A "cartographer" is someone who makes maps for a living. So the word "cartographer" is a job title, similar to how "programmer" is a job title for someone who programs computers.
I don't think that there is an English word for someone who likes maps. The best thing to say is what you already said: that they are "passionate about maps".
To give you a taste, here's the largest change made in 3.42:
> InfoWindows now have a default max width of 648px which can be overridden by setting the InfoWindow maxWidth property. The width of an InfoWindow can now exceed 648px but will still be limited by the width of the map. (Previously, Infowindows were always restricted to the lesser of 648px or the map width.)
Also note that the minor version (0.x) is incremented quarterly, and we're up to 3.43 now, so over 10 years.
I see this as something different: the sign of a mature product. What are competitors doing that Google Maps isn’t? Maybe I’m missing something but I see no significant features.
(Not to mention, the Maps API != Google Maps the product)
Google Maps the consumer product is far ahead of any competitors, but the Maps API lacks many features available in Google Maps (vector maps, 3d acceleration, real-time styling).
These feature disparities between the API & the consumer product were annoying at first, but now that the competitors to the Maps API all have had them for years they're simply baffling.
Apple is so far behind outside of the places they prioritize that it'll take decades at this pace to get on Google Maps' current level.
It's really useless in places like Eastern Europe, where Apple has no interest in supporting and isn't likely that it'll turn that around any time soon.
Here maps is good too. I'm always amazed how it consistently gets the speed limit right even in sparsely populated areas and small towns, where the speed limit often changes literally every 50 meters.
If someone is interested in mapping this kind of things in OpenStreetMap (used by mapy.cz outside Czech Republic) - I recommend StreetComplete (max speed quest must be enabled in settings, it is disabled by default)
I also live in Sweden and do a lot of GIS analysis with both OSM data and other providers. OSM is great when it comes to the actual road geometry (esp. bike and pedestrian roads), although it often gets the speed limits wrong. For pedestrian travel analysis I'd say it's the best dateset available, since it includes all those 'unofficial' paths that everybody uses, but are often left off official maps. It is however pretty terrible when it comes to buildings and addresses. You don't have to get many km out from major cities before a lot of buildings are missing, and the numbering of buildings is often either missing or wrong.
> You don't have to get many km out from major cities before a lot of buildings are missing, and the numbering of buildings is often either missing or wrong.
I am working on a project where I have noticed the same problem with several providers. What provider do you recommend for geocoding when this stuff needs to be right most of the time? Bing API seems somewhat OK. Google Maps API seems like the best, but comes with insane terms and conditions.
Yea, I agree that the Bing API is pretty OK and Google seems slightly better. However for Sweden I would probably go with Hitta or Eniro, since they specialize in the Swedish market, however neither has a free API. Likewise if I only need data for a handful of countries (and am willing to pay) I would first look if there are companies that specialize in those countries, since that data tends to be better than the places that provide global Geocoding.
Also in central Europe. Maps and navigation in the Croatian countryside is comically broken. Not only are the locations of addresses way off, if you travel to that location, they'll then send you somewhere else and eventually in a circle.
Maybe they don't care about poor countries with lower usage, but I'd be embarrassed to have that in my product.
Having said that, rich western Europe is in some ways no better. If you create a public transport route, Google maps will send you walking hundreds of meters around non-existent barriers, or sometimes insist that you go one tram stop past and then catch the tram back to the stop you want to go to.
Maps, like search seems to be slowly suffering from some sort of corporate rot over at Google.
Can't speak about Eastern Europe, but here in the Netherlands the public transport with Google Maps is really good. Including live-timing as to when your tram will arrive.
I have no problem with that, it works fine for me too, but public transport routing here (the actual mapping functionality) in Den Haag is broken and has been for years.
Even when I don't encounter obvious bugs, Google serves up illogical routes.
Google map is amazing in India (a poor country albeit with higher usage).
It is not uncommon to see cab or auto (tuk-tuk) drivers use smartphones to navigate the city roads.
Map technology in general has become a great leveller, where it enables outsider to start driving cabs in complex cities roads (which otherwise would be almost impossible without direction from passenger).
I thought that's because Google stopped doing street view because of German privacy laws. Without the street view cars roaming around there's a lot less street level data to be had.
I'm not sure how important Streetview is for street level data. I was always under the impression that "paved" (or similar) streets were pretty easy to get right (and can possibly be obtained from a governmental agency?). For smaller footpaths I always assumed that they were using movement data (the same they use for traffic forecasting) to detect where they are.
They also resumed Streetview in parts of Germany this year, and I'm not sure they ever fully stopped running them for private data collection.
I figured they had a tracker on the cars that would produce actively captured data that could be compared to phone data to understand what roads are around, etc.
Google maps was released in 2005. The upper limit on how long it would take Apple to build the whole thing from literally nothing is 15 years, if they are investing to improve their service.
Let alone with computer vision, satellite imagery, hardware improvements and the ability to lazily copy the interface Google has created which would speed the process up.
The fact that it took company X 15 years to do something does not mean that 15 years is upper limit for other companies. Not saying it would take more or less, but just seeing it ad an upper limit makes no sense to me.
Mapy.cz is far better than Google in case of Slovakia or Czech Republic. They have full coverage of high resolution pictures taken from planes and not satellites. Also these contain all the hiking, cycling and other routes. The native Android and iOS apps work great and support offline maps - you can download the whole map for a country with one click. Google Maps is unusable for sport or hiking because you only see a large green blob instead of the terrain with contour lines with altitude markings, all trails and roads and POI. Yes, Mapy.cz can't compete with car navigation, but everything else is miles better (and navigation on foot is better too).
Google Maps just isn't very good for hiking. But it's not just a map, it's got the yellow pages, Yelp, and, depending on where you are, various other things like hotel booking and public transport routing thrown in. My recent favorite feature is the live estimation of how crowded a store is, very useful during the pandemic.
Much of this is stuff the software based on OSM isn't even trying, or doing so only very half heartedly, as far as I am aware. On the flipside, OSM is, in many places, peerless in its core competency, a detailed map that everyone can use.
To be fair the crowded functionality in a map is something only Google could pull of since they are tracking all phones and locations. And it still has a bunch of restaurants listed in my neighbourhood that is clearly only containing rental houses and very outdated roads compared to Openstreetmaps.
> My recent favorite feature is the live estimation of how crowded a store is, very useful during the pandemic.
Unfortunately it's been completely useless in my area. I wish stores just allowed access to the cctv cameras on their parking lots so I could estimate for myself.
In the US, I use AllTrails for hiking, which I think is built on Mapbox. Hiking, hunting, fishing, running, biking—all interesting examples of niche uses for maps that naturally lend themselves to separate user experiences.
