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How Google Maps allocates survival across London's restaurants (laurenleek.substack.com)
doctoboggan 2 hours ago [-]
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.

fsckboy 53 minutes ago [-]
>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.

the way you juxtapose them calls for pointing out, Apple Maps don't have streetview which makes Apple Maps a lot less convenient.

lewisgodowski 47 minutes ago [-]
Apple Maps has had "Look Around" (their implementation of Street View) for a while now.
fragmede 47 minutes ago [-]
Where are you? Apple street view coverage isn't as extensive as Google's but there's a binoculars button for it if they do for a given location.
SigmundA 27 minutes ago [-]
Hardly anything unless in a major city, no way to easily tell if there is any coverage other than randomly clicking until it shows, also doesn't tell you the date taken.

Google street view has the 2d overlay letting you know where there is coverage, shows the date taken along with previous imagery, and they have coverage nearly everywhere in the US at a least, although some of its pretty old.

Apple Maps does seem to have more up to date satellite / aerial imagery though.

Hard to overstate how valuable all that street view coverage is on the Google side.

DANmode 2 hours ago [-]
Click on the building, it populates “businesses at this address” - at least, when I’ve tried.
modeless 2 hours ago [-]
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.

shalmanese 2 hours ago [-]
I've said for decades that Google is terrible at search in every area except Google Search. Youtube search? Terrible! Chrome history search? Abysmal! Gmail search? Atrocious! Google Maps Search? At some point, standing in a middle of a mall searching for "coffee" returned only 3 SERPs despite me standing in front of a coffeeshop that I could not get to show up.
dieortin 1 hours ago [-]
SERP = Search Engine Results Page. I’m pretty sure what you mean is simply “3 results”, and not “3 search engine result pages”
modeless 2 hours ago [-]
I find YouTube search to be serviceable. At least it has decent filtering and sorting options. Gmail search is just OK, but I haven't found anything much better. Chrome history search, though, is completely worthless. Especially since it got merged into that myactivity thing that is utter garbage, completely non-functional for any purpose. There's so much potential in searching a complete history of everything you've ever personally seen online, and it would make Chrome more sticky. Incredible fumble by Google here.
shalmanese 2 hours ago [-]
Youtube search does a baffling thing where it shows you 5 SERPs, then a bunch of unrelated things it thinks you like, then another 5 SERPs. It used to only show you the top 5 SERPs before switching to "suggested videos" for the rest of the scroll. Truly a terrible product when that was the design.
charcircuit 59 minutes ago [-]
To be fair those "unrelated" videos are sometimes videos I'm also interested in, sometimes more than what I'm searching for.
fsckboy 45 minutes ago [-]
>To be fair those "unrelated" videos are

the unrelated videos it shows me are so far from anything I'm interested in that I can only conclude it's showing both of us the same stuff, just lowest common denominator popularity.

>videos I'm also interested in, sometimes more than what I'm searching for

therefore, based on my argument, you must have horrible taste

shalmanese 2 hours ago [-]
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.

locofocos 4 minutes ago [-]
I have horrible news for you. Google had it, then they killed it

https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleMaps/comments/1737ft9/google_...

scratchyone 1 hours ago [-]
related to your letterboxd suggestion, https://couchmoney.tv is quite good! it uses trakt instead of letterboxd but it's given me quite a few good suggestions. their FAQ describes a similar approach to what you've been talking about, it tries to find movies and tv you like disproportionately like.
dash2 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.")

dzdt 14 hours ago [-]
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.
tkel 3 hours ago [-]
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.
websiteapi 3 hours ago [-]
How exactly would you fix this? Seems no different than any arbitrary person or groups ranking.
cons0le 2 hours ago [-]
First off, let me see ALL the restaurants in my city, not just the 10 recommended ones.

Second, stop moving the map when I search for things. Why does google maps on both mobile and desktop, change your search area. I put the map in one place because I want to search there.

Third, stop scrubbing bad reviews. When every restaurant is 5 stars, theres no point

fersarr 3 hours ago [-]
+1 to "We audit financial markets. We should audit attention markets too"
sinuhe69 14 hours ago [-]
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)
tokioyoyo 4 hours ago [-]
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.

tkgally 2 hours ago [-]
Long-time Tokyo/Yokohama resident here. I’m basically the same: Especially if I’m by myself and near a train station or retail area, I just walk around to see what’s available and choose someplace to eat. Only if I am planning a meal with others do I look for options online, and then, in addition to Google and Apple maps, I also use sites such as tabelog.com and restaurant.ikyu.com.

I haven’t been outside Japan for nearly a decade so I can’t compare it with other countries, but my impression is that Japan has more small restaurants than some other places. It’s not unusual to go into a ramen, curry, gyoza, soba, or other eating place with fewer than a dozen seats and staffed by just one or two people.

The existence of such small places increases the eating-out options. I don’t know why such small food businesses are viable here but not elsewhere; perhaps regulatory frameworks (accessibility, fire, health, tax, labor, etc.) play a role.

