think this is just the Maps team getting on the gen AI hype
| train.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| Yeah, if I had to guess it's probably using it very minimally
| and they're just advertising that so they can say it's AI.
| bjackman wrote:
| It needs to be powered by generative AI because its purpose is
| to be powered be generative AI.
|
| Look at the way it's phrased: not "to improve the user
| experience" but "to bring generative AI to Google Maps".
|
| This is Google top brass telling everyone explicitly that their
| products need to incorporate generative AI, and product leads
| brainstorming ways to so that.
|
| The problem this is solving is not a problem that users have,
| it's a problem that Google has.
|
| (FWIW I say this as someone who's optimistic that there is
| really something there behind the AI hype. But this ain't it).
| sirpunch wrote:
| IMO it does provide a better user experience. It gets to the
| end goal quickly by giving you a list of places directly in the
| Maps app. You can see how far each place is and if you really
| wanna go to that part of the town from a bird's eye view. Sure,
| I can Google the same query. But that'd require me multiple
| clicks and scrolling through possibly long-winded blogs to
| finally get a list of addresses.
| Hadriel wrote:
| Naw when it comes to gen ai Google teams dont have that much
| will power to say what train they're getting on. It's pretty
| much a directive at Google at this point for everyone to get on
| the gen AI train.
| hatthew wrote:
| I was going to disagree, but after experimentation it seems
| like the non-LLM search in google maps already does a pretty
| good job of handling vague searches more complicated than
| keyword matching
| 2024throwaway wrote:
| The very first paragraph answers your question.
|
| > You've finally found a day the whole crew can hang out. The
| problem? Everyone has different preferences: one friend's
| vegan, another won't venture uptown, and one has a dog that
| never leaves their side. With so much to consider, you're going
| to need help figuring out the perfect place to go.
|
| I imagine searching "place to hangout downtown that is vegan
| and dog friendly" is not going to return the results you're
| hoping for.
| legostormtroopr wrote:
| What happened to the idea of "meeting in a location and
| walking together to find a place". Why does it need to be so
| precice and transactional?
|
| It feels like we are optimising ourselves to transactional
| unhappiness.
| 2024throwaway wrote:
| Not sure why you're gatekeeping someone trying to find a
| good place to hang out.
|
| Maybe someone in the group has trouble walking.
| viscanti wrote:
| Presumably this is for people who don't like that idea.
| Hopefully Google doesn't force everyone to use this, even
| if they preferred to just meet somewhere and walk together
| to look for a place.
| drusepth wrote:
| Their example is horrible, but I kind of see what they're
| (hopefully) trying to get at: more natural ways to "search" for
| places, specifically for people that didn't grow up implicitly
| learning _how_ to search [0][1]. We know to search "vintage
| store SF" because it'll give exactly the results we want, but
| there are still large populations out there searching with
| wildly inefficient queries e.g. full sentences, natural
| language, unrelated info, etc.
|
| And a lot of these queries are valid questions/searches, but
| don't produce the answer the searcher is looking for. Depending
| on how this Maps system works, it might work better for those
| people -- and also provide a new kind of searching for everyone
| else.
|
| Here's a great example from a different domain: a while back I
| built a book search powered by LLMs that helps you find books
| that you remember random details of but can't remember much
| else ("that one where the woman climbs the mountain and gets
| stuck in a cave for a week", "that one where two cities on
| opposite mountains communicate by reflecting light", "that one
| where the main character finds a dragon egg in his grandpa's
| garage"). Without indexing the contents, reviews, analyses, etc
| of each book, an LLM was a great solution for finding the right
| answer to this kind of query which, anecdotally, almost always
| fell flat in traditional search engines (google, goodreads,
| amazon, etc). In Maps, I could see this kind of search working
| well for locations with queries like "that restaurant in KC
| with the giant painting of a woman spilling soup out of her
| mouth", "that museum with the open-air room in the middle",
| "that coffee shop that only hires women", etc).
|
| [0] Tangential anecdote from the far end of the spectrum: one
| of my grandma's first google searches was "Hello there, I'm not
| sure who I'm writing to but I'm hoping you can help me. Years
| ago, my friend {Alice} told me about a restaurant she went to
| in Des Moines that had amazing meatballs. I've looked all over
| and tried {list of places} but I can't find it. She lived near
| the YMCA near Main..." More than half of the query was ignored
| (max 32 words on Google) and not a single result was relevant
| so she just closed my laptop (and rarely used technology ever
| again); however, I bet an LLM probably would have given a much
| better result.
|
| [1] There's also an argument to be made that people who didn't
| grow up around technology are a dying breed, but I think we'll
| soon find that technology moves fast enough that we don't quite
| grok all the latest tech -- and in that lens, we might
| eventually be the ones still using "that legacy way to XYZ"
| instead of whatever's next.
| rvnx wrote:
| Amazing, now that it is released can we have Reviews tab back ?
| and Sort by date ?
| genman wrote:
| I think it might be good. For a moment I was afraid that they are
| going to use generative AI to produce fake details on maps.