Mapy.cz covers most of other use cases as well, including business info, public transport and other details. I personally find mapy.cz more tailored to pedestrian/public transport navigation within european city. The only feature which I go to google maps is the mentioned estimation of how crowded a place is (as this comes from android data, and google has an clear edge there).
The software supports the use cases but the data isn't there. Certainly for where I'm living. Most of the information is missing -- eg apparently there are no pediatricians in my city, many opening times are missing, in my area there are no photos, no reviews; other stuff is wrong. It's more comprehensive in Prague, though from a brief look Google still has more of everything.
I'm not saying that OSM (and other projects, but particularly OSM) can't catch up, especially when it comes to factual information. It has already shown that crowdsourcing can do better than Google at pure mapping.
Does OSM support address-based resolution of places? AFAIK, Google is getting things like store hours when it crawls websites. Which, of course, it's doing anyway for indexing. As long as it can figure out the address and the store hours from the website, it can put them on the map.
In the meantime, OSM generally doesn't even have place addresses in my experience. If I could resolve addresses to places in OSM, then I could easily write some scrappers to help out with filling in other data.
I'm not talking about adding addresses to OSM. I'm talking about resolving features based on address. "Give me the building at address (____), because I know that's a business and I can fill in additional information."
> In the meantime, OSM generally doesn't even have place addresses in my experience.
As @matkoniecz pointed out, OSM is quite capable of having place addresses mapped to a specific spot. If your experience has been that they are missing, then that is most likely because no one has added them to OSM for the area's in which you have looked.
But the good part about OSM is that anyone, including you, can add those details, and they appear in the main map within seconds to minutes of someone adding them. So you could help rectify the missing situation by adding some of that missing data.
If you don't want to learn all the OSM details, and provided some background details are present (generally building outlines for address data questions) one easier way to help add the data is via StreetComplete (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/StreetComplete). It asks simple questions, you enter the answer, and the app handles the low-level OSM tagging changes based upon the answer given.
I do contribute in my local area. But I'm talking about entire suburban cities with no addresses on any of the houses. It would take me months to verify all the addresses and enter them manually. My county property appraiser does offer some data files, but I haven't yet written any tests to see whether it's enough to reliably populate addresses into OSM.
Just tested for Germany (where I am living currently) and it is not very good: at the map level it shows the correct street number but it seems unable to use it for actual route planning (i.e. if you are in a street with numbers from 1 to 200 it seems to always calculate your arrival point at #1 even if you specificy that you are looking for "72/b").
Yes, it's available on iPhone. The company is based in Czech republic and originally they were focused on Czech and Slovak market, but they cover the whole world. I haven't tried the navigation, I only use it mostly for navigation outside of cities for hiking - I can have the whole tourist map in my pocket and offline at any time.
I've spent a ton of time mapping out trails in my region on openstreetmap. I've found the issue now is the interface. The map data is only good if it can be easily read.
I'm starting to look at workflows for taking osm trail data and trying to make nice maps, but wow it is not easy to do!
Thanks! I use mapy.cz for everything, but my main reason are the hiking routes. I've contibuted some routes also (and city data using streetComplete), but certainly not a ton.
Another big issue I've had with using Google Maps for outdoor trips is their awful offline sattelite map saving. There is no way to specify which layers to save and the level Google chooses could be anywhere from decent to utterly unusable. I've had saved maps that turned into blurry blobs the minute I lost phone service countless times.
I eventually gave up on using it and switched to a proper topo map app that actually lets me set the offline resolution and it has been vastly better.
Wow, you weren't kidding. Poking around real quick, the aerial imagery is super high resolution, on par with what you'd get with a consumer-grade drone flyover.
Google Maps is not that great in places they don’t prioritize. They have no ability to handle tolls and direction of roads that are based on day of the week and hour. Local examples from the DC Area: I-66 is marked as a toll road 100% of the time despite only being tolled at rush hour in one direction; Clara Barton parkway is always marked as two way, but it becomes one way during rush hour, I regularly am routed down it by Google maps when it is one way the opposite direction.
I frequently am sent down nonexistent roads in rural Massachusetts, meanwhile there is a paved road in Bristol, NH that Google refuses to route people on; it is used by Apple Maps.
I'm located in NoVA and I've noticed this as well. It seems like instead of having the option "Avoid Tolls" it needs to be "Avoid Tolls when I have to Pay".
A year ago I would have agreed, but I am now more optimistic. They recently launched a huge update for Canada that has made it competitive with Google Maps, and their "Look Around" is a lot more impressive than Street View in my experience with it.
Like the article states, the pace of their updates is increasing. While it may still be a while until they support the rest of the world, the fact that somebody there seems to finally understand people use iPhones in places other than the Bay Area is promising.
Apple is behind, yes, but you overestimate how dependant many core services are towards Google Maps. Many Nordic services like transit apps and websites among others use either OSM with the country's own Land Survey's map data.
As long as Apple and competitors can a) have businesses add their locations easily and b) have public transit companies' timetables in their system, they are already within arm's reach of GMaps.
Apple seems to want to expand its (primarily) iPhone market in India, and yet Apple Maps is still far behind Google Maps here even in larger cities. There was news a few years ago about investing in maps, but that hasn’t shown as much improvement as one would expect. Google Maps adapts and improves a lot faster (partially thanks to millions of Android devices reporting location data all the time).
I don’t think Apple is very serious about Maps. If it is, it’s certainly not investing much into it except for Bay Area and a few major cities in the U.S. Apple Maps is more of a hobby for Apple, like Apple News (which is still only in a handful of countries several years after launch) and some other products (like Apple TV) and services.
Tokyo coverage is also not very good in comparison with Google Maps unfortunately. Considered moving over but the combination of poor search results and the lack of ability to move my places from Google to Apple Maps means it won't be my focus any time soon.
> maybe they are scanning cities for their self-driving cars and are also using this data for Maps?
I think that sounds plausible. I don't see why else they would resume scanning parts of Germany even though they have to blur out large chunks of it on Streetview.
That was my first thought when I just saw "sidewalks" & "crosswalks" too. But AFAIK OSM doesn't have anything remotely like that level of sidewalk shape data. And while stairs on paths are mapped, I don't think outdoor building stairs are mapped.
Here, in OSM, I can see stairs shape, type of pavement, stairs direction, and amount of stairs. Not sure about sidewalks, though. OSM is pretty detailed altogether. It depends on user input, but the tools are there.
Stairs on Google are often the result of leveraging Captcha questions, i.e. Google made the public do the work but then locked up the data under a non-public license.
Thanks for the link. I hope they allow switching between both version. I know the one on the right on your link gives more information, but it looks too crumbled. I dont need most of the information there.
> Just a thought: maybe they are scanning cities for their self-driving cars and are also using this data for Maps?