Bjartr 4 hours ago [-]
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.
dataflow 3 hours ago [-]
I did exactly this < 10 minutes ago. For my local area.
tacker2000 3 hours ago [-]
I disagree, i’m always using Google to find new restaurants and places to go to in my own (fairly large) city.
embedding-shape 4 hours ago [-]
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.

harvey9 4 hours ago [-]
The writer is in London where even locals often eat outside their immediate neighborhood.
asdff 4 hours ago [-]
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.

lmz 2 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure the overlapping pins idea would work for e.g. a 5 floor building with no multilevel maps and 6 businesses to a floor. Which is a common thing in some of the places Google maps.
tacker2000 3 hours ago [-]
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)

willtemperley 1 hours ago [-]
I don’t think the effect Instagram and TikTok has on this attention market can be ignored. Living in a big Asian city I will check those first.
Bowes-Lyon 17 hours ago [-]
I love the idea! And I want to have it for my city :)

Is there a project on GitHub or somewhere that I could clone?? (smiling face with halo)

HanShotFirst 3 hours ago [-]
Same!
dddw 11 hours ago [-]
Same here!
conartist6 1 days ago [-]
The other commenter thought the work was silly, but I think it's brilliant. Keep at this!! You're making me hungry :)
nicbou 3 hours ago [-]
In Germany, businesses routinely bully reviewers into deleting negative reviews, so the scores are meaningless.

I only trust what friends recommend.

patrickmay 3 hours ago [-]
Serious question: How do they bully online reviewers?
bay_baobab_ii 3 hours ago [-]
This happened to me a few times for my reviews in Germany. My 1-star reviews were flagged by the business as "defamation" although it contained only facts and personal opinions. I provided additional proof like screenshot of their documents (one of them was a language school), but they deleted my review at the end. I was so frustrated, I even considered deleting all of my two hundred something reviews from Google Maps.
chamomeal 3 hours ago [-]
I’ve almost moved on from online reviews. So many are fake, so many these days are slop. Half the time a 3.5 place is rated so low because people pick the most random ass reasons to slap it with 1 star.

Also I’ve decided I don’t want to live my life by following what Google says I should do as a default. Sometimes I go to a place that sucks. But that happened when I checked Google reviews anyway!!

wat10000 2 hours ago [-]
I mostly ignore the ratings and spot-check some reviews with good and bad ratings. If the good reviews actually describe something concrete and the bad reviews are nonsense, I take both of those as a good sign. If the good reviews are vague and the bad reviews are actually justified, then the place is probably not so good.

Similar with online shopping. If all the one-star reviews are complaining about the shipment being lost in the mail or other irrelevant nonsense, the product is probably pretty good.

pixl97 2 hours ago [-]
About the only reviews worth reading are 4-2 stars out of 5. 5s are overblown or fake. 1s quite often are about something dumb. A 3 for for example is apt to at least be thoughtful
NoboruWataya 4 hours ago [-]
Nearest hidden gem to me is a Domino's Pizza...
cons0le 2 hours ago [-]
I'll blow your mind. Go in there and get the pasta primavera. It slaps ( to be fair you can make it at home real easy )
cheesyted 3 hours ago [-]
Someone hasn’t tried the cheesy bread!
bromuk 3 hours ago [-]
Username checks out
thimkerbell 1 hours ago [-]
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.
thimkerbell 1 hours ago [-]
(they don't fix things anymore, do they?)
theahura 32 minutes ago [-]
Pretty sure this whole post is generated by AI
0_____0 4 hours ago [-]
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.

monerozcash 8 hours ago [-]
At least in central London, the "underrated gems" feature does not seem to be very good at finding underrated gems.

That might just be a feature of the area though.

zem 1 days ago [-]
super interesting project. I would love to generate a similar list for my own neighbourhood
digitalPhonix 19 hours ago [-]
Yeah!

> "I scraped every single restaurant in Greater London"

How hard is that now? I assumed that Google is very protective of that data

bbno4 3 hours ago [-]
pretty cool, i'll check some of these out thanks!
2 hours ago [-]
mistercheph 3 hours ago [-]
What's google maps? I use OSM
x0x0 1 days ago [-]
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.
rendx 1 days ago [-]
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.
csoups14 3 hours ago [-]
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?
x0x0 3 hours ago [-]
You clearly didn't read it. A direct quote:

> At minimum, ranking algorithms with this much economic consequence should be auditable.

"At minimum". Immediately preceded by a paragraph starting by "For policy", with sentences like "If discovery now shapes small-business survival, then competition, fairness, and urban regeneration can no longer ignore platform ranking systems" or "tools of local economic policy".

That's perhaps not an outright call for regulation, but it's certainly suggesting it's warranted.

digitalPhonix 19 hours ago [-]
> 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!

x0x0 8 hours ago [-]
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."

shermantanktop 4 hours ago [-]
A tone of breathless wonder is now the coin of the realm. Quality research and interesting analysis gets the same treatment as everything else, because that's what gets clicks and responses. Dinging an individual article for this is arbitrary and capricious.

Don't hate the player, hate the game. I hate the game too, fwiw.

x0x0 1 hours ago [-]
Still a lie though. If you don't know / aren't familiar with a ranker, the author is priming you through the entire article to believe google is doing something wrong or malicious by ranking the results. Rather than the same thing search engines have been doing for 30 years. Whether their ranker is good or bad (and for whom) is separate.

Including, of course, the way many popular chain restaurants got there is they make food a lot of people like.

asdff 4 hours ago [-]
Uhh, I want a list of all the results. I want to be able to search comprehensively within my map viewer frame.
jeffbee 4 hours ago [-]
Over small areas you can get that, but the API only returns 20 results, so you will either need a ranking signal over a large area, or a grid search over tiny areas.
asdff 4 hours ago [-]
What is wrong with alphabetical? It's how the yellow pages used to work.
x0x0 3 hours ago [-]
Useless but also stupid.

A1 steak house.

AAA1 steak house.

00AAA000 steak house.

tehjoker 3 hours ago [-]
I just looked at google maps and (I didn't realize this previously), but you can scroll the results and it will change the map when you bump against the bottom of the list.
3 hours ago [-]
RivieraKid 3 hours ago [-]
> Google Maps is not just indexing demand - it is actively organising it through a ranking system built on

This is where I stopped reading.

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