Interesting work, but ultimately silly: of course google maps ranks results. No one (yes, yes, I'm sure like 3 people) want a list of all results, unordered or ordered by something useless like name, when they type in restaurant. And I cannot put into words how uneager I am to have the city or state government manage what comes up when I put indian or burrito into a map.
Where in the post do you see the author arguing about "a list of all results"? To me, it merely draws attention to the fact that there is only one algorithm available in Google Maps, and you rely on Google to calculate "relevance" based on (to us) unknown and intransparent metrics. It draws attention to the kind of power Google has over businesses and our daily lives, without necessarily presenting alternatives. Nothing about that is "silly". It might be more relevant to me to learn about new, small, independent restaurants, but I don't have that choice. If I had access to the full data set, like e.g. OSM, I would.
> No one (yes, yes, I'm sure like 3 people) want a list of all results, unordered or ordered by something useless like name
That's not what the author was suggesting (or indeed, what they built). They were trying to untangle the positive feedback bias showing up first in the rankings gives.
I think there's probably a lot more to untangle, but as a first pass it's super cool!
It's the feigned surprise and sort of attitude that google is doing something malicious or it's a subterfuge. Starting with a bolded "Google Maps Is Not a Directory. It’s a Market Maker." and inishing with eg
> the most important result isn’t which neighbourhood tops the rankings - it’s the realisation that platforms now quietly structure survival in everyday urban markets.
For any service like this, _of course_ ranking is at the core of it. A more honest article could have started there, eg "since you can't display all results, and doing so is useless to everyone, the heart of these products is their ranking algorithm and choices. Let's examine Google's."
Nowhere in the article is the author suggesting that local or state governments manage these algorithms, just that they be audited for fairness given the amount of power these algorithms hold in the market. Google operates something of a monopoly in Google Maps and its recommendations. You don't find an attempt to understand the efficacy of its rankings or how Google or market participants could be manipulating the rankings to benefit themselves interesting?
Very interesting. But I wonder how much Google (and other) Maps can actually shape the scene. For tourist hotspots with a lot of visitors, it IS clearly the driving force. But for locals, I don’t think it has an overwhelming effect. Locals know their restaurants and they visit them based on their own rating. They could explore total strange and new ones, but then they will form their own rating and memory immediately and will not get fooled/guided by algorithm (the next time)
Depends if you live in a big city with a lot of restaurant turnover or not.
This is actually a big frustration for me how I can search food and get totally different results over the same area in the frame. I seem to remember in the old days of google maps you'd see, you know, everything in the area. Like pins on pins on overlapping pins. And you'd click through them or zoom in as appropriate. You found everything. It all worked.
Then someone had the brilliant idea that this was all too busy, and you should have pins omitted until you have sometimes zoomed so far in you are filling your map viewer frame with the doorstep of that business...
I wouldn't be surprised to learn businesses get charged to appear first. Seems like it tends to be things like fast food or national chains over new locally owned restaurants that pop up more often on google maps.
Yeah, can’t comment about London, as I’ve only been a tourist there, but assuming it works like in Tokyo. In a big city, with basically unlimited amount of dining options, a lot of people will try different places. In the past year, I don’t think I’ve repeated a single dinner spot more than 3 time, and I basically eat out every day. This is always a discovery problem, and word of mouth/google maps/tabelog/etc. is a major sales driver here.
Now, if I think about the time I lived in Vancouver, it was the opposite. You don’t have that many options, after a while you basically make a list of your favourites and rotate.
Unless, as a local looking for new spots to try, your first step is going to Google Map and searching "restaurants". I'm certainly guilty of this sometimes.
I think it's less about tourist vs local, and more about the breadth of restuarants you have available. I live outside of a major metropolitan area in South Europe, there are restuarants going out of business and opening up every day in the city, no one can keep track of all them.
If you can just say "Peruvian" and it finds all restaurants around you within 2km, you might get 30 options. At that point, using the wisdom of the crowd for some initial filtering makes a lot of sense.