This is extremely likely. We know that Street View cars have been carrying Lidar equipment for a few years now which aids in HD mapping. It makes total sense for them to re-use this data for their self driving cars.
This is a familiar refrain I've recently begun to hear about many of Google's products and I'm starting to see the point. Technology has evolved significantly in the last ten years. It is now significantly easier to build a search engine with its own index and crawl the entirety of the Internet than it was ten years ago. Maps too, will go that way soon. It took IBM and Intel, who were regarded the same way Google is now, half a century to be dethroned. For Google, this might happen on a more accelerated schedule. I suspect there will be a swarm of startups biting at its heels within the next five years.
Thankfully (1) there just aren't that many useful websites anymore. Most content lives in walled gardens. Negotiate a few deals to get around CloudFlare for those select few and you're set.
'Many a true word was said in jest' as the aphorism goes. IME useful information has become somewhat concentrated into nodes, instead of trawling blogs for info it's all on stackoverflow/Twitter/whatever (depending on subject).
I hope for the startups too, but I'm not as optimistic. While the HP/Intel/IBM/etc. dinosaurs are slowly being sapped of relevance, I don't think Google will fall victim to the same fate. Those dinosaurs largely saw their maturation before the rise of Internet, and as such still have a lot of pre-Internet culture in them, especially in the C-suite. Google (largely) doesn't have that. And they, along with the rest of the FAANG companies, just deal with menacing upstarts by buying them. They're public, they're starting to become too massive, but no one cares as long as they continue providing their core free services.
My thought on this is: while technology and circumstance changes, human beings and groups of human beings, are subject to the same fundamental forces of ascendance, consolidation, plateau and decline. The human beings that make up Google are fundamentally no different from those that made up IBM (or even the Roman Empire). They may have the knowledge of what happened to the previous generation of tech companies in their collective memories, but then again, one could argue that IBM too, had in their collective memories, the fate of the industries that they supplanted.
I live in London and for commuting around via public transport OR walking I always use Citymapper, which is massively superior than Google Maps for directions. I suspect they are using Googles APIs underneath it all, but their UI is better than Google maps and also their recommended public transport directions are orders of magnitude better than Google Maps.
Citymapper will get you between any two locations in London and give you many options based on cost or time or preference for one transport type (e.g. preferring tubes versus buses). Citymapper also gives multi-modal directions: e.g. walking PLUS take an Uber. Or walking, tube, then a cab. Not only this, but it ALSO tells you where you should sit on a train so you have the least walk when you exit the train.
Citymapper is nice, but I disagree that it's massively superior:
1- When I was living south of London, Citymapper was completely pointless, since it only showed commuting options with SouthWest trains, and not Southern trains (my station was served by both). I suspect Citymapper might've fixed this since.
2- Maps also gives you all different options, and since some time ago they also started to offer mixed ride-hailing and public transport (they appear to offer that only if your public transport station is far enough from you probably > ~15 minutes walk?)
3- The other features are not that useful: since you'd use a monthly travelcard or pay as you go on your oyster/bank card, the cost estimate is not really something that you have to worry about. If you're a cash-strapped student, you're probably just going to always opt for the bus to save one or two pounds compared to the tube... so, just picking Bus as your preferred mode of transport is enough to cover that use case.
4- Citymapper is/was also inferior to Google maps when you need to quickly check/compare a (different) train that you just managed to hop into if it's not shown in the UI (maybe because it was delayed, and so it was not shown among the options). With Google maps you could just amend the start time for your trip.
5- One really nice feature that Citymapper has is the instructions for which tube exit to use when you arrive at the destination. It really helps to diminish the "which side is north?" disorientation. Otoh, you don't get that unless you actually start the trip (if you only use Citymapper to browse the route options, for example). OTOH, Google maps has AR navigation, which covers the same use case (orient yourself when you do the last bit of your trip on foot)
6- Both Maps and Citymapper have alert notifications for when you should get out at your stop. I almost never use the feature though, because I missed my tube stop a couple of times due to Citymapper triggering their notification AFTER the stop was already past)
7- Both Maps and Citymapper have a way to share your trip with other people. Citymapper is nicer though, since you can see all of the people that shared a trip with you on the same map (nice when you're meeting with more than 1 other friend from different parts of London)
That said, I dislike monopolies, so when I'll travel around London again (after the end of the pandemic) I'm planning to try to use maps.me (which uses the OSM data) as my first option.
This is all your opinion. As someone that literally lives in Zone 2, I rely on Citymapper literally every day and in my actual experience as a Londoner, Citymapper beats Google every day. If Google were better, I'd use Google, but it's not.
Also, another major benefit of Citymapper over Google. Citymapper does a much better job of orienting you when walking. Google Maps seems to be slow, or maybe have UI issues when I'm trying to work out where I am and which direction I should be walking in. With Citymapper I never have an issue, it seems to use the IPhone compass functionality better than the Google Maps app.
The other major, major issue with Google, is the Directions UI on phone just seems half baked, like it was an after-thought. It has never felt nice to use and I'm often struggling trying to work out how to make it do what I want. I struggled when I first moved to London getting around until a co-worker advised I use CityMapper and then I never went back, it actually made me travel around London more because I felt so much more comfortable with how to get around.
E.g. On my phone I just tried to make Google show me a route from my home to a pharmacy in central London. The result: "Can't find a way there."
Google Maps can't, at least on my phone (11 pro) with the latest version, show me routes involving buses AND trains. It only shows me trains and not buses. If there is a way to make it show both it doesn't make it obvious.
In Google Maps I can only click on one option, walking, trains, car, etc. There is no option to just show me all methods and then compare them. This is one of the things CityMapper does incredibly well, it shows you every option possible and does so in a very nice presentation. Google Maps assumed you already know which SINGLE method of transportation you want to use and you have to choose it to begin with, which in my opinion is a poor way of handling this situation.
> 1- When I was living south of London, Citymapper was completely pointless
Agreed. Citymapper is only good when you’re in a city. When you’re not in a city / travelling outside the city, the experience is subpar.
Fortunately the clue’s in the name. Like the OP (and sibling), living in zone 2 and rarely venturing outside of my z1-2 bubble, nothing comes close to Citymapper.
When I do venture out, I’ve now switched to Apple Maps, as I’m typically driving. Voice notifications are intrusive to music & audiobooks, and having to regularly look at the screen is distracting and dangerous. Apple’s restrictive APIs for the Apple watch means it’s the only mapping platform that can give me haptic feedback when it’s time to turn, and that’s extremely valuable driving in and out of London.
Citymapper is so much better in Paris where Google Maps is very poor for public transport. I'm extremely impressed.
It can not only tell you which exit you need to take (extremely important in Paris) but also which car to board to be the closest to the proper exit or line change.