|
| Edit: but is it possible that it makes up things that do not
| exist and presents it as local trivia?
| baxtr wrote:
| I am looking forward to driving on roads that don't exist, in
| search of a place that doesn't exist either...
| nimbius wrote:
| please god no.
|
| Everything Alphabet has hit with their sugar-stick of AI has
| turned to a foetid garbage pile in just as much time. search on
| the google product is less than useless in most cases, its
| outright harmful to the pursuit of knowledge itself and the
| security posture of the system accessing the links provided.
|
| Once alphabet tires of the AI hype train im sure whatever adjunct
| features and functions get added to maps will fester like a
| withering carbunkle until suddenly maps is replaced with
| maps(new_name) where the next product is just a reskinned
| rollback.
| a2128 wrote:
| I've been struggling to use Google Maps's search lately. I zoom
| into Orlando, search "Euro Deli", and it suddenly takes me to a
| place called Euro Deli in Quebec. If I go back to Orlando and
| then click "Search this area" it finally shows me euro deli
| stores in Orlando. Sometimes it doesn't even show me all of the
| results when I click "Search this area" and leaves some areas
| blank, making me think that city/town doesn't have e.g. a Burger
| King when it in fact does if I just pan around a bit and re-do
| the search
| bgirard wrote:
| This is infuriating.
|
| Also I can zoom in to some strip mall and ask to see all the
| restaurants and I'll only be presented with a subset that
| Google decided were worth highlighting. No easy way to see the
| others.
| alexanderchr wrote:
| That's a feature. You're the product.
| nicwolff wrote:
| Sounds like it finally caught up with Apple Maps!
| psyklic wrote:
| Agreed -- slightly getting the name wrong does a
| national/international search! Searching for coffee shops often
| leaves out obvious results such as some Starbucks. Even more
| frustratingly it doesn't show particular businesses even when I
| zoom in, forcing me to manually search for the business name.
| atum47 wrote:
| Google maps is an amazing tool. Twice a year I go to the United
| States to a company meet up. I always stay a little bit longer
| than my co-workers to get the most of the trip (since I spend
| almost 20 hours to get there). I always use maps constantly not
| just to know where am I but also to know where to go and possible
| good locations to visit. A cool trick is to use the "busy areas"
| to identify cool places. Can't wait to see the new features.
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| Hey, sorry about the tangent but any tips on how you found a US
| company that hires remote outside the US?
|
| So far I haven't come across a single such opportunity for
| example in who is hiring threads..
| atum47 wrote:
| I got my current job (3 years so far) here on Hacker news on
| a "who wants to be hired" topic. Don't really know why they
| hired me but I'm glad they did.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Please just tell me where to turn.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| On the negative side, this will probably cause trouble.
|
| On the positive side, Google will probably kill it in a year
| anyway.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| [dupe]
|
| More discussion earlier:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39218367
| dang wrote:
| We'll merge that hither since the reporting doesn't seem to add
| anything to the original. Thanks!
| andrewla wrote:
| I think Google is generally going down a self-destructive path
| with their AI approach, which works with their generally self-
| destructive approach to user interfaces.
|
| I see ads for Google phones where they brag about how rather than
| taking actual pictures, they have their AI hallucinate better
| pictures, and I wonder who exactly these ads are supposed to
| appeal to?
|
| Already Google Maps is something of a nightmare to use --
| searching for something will often refocus the current view in
| wild and useless ways. This is doubly true when you're trying to
| do a multi-part search (e.g. "I'm going to be at this store, I
| wonder if there's a good Thai restaurant nearby" will zoom out
| and show you Thai restaurants thirty miles away, and you've lost
| the pin from the first search). And the "explore" option just
| seems kind of useless and intrusive -- it is literally never what
| I am using Google Maps for. And the near-extortive labelling --
| "in order to get your restaurant labelled as 'LGBTQ friendly' you
| have to create a Google account and claim the restaurant" is
| mind-boggling.
|
| Adding AI to Google Maps could conceivably help with keyword
| labelling (like when a search for "pharmacy" fails to show up a
| given pharmacy because it's marked as a "drug store" or
| something). Maybe if I search for a good "salad place" it'll find
| restaurants that serve good salads but don't have them in the
| restaurant name. But I'm terrified of the kind of generalized
| hallucinations that it will provide. Might be interesting to do a
| "vibe"-based search from time to time ("find me a clean, well-
| lit, quiet bar" or a "bar with a pool table") but I suspect this
| will get old after a couple of false positives.
| foogazi wrote:
| > I see ads for Google phones where they brag about how rather
| than taking actual pictures, they have their AI hallucinate
| better pictures, and I wonder who exactly these ads are
| supposed to appeal to?
|
| Everyone that takes pictures where: someone closed their eyes,
| wasn't looking, something annoying in the background,
| unflattering pose, etc
|
| Most peoples pictures are not a statement of record - we just
| want to remember the good times with loved ones
| andrewla wrote:
| > Most peoples pictures are not a statement of record - we
| just want to remember the good times with loved ones
|
| But on that note, having a flawed high fidelity record is no
| worse for remembering the good times. The hallucinations are
| mostly harmless, until the AI changes your eye color or adds
| extra teeth or all of a sudden there's an elephant in the
| background, even though you told the AI that you specifically
| wanted a picture without an elephant.