Personally I love going to completely unknown restaurants that has just opened and have zero reviews yet which Google Maps helps with too, but looking at how others around me use Google Maps, a lot of them basically use it for discovering new restaurants to try, and we're all locals.
Google maps is doing the same thing to local business success that social media algorithms are doing to political success. The algorithm controls what you perceive as the consensus of others. It is a dangerous world to have such power so highly concentrated.
Perhaps such things should be controlled democratically instead of by a single person or a small group of people whose companies are organized as dictatorships.
I have gotten so sick of Google Maps that I've done the unthinkable, and have started walking around the city trying establishments at random.
It has yielded quite good results basically immediately. People (myself included) have gotten too used to living In The Box. Putting aside the time to just go for a walk around and pop into random shops and pubs has been wonderful.
I've had this happen to me, posted a factual restaurant review 12 months later threatened with defamation and it's auto removed by Google. It seems there are agencies that use legal framework to do bulk removal requests to Google for any low reviews no matter the content. The in-authentic Korean restaurant in Cologne went from a 1.9 to a 4.6. It's impossible to trust reviews in Germany due to these corrupt bully tactics.
Very interesting, ive always wondered how google decides to show restaurants or other POIs if they overlap and there is a large density.
Im sure they favour the ones that use google ads, but i would not think that they are bullying places a la yelp.
Anyway its pretty crazy that nowadays your success as restaurant is so dependent on one huge platform. (… and actually, lets not forget the delivery platforms also)
It's always annoyed me that zooming in on a building will not reliably show the business that operates there. I understand that at low zoom levels you may need to filter what is displayed based on the high density, but when I zoom in I want to see everything that is there. Sometimes I am forced to go to street view to read the sign, then type the company name into the search box to force the business marker to show up and get clickable.
I've found Apple Maps is a little better in this regard. They show a higher density of business markers at any given zoom level.
A lot of these place names are user-created and I’ve definitely seen completely wrong and bogus place names on Google Maps. It seems that they hide a lot of these when the business owner doesn’t actively take control of the business page. I suppose it’s partly for accuracy, partly to encourage businesses to verify the listing on their maps.
I guess there's various reasons, ranging from "it's hard to make auto-layout algos produce stuff as dense as painstakingly handcrafted maps" to "let's make it harder to scrape/copy data"
A few days ago I was trying to see if a anything new had taken over a vacant restaurant space yet, previous occupant had closed in July.
When I zoomed in, it would still only show me the Permanently Closed business listing for the old restaurant.
Searching by address, they do have a listing for its replacement. But they were prioritizing the dead restaurant on the map because why would I want to know current info from a map when they can be useless instead?
And it's not like this is a restaurant in the first floor of a tower with a bunch of businesses stacked on top of it competing for map space. It's a single floor, there's only one occupant.
There are two 40-floors buildings nearby to each other in Tbilisi, Georgia, that are missing on Google Maps. All businesses have to put POI just "somewhere".
One man from Google told me that there are staff members responsible for Georgia maps but they are chilling :)
> It's always annoyed me that zooming in on a building will not reliably show the business that operates there.
It's actually much worse than that.
I will often see the business name as I'm zooming in, but if I zoom too far, it's no longer available. You have to find "just the right zoom level" for displaying the given business.
As if it were some weird mind game they were playing with you.
Google's Maps search ranking doesn't seem sophisticated to me. In fact it seems unbelievably naive. Ranking is Google's core business and yet they seem to forget how to do it when a map is involved.
When I want to find something that's actually good, I use this site: https://top-rated.online. At first glance it looks like an unremarkable SEO spam site, but it's actually a great way to get properly ranked Google Maps reviews. It uses proper Bayesian ranking, so it won't show you a 5 star place with two reviews over a 4.9 star place with 2,000 reviews, as Google often will. And it has good sorting and filtering options so you can, for example, filter or sort by number of reviews.
I never understood why the "collaborative filtering" approach never took off with most review options. Google Maps shows you what the average person thinks is a good restaurant, meaning the rich get richer faster and tiny statistical noise converts to durable competitive advantage.