Multimodal routing is also extremely impressive. They properly implement the city bike sharing system including how much bikes and empty spots they are available at each station.
As most of this is public data, I don't understand why Google is not exploiting it. My guess is that Citymapper originated in London and therefore as a deep understanding of this way of using public transport while Google Maps is mainly developed in the USA.
> Citymapper is so much better in Paris where Google Maps is very poor for public transport. I'm extremely impressed.
> It can not only tell you which exit you need to take (extremely important in Paris) but also which car to board to be the closest to the proper exit or line change
Google Maps has been doing both of these for at least a year now.
> Multimodal routing is also extremely impressive. They properly implement the city bike sharing system including how much bikes and empty spots they are available at each station
That one is pretty cool. If only the service wasn't massacred and rendered almost unusable :( ( used it regularly but had to buy a bike due to how often there would be broken bikes or bugs in their system. I think they lost a lot of customers with the provider switch, it was a complete disaster for more than a year and still isn't great).
Hands down the best public transit app I've ever used (including Citymapper, Transit, Apple Maps, Google Maps) was an experimental app developed by a Google incubator: the 'Pigeon' app by Area 120.
It graphically showed which parts of the subway were having issues alongside user reports of what's going on. >90% of the time, users would report issues (e.g. train had its brakes triggered at station X, no trains at station Y for the last 15 minutes, etc.) tens of minutes before the MTA (NYC's transit authority) would.
Rather unfortunately, Google shut down Pigeon back in June 2020. I would've paid tens of dollars per year to have it continue being in operation.
One of my favourite features of Citymapper when I lived in London was how they would let you filter routes by trains that had air conditioning for the complete hideousness that was summer 2019. Another interesting one I noticed was that they would increase the size of the "navigate home" button after a certain time of day.
One thing I have noticed and found really irritating is the degradation of the street view functionality in Google maps. They have got lazy. I used to be able to click or keyboard navigate through a route but now it either stops responding to clicks, transports me onto a nearby motorway randomly,or gets massively unresponsive.
I am very glad there is some competition coming, as good as Google maps is they are clearly resting on their laurels and not bothering to fix blatant issues.
Also, if you drop a pin while zoomed out at all, you are going to look at a user's PhotoSphere, no questions. I've tested this at length, no degree of precision in your pin drop will avoid the PhotoSphere, it owns the pin drop region at most zoom levels.
Great article, but I think the conclusion about Google Maps languishing because it’s a low margin product is wrong.
While Google Maps as a distinct product has a bottom and top line I think the author underestimates the value that the underlying places data has for Google’s core search product.
The local place data is _massivley_ important to search. I don’t see any foreseeable way Google let’s the product that generates it languish. It’s far too strategic for them. Not to mention the amount of brand value maps has for them as an ecosystem.
My view is that as Google’s Maps advantage dwindles, they’ll do more and more strategic acquisitions of places data sources. Tying more data into their closed ecosystem. Whether the new tech anti-trust landscape in the US and EU allows this is another question.
Yep. This. I use a couple of different services (primarily Apple Maps and HERE maps) interchangeably _when I know where I am going_. But when I don’t know where I am going (e.g. looking for a type of store or restaurant or whatever) I use Google Maps. Their places data is just still so much better.
I hope the days of big tech treating startups as lego pieces to be snapped into their empires will be stopped by regulators. I imagine a lot of new ideas, not bound by ad tech revenue, may take root.
Yup. When I switch to DDG, the quality of local results is a huge discriminating factor that pushes me back to Google. Google Maps adds great value to the "one stop search" of Google Search.
We spend enough on Google Maps API that I've been looking at alternative. We're more interested in fuzzy searching, addresses and points of interest.
Street numbers seems like a pretty big weakness for open source datasets. If all you have is the name of a 1km street, you only get 1km precision.
The APIs from other commercial providers (e.g. TomTom) have better data, but noticeably worse search. I don't think they make their raw data available except for very large deals.
I’ll take the author’s word for it, I still just use Google maps on my phone. Obviously it sucks that Google jacked up their prices, but I’m kinda thinking they did that because their mapping solution is the best. That makes sense to me even if, agin, I don’t necessarily like it.
I've avoided using Google Maps API for Apple devices.
The main reason, was that I knew someone that used it, and got the "Google $urpri$e," where, all of a sudden, they owe four-to-five figures a month, for a narrow-demographic $0.99 app. They switched over to MapBox. MapBox doesn't have quite the feature set and quality that GM does, but it's a great library, and won't give you sticker shock.
Google has a lot of money for a reason.
I have found that Apple Maps is fine for my purposes. I don't really need some of the fancier stuff that GM and MapBox gives you. If I needed the fancier stuff, I'd probably go with MapBox.
Meta: could someone explain/clarify the sentence "Back in 2012, I had not yet been born (I am, in fact, only six years old)." please? I highly doubt a 6-years-old wrote this article, so is it a joke? Or is it alluding to some mapping alternative being 6 years old?
I honestly don’t even know what generation you’re assuming I’m from and referring to. Is this supposed to be something old people don’t understand? Or young people?
Of course you can have standalone jokes, but “I’m six years old” is not one.
It’s not a generation thing. The joke is the OP is obviously not six. We know that because most six year olds can’t come up with such an artifact to set the timeframe of an article. For more references on jokes like this read MAD. ;)
No, it’s clearly a joke - it made me laugh! It doesn’t need another reference point because the claim’s very existence is a reference to people’s reticence to admit their own age (due to vanity) or fear (of facing one’s mortality). That has been a common point of humor for ages (pun also intended).
Sure it does, such a joke is often called absurdist or surrealist humor. Quite popular on Twitter.
Anyway, I think that is a lot more likely than some obscure cultural reference that we’re expected to parse in the middle of musing about digital mapping.
Often when writing you need to make decisions as to how to get through the different points you need to inform the reader about, if you are writing a jocular, breezy piece you will choose different strategies than otherwise.
The joke, such as it is, is clarified by what follows:
Back in 2012, I had not yet been born (I am, in fact, only six years old). But I am a student of history.
How does that clarify - because the student of history thing indicates now he will need to give us some background of things that happened a long time ago. Of course it didn't happen a long time ago, only 6 years ago, but there is the concept of internet time going faster than normal time. In fact it seems a really long time ago to anyone paying attention that Cook had to apologize - oh remember when that happened.
So he makes a joke that gives us a light feel and that also points out in a roundabout way hey it feels a long time ago but was only 6 years but bringing it up seems like ancient history without having to directly reference the hoary old trope that internet time is happening so fast that 6 years feels like ancient history man!
Anyway, often people writing things, especially if they have a deadline by which they wish to be finished, and especially in our modern era when there is not enough editing (remember editors, boy internet time really wiped out that species!) end up writing things that are allowed to remain in the article even if they are significantly less successful than other things.