|
| Or, more whimsically, your friend who memorably never smiles
| in pictures is smiling in all of the pictures with your new
| phone.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _having a flawed high fidelity record is no worse for
| remembering the good times_
|
| This doesn't describe most avid photo takers, who are
| presumably the people who will choose a smartphone based on
| its camera features.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Most peoples pictures are not a statement of record - we
| just want to remember the good times with loved ones
|
| Maybe so, but personally if I'm taking a picture, I want that
| picture to be of real things. I don't want it to be altered
| or to have artificial things added. That just adds an
| additional layer of separation between my and reality.
|
| If I want a picture to be artificially enhanced, I'd be using
| photoshop or similar.
|
| But I understand that's just me. One of the things I worry
| about with how generative AI seems to be going is that it's
| being used for things that further blur what is real from
| what is not, and we already have far too much of that as it
| is.
| Xeyz0r wrote:
| That's true. I remember when I switched from the iPhone 6s
| to the iPhone 13 and tried taking a selfie in low light. I
| was so dissatisfied because the image became brighter than
| it appeared on the camera preview during shooting. Good
| shots with minimal phone editing now only happen in good
| lighting. But if a photo is taken in low light, the face
| gets heavily smoothed to remove noise in the photo, but in
| my opinion, it only makes everything look worse.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| I get using AI in Maps, but _generative_ AI?
|
| Searching for a place can be done with the help of AI
| classifiers, but in the end, you just get a point on a map,
| nothing generative here. Other things that Maps can do, like
| pathfinding is most likely better served using traditional
| algorithms.
| summerlight wrote:
| I am not sure how generative models would help here, but sometime
| I just want to put a multiple constraints on the map query and
| this is not feasible even though they already have all the
| necessary information because their UI doesn't support it.
| Something like "burger shops/cafes near the downtown that I've
| been there before and gave a good rating or in my favorite list,
| reservation open for tomorrow lunch". Probably too complicated
| for dedicated UI, wonder if a chat style UX could fit to this
| kind of needs.
| thorum wrote:
| Still dreaming of the day they use AI to enhance the street view
| experience. Being able to walk through a photorealistic
| simulation of any place on earth would be amazing, but the UX and
| image quality doesn't seem to have changed in years.
| crakenzak wrote:
| This with the 3rd or 4th gen of Apple Vision Pro where all the
| issues are hammered out would be unreal.
|
| What I'm really looking forward to is describing what you want
| midjourney prompt style then being teleported to a hyper
| realistic world you can explore with quests and journey.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| The examples provided are poor. Here's one: I recently asked Bard
| for "a good place to go with a colleague to lunch in Mountain
| View," and then asked it to refine to places "upscale and favored
| by locals." Wound up finding Cucina Venti, which I'm not sure a
| regular search would have yielded.
|
| That said, it's a neat to see feature. Not a must have, certainly
| nothing compelling.
| prng2021 wrote:
| I agree it's not compelling. In fact I think typing all those
| words is a waste of time. I use Yelp and here's what the
| experience is like:
|
| 1. Type "lunch". It auto suggests "lunch restaurants"
|
| 2. It already has my location but of course it can auto
| complete a different one.
|
| 3. Press the $ button to filter to upscale, aka higher priced,
| restaurants with $$$ and $$$$.
|
| Very quick. I guess the advantage for AI is finding "favored by
| locals".
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _the advantage for AI is finding "favored by locals"_
|
| And winnowing the list. Yelp's results in the Bay Area are
| strongly skewed by people who go to a fine-dining
| establishment, have a terrific meal, and then leave one star
| because it's priced as fine dining.
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| I wonder - does saying "<thing> - but now with AI!" actually
| work? Like do normies buy this stuff? I don't know any normies,
| but I'm very curious to hear from those that do. Do they fall for
| this "<thing> plus AI!" that I hear in every single advert now?
| avereveard wrote:
| Anecdotal but here's my experience.
|
| A year ago a normie wedding planner was scouting locations for
| a couple that had a list of specific needs, nothing weird, just
| rooms for the night, sea view, allowed catering and had a
| garden space, but even if the requirements were pretty standard
| it's not something you can get at glance from maps or Google
| searches.
|
| So it was taking significant time to open each location web
| site and validate them because one has to be sure and often
| locations doesn't explicitly have a list of features, you'd
| have to see photos or find the right snippet of text in
| whichever subsection it could have been, and the hit rate was
| petty low
|
| So I tried asking gpt and quickly had 20 matches for her ready.
| Some were hallucinated, some we couldn't confirm the features,
| but more than two thirds where legit candidates, which saved a
| lot of busy work.
|
| So in the end the planner opened an account and never used gpt
| ever again because it was weird and alien and couldn't figure
| out prompting.
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