Instead, I'd love for Google to understand me well enough to show me which restaurants I would disproportionately love compared to other people based on its understanding of my taste profiles. That way, the love can be shared amongst a much wider base of restaurants and each distinctive restaurant could find its 10,000 true fans.
On top of that, it actually gives me an incentive to rate things. Right now, you only rate from some vague sense of public service instead of "this can actively improve your experience with our product".
It's not just Google Maps, Netflix used to operate on the model of deep personalization that they've slowly de-emphasized over the years. I'm still waiting for Letterboxd to introduce a feature to give me personalized film recs based on the over 1000 ratings I've given it over the years as a paying customer but they seem in no hurry to do so. Amazon used to take your purchase history into account when ordering search results but I think that's also been significantly de-emphasized.
About the only arena this is widespread is streaming music services like Spotify.
> About the only arena this is widespread is streaming music services like Spotify
And even they can't get it right, and will give me promoted content before they give me anything related to my tastes. Pandora is the only recommendation engine that actually gives me what I would consider to be valid results. Shame they refuse to improve their audio quality, or I'd jump ship to Pandora. Until then, I'll keep using their free tier to curate Spotify playlists.
It's a little funny that no one is a human face of (interface to) Google Maps, or any platform with longevity these days. Talk to the faceless pretend person if you have a problem, maybe you'll feel better.
> This disproportionately rewards chains and already-central venues. Chains benefit from cross-location brand recognition. High-footfall areas generate reviews faster....
I think this is very likely false if you mean compared to the status quo ante. Before Maps, a well-loved but hard-to-find venue just wouldn't ever be seen by most people, and the absence of reviews made branding more important because it was all you had to go on. I'd be very doubtful if the proportion of independent cafes and restaurants decreases when Google Maps enters an area. (Couldn't find any causal research designs though....)
The more general point that the algorithm is not neutral (and probably never could be) must be right.
(I asked ChatGPT but it ended up with: "We have almost no clean exogenous variation in Maps rankings or feature rollouts at fine geographic scales that would let you estimate impacts on entry, survival, or market structure in a neat DiD/IV way.")
The solution is what Lauren did, she rolled her own. Once that took teams of experts and big bucks. Now a single ML expert can do it for small bucks because she "needed a restaurant recommendation" and didn't trust the available ones. Soon any mild mannered programmer will have the same capability, and then the muggles will get it, in a mass, just for the asking of their favorite chat bot.
If the progression holds, oodles of recommendation engines can bloom, and it'll be trivial to fork and customize a favorite with a prompt. As the friction of doing large analysis jobs tends toward nil, the Google moat dries up and their commanding height subsides. Too optimistic?
74 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 85.1 ms ] threadThat's not what the author was suggesting (or indeed, what they built). They were trying to untangle the positive feedback bias showing up first in the rankings gives.
I think there's probably a lot more to untangle, but as a first pass it's super cool!
> the most important result isn’t which neighbourhood tops the rankings - it’s the realisation that platforms now quietly structure survival in everyday urban markets.
For any service like this, _of course_ ranking is at the core of it. A more honest article could have started there, eg "since you can't display all results, and doing so is useless to everyone, the heart of these products is their ranking algorithm and choices. Let's examine Google's."
Is there a project on GitHub or somewhere that I could clone?? (smiling face with halo)
This is actually a big frustration for me how I can search food and get totally different results over the same area in the frame. I seem to remember in the old days of google maps you'd see, you know, everything in the area. Like pins on pins on overlapping pins. And you'd click through them or zoom in as appropriate. You found everything. It all worked.
Then someone had the brilliant idea that this was all too busy, and you should have pins omitted until you have sometimes zoomed so far in you are filling your map viewer frame with the doorstep of that business...
I wouldn't be surprised to learn businesses get charged to appear first. Seems like it tends to be things like fast food or national chains over new locally owned restaurants that pop up more often on google maps.
Now, if I think about the time I lived in Vancouver, it was the opposite. You don’t have that many options, after a while you basically make a list of your favourites and rotate.
If you can just say "Peruvian" and it finds all restaurants around you within 2km, you might get 30 options. At that point, using the wisdom of the crowd for some initial filtering makes a lot of sense.