It’s becoming nearly impossible to fix map problems with google. I have a bunch of weird one way and foot only pathways near me in London and the routing is always awful for delivery drivers. Telling them to come the wrong way down a street etc. despite having a very good history of submissions nothing is ever fixed in the routing despite opening dozens of reports.
Most commerical delivery drivers will use an OpenStreetMap based routing application, so make sure to see if these things are in OSM and if you can fix them.
Google assistant, especially in concert with maps/directions is pretty F'd up the past couple months... it's nearly unusable, and definitely not something you can use in a car with voice commands anymore.
My biggest frustration with Google Maps is that no matter how often I report my address to be in the wrong location, nothing ever changes. Another example of the “customer service” Google is famous for.
Does Google? They've been publishing cool papers for many years but the experience while using Google Maps has been consistently highly-unrealistc ETAs with things like unprotected left turns across 4 lanes of traffic “saving” time (in areas like DC, NYC, BOS, etc. where they have tons of data, too).
Maybe this is the iteration where the results will actually match the publications but it's been years since Apple Maps wasn't consistently more accurate on actual arrival time for me.
In my experience it is very reliable in France and Belgium.
Whether on my 800-km, 8-hour trip to go to my parents across countries, or on my 150 km weekly commute (across countries as well actually) the traffic is consistently accurate and the ETA is almost always correct to a few minutes. In the worst case, maybe Google will expect 20 minutes extra time entering France or entering Antwerp when it's actually 30 minutes this particular day. But that's a very acceptable error on a 2-hour trip.
Of course, this was true in 2019 but I didn't have the occasion to keep doing these trips in 2020. Also, I can't compare with Apple Maps which isn't available on my smartphone.
I traveled to Beijing and Shanghai and Google maps was effectively worthless. Apple Maps on the other hand was accurate and included accurate mass transit directions.
Google Maps is useless in Shenzhen and horrid in Hong Kong (satellite view and street view don't line up at all). I didn't have an iPhone, so I resorted baidu maps in China and memorizing the Chinese characters for the subway stations. I wasn't there for long, but it was very accurate. I guess I'll bring an iPhone next time.
China forbids crowdsourced or foreign-corporate mapping. It is considered a national security risk. There are local approved sources of cartographic data. Apple presumably could buy them, but Google either could not or chose not to.
What’s up HN?! Always fun to find an article of mine on here. What I’ve learned so far:
I’ve underestimated the important of their place data to the rest of the search apparatus, and likely underestimated the relevance of Maps to their autonomous vehicle strategy.
What I remain curious about that I’d love your speculation on: why do they bother with the Google Maps Platform at all? They have plenty of ways to monetize with ad targeting, so why go through the headache of opening it up to other businesses?
> why go through the headache of opening it up to other businesses?
Such a platform is obviously necessary for the Internet; Google exposing Maps (& related APIs) makes it less likely that another company will build the default platform for map APIs on the Internet.
I so so much appreciate this article. Google's maps dominance has been frustrating me, both as a user who wants innovation, and as a developer who wants affordable access. Very excited to read about these combined efforts (and, like you said, anti-tragedies-of-the-commons)
Google wants to control all the ways people search the web so that they don't have to share profits and so that a competitor can't emerge. That's why we have Maps (location), Android (mobile), Home & Assistant (voice), and Chrome (URL bar).
GMail is there mostly as a legacy of a time when Google had legit competition from portal sites like Yahoo and MSN. E-mail was an important part of that portal and GMail was a way to siphon some users.
You can make up as many fictional backstories as you want, but gmail was launched because signed-in users enjoy vastly better search quality and prior to gmail there was no reason to associate your identity with Google.
Ha! GMail offered the most free space, by an order of magnitude over its competitors, and that's the primary reason it succeeded in drawing users initially.
Email search wasn't the draw initially, and wasn't even all that much better; there was serious controversy over search, years later, as it was tied to ads that reflected the content of private communications.
Hotmail, Yahoo et al had reasonably good search for the time, but stiflingly little free space. Google offered far more free space with IMAP and POP3 access.
Your argument is about why users moved to gmail. jeffbee is saying Google created GMail to have users signed in so that they could give better search results through personalization.
From the outside, it looked like GDocs, GMail, and crew were originally created for internal use because engineering Googlers used Linux and hated Windows. Microsoft was still quite the enemy in teh early 00's after all. Along the way a few someones figured out that they could offer it as a product outside the company as a means to attack Microsoft more broadly.
Google Docs was acquired, so I don't think so. You might be right about Calendar, because there is nothing in the world that a Googler or anyone else hates more than Oracle Calendar.
My overarching view on Google's evolution is that their real product is dirt-cheap computing facilities, and their products are often just a way to exploit that capacity. Part of Gmail's genesis was an abundance of underutilized hard drives. YouTube was acquired because they already had the networking in place to operate it. Inbox Smart Reply was a way to use a novel and cheap ML inference device to launch a feature that nobody else could afford. In all these cases the infrastructure existed first and the products emerged to fill them.
Thanks for highlighting the truth. There’s far too much FUD in the comments section these days, especially with respect to FAANG companies I’ve noticed in recent months.
I still feel like I've been kicked in the groin every time I open Gmail and it isn't Inbox.
Bastards!
I suppose I'm probably a fool to continue expecting that they'll eventually get around to bringing Inbox's bundles over to Gmail, like they said they were going to.
Ha! They’d been pulling back support for quite a while but it’s fully deprecated now. The android+cardboard VR model just doesn’t make sense with current gen VR headsets.
my guess/understanding is that every team at Google is under significant pressure to monetize. Unlike the old days where there was more of a strategy of "build anything that brings people in, search/ads will monetize those eyeballs".
The 2018 google maps price increase could have given some execs HUGE bonuses under that new model, even if it isn't ideal from a Google-wide standpoint
Before the 2018 price increase I was convinced Google didn't care to have lots of little customers paying for Google Maps. It was all peanuts compared to their main income
Without opening a platform, competitors and would be service providers have a clear investor story. By opening a platform, Google undermine their story to investors, making it look like a commodity. Then, each time a competitor is diffused, Google can cripple the service or raise the price so much as to make it useless.
For me, as an OSM contributorm it was incredibly sad to read
> the incredible year OpenStreetMap is having, largely because of enormous investment from Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Mapbox (FAAMm)
Their contributions were (as far as I know) not really important compared to what was contributed by hobbyists, and overall their activities likely caused more damage than benefit. Mostly due to associating OSM with toxic brands such as Facebook or Amazon and discouraging new contributors.
Note that linked article seems to be not supporting this claim that 2020 is successful for OSM mostly due to corporations.
> Meanwhile at an office down the hall, Azure Maps has been humming along quietly since 2018, beating AWS to the punch by over two years.
Microsoft's actually been in the geo API game for significantly longer, pre-Google Maps. MapPoint started as a desktop GIS product in 2000 that let businesses create desktop maps, and they've had an online API since 2002... it started as a SOAP API: https://news.microsoft.com/2002/04/10/microsoft-announces-ma...
But it was pre-AJAX so Google Maps stole much of their mindshare. And it's been renamed so many times that no one can keep track of it (MapPoint, Bing Maps/Live Maps/MSN Maps, Azure Maps). Though the pricing and documentation has consistently been reasonable.
I also remember Microsoft being involved in TerraServer pre-2000. Loading up satellite photos of my house on dial-up is an early internet memory that will stick with me forever.
I remember being about 8-10 years old and showing my parents a pic of our house from the sky. They freaked out and thought I was "hacking". haha. I can't remember what I used but it was a little before 2000
Good, there needs to be more competition. All the maps apps (both web and mobile) seem to think the actual map is just a background decoration for something else and don't do basic things like render road labels accept at particular zoom levels.
The more difficult it is for the end user to modify the GUI the faster the GUI deteriorates into something totally unusable.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 303 ms ] threadAnd the discussion that came with it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15965653
He’s a passionate cartographer, and has been posting about maps since 2010, 2017 being his rise to popularity not withstanding.
(This misconception comes from a 2017 Verge piece on "Google Maps' Moat" that misstated that he was.)
Source/Disclosure: I'm a close friend.
Perhaps I used the word “cartographer” incorrectly. I apologize, my native language is German so English is not always 100% forthcoming to me.
I don't think that there is an English word for someone who likes maps. The best thing to say is what you already said: that they are "passionate about maps".
Bingo. Here's a fun exercise: try to find the last genuinely useful feature added to the Maps API in the release notes.
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/...
To give you a taste, here's the largest change made in 3.42:
> InfoWindows now have a default max width of 648px which can be overridden by setting the InfoWindow maxWidth property. The width of an InfoWindow can now exceed 648px but will still be limited by the width of the map. (Previously, Infowindows were always restricted to the lesser of 648px or the map width.)
Also note that the minor version (0.x) is incremented quarterly, and we're up to 3.43 now, so over 10 years.
Do you open Google maps and frown when it does the same reliable simple thing it always has? I don’t
(Not to mention, the Maps API != Google Maps the product)
These feature disparities between the API & the consumer product were annoying at first, but now that the competitors to the Maps API all have had them for years they're simply baffling.
No one wants to pay, brand risk if the customer implementation sucks, etc.
It's really useless in places like Eastern Europe, where Apple has no interest in supporting and isn't likely that it'll turn that around any time soon.
I am working on a project where I have noticed the same problem with several providers. What provider do you recommend for geocoding when this stuff needs to be right most of the time? Bing API seems somewhat OK. Google Maps API seems like the best, but comes with insane terms and conditions.
Maybe they don't care about poor countries with lower usage, but I'd be embarrassed to have that in my product.
Having said that, rich western Europe is in some ways no better. If you create a public transport route, Google maps will send you walking hundreds of meters around non-existent barriers, or sometimes insist that you go one tram stop past and then catch the tram back to the stop you want to go to.
Maps, like search seems to be slowly suffering from some sort of corporate rot over at Google.
Even when I don't encounter obvious bugs, Google serves up illogical routes.
It is not uncommon to see cab or auto (tuk-tuk) drivers use smartphones to navigate the city roads.
Map technology in general has become a great leveller, where it enables outsider to start driving cabs in complex cities roads (which otherwise would be almost impossible without direction from passenger).
They also resumed Streetview in parts of Germany this year, and I'm not sure they ever fully stopped running them for private data collection.
Streetview imagery is mined for address information from signs/plaques on buildings. Operating hours and names of businesses can be determined via OCR
I'm very literal.
Google maps was released in 2005. The upper limit on how long it would take Apple to build the whole thing from literally nothing is 15 years, if they are investing to improve their service.
Let alone with computer vision, satellite imagery, hardware improvements and the ability to lazily copy the interface Google has created which would speed the process up.
You’re hinting at the same thing here, but you ignored the key phrase ”at this pace” in the OP’s comment.
Even Usain Bolt won’t do an impressive 100 meters run if he’s walking.
Much of this is stuff the software based on OSM isn't even trying, or doing so only very half heartedly, as far as I am aware. On the flipside, OSM is, in many places, peerless in its core competency, a detailed map that everyone can use.
Unfortunately it's been completely useless in my area. I wish stores just allowed access to the cctv cameras on their parking lots so I could estimate for myself.
https://www.cbinsights.com/research/alternative-data-future-...
Satellite image companies sell this type of alternative data to buyers:
https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/how-hedge-funds-use-satel...
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/05/stock-v...
Some of the vendors are RS Metrics, Descartes Labs and Orbital Insight.
I'm not saying that OSM (and other projects, but particularly OSM) can't catch up, especially when it comes to factual information. It has already shown that crowdsourcing can do better than Google at pure mapping.
In the meantime, OSM generally doesn't even have place addresses in my experience. If I could resolve addresses to places in OSM, then I could easily write some scrappers to help out with filling in other data.
See https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/50.07298/19.93528 where it is mapped at least in a small part.
> then I could easily write some scrappers to help out with filling in other data.
Note that it may not possible due to copyright issues
E.g.: https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/ui/search.html?q=pilking...
As @matkoniecz pointed out, OSM is quite capable of having place addresses mapped to a specific spot. If your experience has been that they are missing, then that is most likely because no one has added them to OSM for the area's in which you have looked.
But the good part about OSM is that anyone, including you, can add those details, and they appear in the main map within seconds to minutes of someone adding them. So you could help rectify the missing situation by adding some of that missing data.
If you don't want to learn all the OSM details, and provided some background details are present (generally building outlines for address data questions) one easier way to help add the data is via StreetComplete (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/StreetComplete). It asks simple questions, you enter the answer, and the app handles the low-level OSM tagging changes based upon the answer given.
Also, is it available as an app on iPhone?
I find openstreetmap.org to be great for showing hiking trails. At least for my local area.
I'm starting to look at workflows for taking osm trail data and trying to make nice maps, but wow it is not easy to do!
I eventually gave up on using it and switched to a proper topo map app that actually lets me set the offline resolution and it has been vastly better.
...as opposed to google maps not using aerial photography? AFAIK most urban "satellite" picture on google maps is also taken with planes.
https://en.mapy.cz/turisticka?x=13.8929744&y=50.0331743&z=14...
And compare it to Google Maps:
https://www.google.com/maps/@50.0297578,13.8901237,13.85z
Google Maps is substantially better at search and places data but this advantage is slowly shrinking.
Also, Mapy.cz has a tracker feature with online sync and gpx export.