Personally I love going to completely unknown restaurants that has just opened and have zero reviews yet which Google Maps helps with too, but looking at how others around me use Google Maps, a lot of them basically use it for discovering new restaurants to try, and we're all locals.
That might just be a feature of the area though.
It has yielded quite good results basically immediately. People (myself included) have gotten too used to living In The Box. Putting aside the time to just go for a walk around and pop into random shops and pubs has been wonderful.
I only trust what friends recommend.
This is where I stopped reading.
Im sure they favour the ones that use google ads, but i would not think that they are bullying places a la yelp.
Anyway its pretty crazy that nowadays your success as restaurant is so dependent on one huge platform. (… and actually, lets not forget the delivery platforms also)
I've found Apple Maps is a little better in this regard. They show a higher density of business markers at any given zoom level.
I guess there's various reasons, ranging from "it's hard to make auto-layout algos produce stuff as dense as painstakingly handcrafted maps" to "let's make it harder to scrape/copy data"
When I zoomed in, it would still only show me the Permanently Closed business listing for the old restaurant.
Searching by address, they do have a listing for its replacement. But they were prioritizing the dead restaurant on the map because why would I want to know current info from a map when they can be useless instead?
And it's not like this is a restaurant in the first floor of a tower with a bunch of businesses stacked on top of it competing for map space. It's a single floor, there's only one occupant.
It's actually much worse than that.
I will often see the business name as I'm zooming in, but if I zoom too far, it's no longer available. You have to find "just the right zoom level" for displaying the given business.
As if it were some weird mind game they were playing with you.
Unfortunately, not all numbers are shown, even when all the exits are non-overlapping at the displayed zoom level.
When I want to find something that's actually good, I use this site: https://top-rated.online. At first glance it looks like an unremarkable SEO spam site, but it's actually a great way to get properly ranked Google Maps reviews. It uses proper Bayesian ranking, so it won't show you a 5 star place with two reviews over a 4.9 star place with 2,000 reviews, as Google often will. And it has good sorting and filtering options so you can, for example, filter or sort by number of reviews.
Instead, I'd love for Google to understand me well enough to show me which restaurants I would disproportionately love compared to other people based on its understanding of my taste profiles. That way, the love can be shared amongst a much wider base of restaurants and each distinctive restaurant could find its 10,000 true fans.
On top of that, it actually gives me an incentive to rate things. Right now, you only rate from some vague sense of public service instead of "this can actively improve your experience with our product".
It's not just Google Maps, Netflix used to operate on the model of deep personalization that they've slowly de-emphasized over the years. I'm still waiting for Letterboxd to introduce a feature to give me personalized film recs based on the over 1000 ratings I've given it over the years as a paying customer but they seem in no hurry to do so. Amazon used to take your purchase history into account when ordering search results but I think that's also been significantly de-emphasized.
About the only arena this is widespread is streaming music services like Spotify.
And even they can't get it right, and will give me promoted content before they give me anything related to my tastes. Pandora is the only recommendation engine that actually gives me what I would consider to be valid results. Shame they refuse to improve their audio quality, or I'd jump ship to Pandora. Until then, I'll keep using their free tier to curate Spotify playlists.
I think this is very likely false if you mean compared to the status quo ante. Before Maps, a well-loved but hard-to-find venue just wouldn't ever be seen by most people, and the absence of reviews made branding more important because it was all you had to go on. I'd be very doubtful if the proportion of independent cafes and restaurants decreases when Google Maps enters an area. (Couldn't find any causal research designs though....)
The more general point that the algorithm is not neutral (and probably never could be) must be right.
(I asked ChatGPT but it ended up with: "We have almost no clean exogenous variation in Maps rankings or feature rollouts at fine geographic scales that would let you estimate impacts on entry, survival, or market structure in a neat DiD/IV way.")
If the progression holds, oodles of recommendation engines can bloom, and it'll be trivial to fork and customize a favorite with a prompt. As the friction of doing large analysis jobs tends toward nil, the Google moat dries up and their commanding height subsides. Too optimistic?