For example, see random part of Poland: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/52.1081/21.1167
Main power of Google is live traffic data.
Does Google not rely on Waze for this?
Granted, Google now owns Waze, but they may have an API.....
I frequently am sent down nonexistent roads in rural Massachusetts, meanwhile there is a paved road in Bristol, NH that Google refuses to route people on; it is used by Apple Maps.
Like the article states, the pace of their updates is increasing. While it may still be a while until they support the rest of the world, the fact that somebody there seems to finally understand people use iPhones in places other than the Bay Area is promising.
As long as Apple and competitors can a) have businesses add their locations easily and b) have public transit companies' timetables in their system, they are already within arm's reach of GMaps.
I don’t think Apple is very serious about Maps. If it is, it’s certainly not investing much into it except for Bay Area and a few major cities in the U.S. Apple Maps is more of a hobby for Apple, like Apple News (which is still only in a handful of countries several years after launch) and some other products (like Apple TV) and services.
Just a thought: maybe they are scanning cities for their self-driving cars and are also using this data for Maps?
I think that sounds plausible. I don't see why else they would resume scanning parts of Germany even though they have to blur out large chunks of it on Streetview.
Yes, for now only tiny part of sidewalks has area info. See https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:area:highway
> I don't think outdoor building stairs are mapped.
It can be mapped, also not done in most of places
A volunteer who likes to bike checks out the locations. There used to be some that were quite off, now it’s really spot on.
This is extremely likely. We know that Street View cars have been carrying Lidar equipment for a few years now which aids in HD mapping. It makes total sense for them to re-use this data for their self driving cars.
ReCAPTCHA, hCaptcha, CloudFlare definitely don't make it easier to crawl the web than it was ten years ago
[1] I'm being sarcastic.
Unfortunately many of these channels are hooked up to hyper-growth valuation needs and this necessitates volume over quality.
Look at Quora, Pinterest, Medium, and LinkedIn. And I haven't even mentioned the biggest offenders.
I don't think I'm better served in 2020 than I was in 2008.
Citymapper will get you between any two locations in London and give you many options based on cost or time or preference for one transport type (e.g. preferring tubes versus buses). Citymapper also gives multi-modal directions: e.g. walking PLUS take an Uber. Or walking, tube, then a cab. Not only this, but it ALSO tells you where you should sit on a train so you have the least walk when you exit the train.
1- When I was living south of London, Citymapper was completely pointless, since it only showed commuting options with SouthWest trains, and not Southern trains (my station was served by both). I suspect Citymapper might've fixed this since.
2- Maps also gives you all different options, and since some time ago they also started to offer mixed ride-hailing and public transport (they appear to offer that only if your public transport station is far enough from you probably > ~15 minutes walk?)
3- The other features are not that useful: since you'd use a monthly travelcard or pay as you go on your oyster/bank card, the cost estimate is not really something that you have to worry about. If you're a cash-strapped student, you're probably just going to always opt for the bus to save one or two pounds compared to the tube... so, just picking Bus as your preferred mode of transport is enough to cover that use case.
4- Citymapper is/was also inferior to Google maps when you need to quickly check/compare a (different) train that you just managed to hop into if it's not shown in the UI (maybe because it was delayed, and so it was not shown among the options). With Google maps you could just amend the start time for your trip.
5- One really nice feature that Citymapper has is the instructions for which tube exit to use when you arrive at the destination. It really helps to diminish the "which side is north?" disorientation. Otoh, you don't get that unless you actually start the trip (if you only use Citymapper to browse the route options, for example). OTOH, Google maps has AR navigation, which covers the same use case (orient yourself when you do the last bit of your trip on foot)
6- Both Maps and Citymapper have alert notifications for when you should get out at your stop. I almost never use the feature though, because I missed my tube stop a couple of times due to Citymapper triggering their notification AFTER the stop was already past)
7- Both Maps and Citymapper have a way to share your trip with other people. Citymapper is nicer though, since you can see all of the people that shared a trip with you on the same map (nice when you're meeting with more than 1 other friend from different parts of London)
That said, I dislike monopolies, so when I'll travel around London again (after the end of the pandemic) I'm planning to try to use maps.me (which uses the OSM data) as my first option.
Also, another major benefit of Citymapper over Google. Citymapper does a much better job of orienting you when walking. Google Maps seems to be slow, or maybe have UI issues when I'm trying to work out where I am and which direction I should be walking in. With Citymapper I never have an issue, it seems to use the IPhone compass functionality better than the Google Maps app.
The other major, major issue with Google, is the Directions UI on phone just seems half baked, like it was an after-thought. It has never felt nice to use and I'm often struggling trying to work out how to make it do what I want. I struggled when I first moved to London getting around until a co-worker advised I use CityMapper and then I never went back, it actually made me travel around London more because I felt so much more comfortable with how to get around.
E.g. On my phone I just tried to make Google show me a route from my home to a pharmacy in central London. The result: "Can't find a way there."
Google Maps can't, at least on my phone (11 pro) with the latest version, show me routes involving buses AND trains. It only shows me trains and not buses. If there is a way to make it show both it doesn't make it obvious.
In Google Maps I can only click on one option, walking, trains, car, etc. There is no option to just show me all methods and then compare them. This is one of the things CityMapper does incredibly well, it shows you every option possible and does so in a very nice presentation. Google Maps assumed you already know which SINGLE method of transportation you want to use and you have to choose it to begin with, which in my opinion is a poor way of handling this situation.
Agreed. Citymapper is only good when you’re in a city. When you’re not in a city / travelling outside the city, the experience is subpar.
Fortunately the clue’s in the name. Like the OP (and sibling), living in zone 2 and rarely venturing outside of my z1-2 bubble, nothing comes close to Citymapper.
When I do venture out, I’ve now switched to Apple Maps, as I’m typically driving. Voice notifications are intrusive to music & audiobooks, and having to regularly look at the screen is distracting and dangerous. Apple’s restrictive APIs for the Apple watch means it’s the only mapping platform that can give me haptic feedback when it’s time to turn, and that’s extremely valuable driving in and out of London.
It can not only tell you which exit you need to take (extremely important in Paris) but also which car to board to be the closest to the proper exit or line change.
Multimodal routing is also extremely impressive. They properly implement the city bike sharing system including how much bikes and empty spots they are available at each station.
As most of this is public data, I don't understand why Google is not exploiting it. My guess is that Citymapper originated in London and therefore as a deep understanding of this way of using public transport while Google Maps is mainly developed in the USA.
Google Maps has been doing both of these for at least a year now.
> Multimodal routing is also extremely impressive. They properly implement the city bike sharing system including how much bikes and empty spots they are available at each station
That one is pretty cool. If only the service wasn't massacred and rendered almost unusable :( ( used it regularly but had to buy a bike due to how often there would be broken bikes or bugs in their system. I think they lost a lot of customers with the provider switch, it was a complete disaster for more than a year and still isn't great).
It graphically showed which parts of the subway were having issues alongside user reports of what's going on. >90% of the time, users would report issues (e.g. train had its brakes triggered at station X, no trains at station Y for the last 15 minutes, etc.) tens of minutes before the MTA (NYC's transit authority) would.
Rather unfortunately, Google shut down Pigeon back in June 2020. I would've paid tens of dollars per year to have it continue being in operation.
https://www.slashgear.com/pigeon-crowdsourced-transit-app-ex...
I am very glad there is some competition coming, as good as Google maps is they are clearly resting on their laurels and not bothering to fix blatant issues.
Competition is good.
While Google Maps as a distinct product has a bottom and top line I think the author underestimates the value that the underlying places data has for Google’s core search product.
The local place data is _massivley_ important to search. I don’t see any foreseeable way Google let’s the product that generates it languish. It’s far too strategic for them. Not to mention the amount of brand value maps has for them as an ecosystem.
My view is that as Google’s Maps advantage dwindles, they’ll do more and more strategic acquisitions of places data sources. Tying more data into their closed ecosystem. Whether the new tech anti-trust landscape in the US and EU allows this is another question.
Street numbers seems like a pretty big weakness for open source datasets. If all you have is the name of a 1km street, you only get 1km precision.
The APIs from other commercial providers (e.g. TomTom) have better data, but noticeably worse search. I don't think they make their raw data available except for very large deals.
The main reason, was that I knew someone that used it, and got the "Google $urpri$e," where, all of a sudden, they owe four-to-five figures a month, for a narrow-demographic $0.99 app. They switched over to MapBox. MapBox doesn't have quite the feature set and quality that GM does, but it's a great library, and won't give you sticker shock.
Google has a lot of money for a reason.
I have found that Apple Maps is fine for my purposes. I don't really need some of the fancier stuff that GM and MapBox gives you. If I needed the fancier stuff, I'd probably go with MapBox.
Of course you can have standalone jokes, but “I’m six years old” is not one.
Anyway, I think that is a lot more likely than some obscure cultural reference that we’re expected to parse in the middle of musing about digital mapping.
The joke, such as it is, is clarified by what follows:
Back in 2012, I had not yet been born (I am, in fact, only six years old). But I am a student of history.
How does that clarify - because the student of history thing indicates now he will need to give us some background of things that happened a long time ago. Of course it didn't happen a long time ago, only 6 years ago, but there is the concept of internet time going faster than normal time. In fact it seems a really long time ago to anyone paying attention that Cook had to apologize - oh remember when that happened.
So he makes a joke that gives us a light feel and that also points out in a roundabout way hey it feels a long time ago but was only 6 years but bringing it up seems like ancient history without having to directly reference the hoary old trope that internet time is happening so fast that 6 years feels like ancient history man!
Anyway, often people writing things, especially if they have a deadline by which they wish to be finished, and especially in our modern era when there is not enough editing (remember editors, boy internet time really wiped out that species!) end up writing things that are allowed to remain in the article even if they are significantly less successful than other things.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25137235
It started around the time they were pushing Material design and hasn't stopped since then.
[0] https://deepmind.com/blog/article/traffic-prediction-with-ad...
Maybe this is the iteration where the results will actually match the publications but it's been years since Apple Maps wasn't consistently more accurate on actual arrival time for me.
Whether on my 800-km, 8-hour trip to go to my parents across countries, or on my 150 km weekly commute (across countries as well actually) the traffic is consistently accurate and the ETA is almost always correct to a few minutes. In the worst case, maybe Google will expect 20 minutes extra time entering France or entering Antwerp when it's actually 30 minutes this particular day. But that's a very acceptable error on a 2-hour trip.
Of course, this was true in 2019 but I didn't have the occasion to keep doing these trips in 2020. Also, I can't compare with Apple Maps which isn't available on my smartphone.
Geographic data is mostly off limits in China; state owned enterprises / native Chinese apps likely get a pass on this though.
I’ve underestimated the important of their place data to the rest of the search apparatus, and likely underestimated the relevance of Maps to their autonomous vehicle strategy.
What I remain curious about that I’d love your speculation on: why do they bother with the Google Maps Platform at all? They have plenty of ways to monetize with ad targeting, so why go through the headache of opening it up to other businesses?
Such a platform is obviously necessary for the Internet; Google exposing Maps (& related APIs) makes it less likely that another company will build the default platform for map APIs on the Internet.
Thank you!
Email search wasn't the draw initially, and wasn't even all that much better; there was serious controversy over search, years later, as it was tied to ads that reflected the content of private communications.
Hotmail, Yahoo et al had reasonably good search for the time, but stiflingly little free space. Google offered far more free space with IMAP and POP3 access.
Is that view incorrect?
My overarching view on Google's evolution is that their real product is dirt-cheap computing facilities, and their products are often just a way to exploit that capacity. Part of Gmail's genesis was an abundance of underutilized hard drives. YouTube was acquired because they already had the networking in place to operate it. Inbox Smart Reply was a way to use a novel and cheap ML inference device to launch a feature that nobody else could afford. In all these cases the infrastructure existed first and the products emerged to fill them.
Bastards!
I suppose I'm probably a fool to continue expecting that they'll eventually get around to bringing Inbox's bundles over to Gmail, like they said they were going to.
The 2018 google maps price increase could have given some execs HUGE bonuses under that new model, even if it isn't ideal from a Google-wide standpoint
Before the 2018 price increase I was convinced Google didn't care to have lots of little customers paying for Google Maps. It was all peanuts compared to their main income
> the incredible year OpenStreetMap is having, largely because of enormous investment from Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Mapbox (FAAMm)
Their contributions were (as far as I know) not really important compared to what was contributed by hobbyists, and overall their activities likely caused more damage than benefit. Mostly due to associating OSM with toxic brands such as Facebook or Amazon and discouraging new contributors.
Note that linked article seems to be not supporting this claim that 2020 is successful for OSM mostly due to corporations.
Microsoft's actually been in the geo API game for significantly longer, pre-Google Maps. MapPoint started as a desktop GIS product in 2000 that let businesses create desktop maps, and they've had an online API since 2002... it started as a SOAP API: https://news.microsoft.com/2002/04/10/microsoft-announces-ma...
But it was pre-AJAX so Google Maps stole much of their mindshare. And it's been renamed so many times that no one can keep track of it (MapPoint, Bing Maps/Live Maps/MSN Maps, Azure Maps). Though the pricing and documentation has consistently been reasonable.
The more difficult it is for the end user to modify the GUI the faster the GUI deteriorates into something totally unusable.