alt.hn

12/9/2025 at 10:20:02 AM

How Google Maps allocates survival across London's restaurants

 https://laurenleek.substack.com/p/how-google-maps-quietly-allocates

by justincormack

12/11/2025 at 12:28:19 AM

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.

by doctoboggan

12/11/2025 at 11:27:21 AM

> It's always annoyed me that zooming in on a building will not reliably show the business that operates there.

8-10 years ago it was way more reliable. The decline started with them adding the option to promote a business. Frustrating.

by pmdr

12/11/2025 at 1:44:57 PM

Yes, I've noticed their results are definitely becoming more opaque and driven by what they want to show you. (This is even when there isn't a sponsored option on the map.)

by zdc1

12/11/2025 at 3:08:53 PM

Yesterday I was having the same issues as the top commenter except I was having trouble getting Google to label various mountain peaks I had zoomed in on.

by Fricken

12/11/2025 at 3:23:16 PM

It would be nice if they'd fix the missing labels on roads, even at the highest zoom with no clutter. Likewise, highway speed limits that were changed over a year ago.

by kevin_thibedeau

12/11/2025 at 9:59:06 PM

yeah but I'll bet it showed you the closest starbucks

by liveoneggs

12/11/2025 at 12:02:53 PM

advertising ruins everything, users don't want to change to other services, news at 11.

by iso1631

12/11/2025 at 2:11:19 PM

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.

by wlesieutre

12/11/2025 at 2:49:02 AM

OpenStreetMap-based maps tend to be much better in this regard. Although this is counterbalanced by the fact that they tend to have less data on businesses in general.

by nicoburns

12/11/2025 at 10:33:55 AM

Which is not surprising, as those two have very different priorities.

- OSM want's a detailed and reliable map.

- Google maps tries to either sell your data to clients, or make you buy from them.

Their business data is their priority for maps. You can see that clearly when you look at location history changes over past decade or so. It used to be actual user location history and it was glorious. Now it's "near what businesses you were more or less, help us rate them".

It's a great moment to again remind about existence of low-friction tools that you can use to add business data (among others) to OSM, like StreetComplete app, available on F-droid and Google Play :)

https://streetcomplete.app/?lang=en

In my region OSM business data starts to be on par with google, better (more up to date) sometimes.

by szszrk

12/12/2025 at 9:16:18 AM

I have recently tried to navigate with OsmAnd a few times where I live. Once I ended up in the wrong location, and a few times I have had to look up the business in Google Maps to find their address.

I would love to use OsmAnd more. StreetComplete sounds great and looks like a nice way to be able to contribute fixes to OSM. Thanks for the recommendation!

by DanOpcode

12/12/2025 at 10:22:43 AM

It is smooth and kind of "I'm doing my part!" but with low friction.

> a few times I have had to look up the business in Google Maps to find their address

Exactly my point - Gmaps taught us to expect *businesses" on maps. Not addresses. Pins and stars, instead of streets and numbers. Arrival time and traffic, instead of distance, elevation and road type (size).

I use gmaps still, mostly for businesses, but to actually know where I am I have better options. Gmaps hides most of typical map features - you see less of trees, water, buildings, height elevation. On Comaps/Osmand you suddenly can correlate map with things you see (without street view! :P).

by szszrk

12/11/2025 at 2:16:01 PM

If you just want to add POI data, then Every Door is a good choice that also works on iOS

CoMaps would be a good map app, and it will also display when POIs and opening hours were last confirmed (the only OSM app to do so AFAIK)

https://every-door.app https://www.comaps.app

by eisa01

12/11/2025 at 7:43:26 PM

> 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.

by SomeUserName432

12/11/2025 at 1:48:06 PM

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.

by kccqzy

12/11/2025 at 1:01:16 AM

Click on the building, it populates “businesses at this address” - at least, when I’ve tried.

by DANmode

12/11/2025 at 7:20:00 AM

Just tested - slightly different UI but still works the same. Also useful for taller buildings with a lot of tenants.

by pests

12/12/2025 at 1:17:15 AM

Businesses inside hospitals, businesses at shared addresses, businesses underground, all sorts of great uses.

by DANmode

12/11/2025 at 5:34:49 PM

Even trying to see the street name has a very high probability of failure, so I don't know what you expect.

by vladvasiliu

12/11/2025 at 6:54:16 PM

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 :)

by Perepiska

12/11/2025 at 11:20:49 AM

The most annoying thing is when you search for instance for "Chinese restaurants" and Google maps shows me Japanese restaurants while hiding actual Chinese restaurants.

by ginko

12/11/2025 at 4:02:27 PM

In Tokyo when I search for convenience stores, a lot of the time Google Maps will also show ATMs, assuming that's the reason I want to go to a convenience store. Inversely, if I search for a bank branch, it'll show convenience stores. The fuzzy search results can be very frustrating sometimes.

by decae

12/11/2025 at 7:53:35 PM

My search for thrift stores did not include Goodwill. Had to search for Goodwill explicitly.

Clever.

by specialist

12/12/2025 at 5:38:26 AM

I don't know about other countries, but in Japan, maps will show underground passages from e.g. the metro, with exit annotated with their numbers...

Unfortunately, not all numbers are shown, even when all the exits are non-overlapping at the displayed zoom level.

by glandium

12/11/2025 at 2:04:21 PM

information density of online maps is, in general, quite low compared to old paper maps: https://x.com/patrickc/status/1738646361128792402

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"

by bschne

12/11/2025 at 2:18:08 PM

Back then it was dedicated map makers that created maps. Now it's mainly programmers. So its not surprising that quality tanks when you go from disciplinary expert staff to IT day laborers.

by tokai

12/11/2025 at 10:56:17 AM

Its not possible to be better because its not possible for even Google or Apple to verify anything anyone claims which is not static btw. The info keeps changing all the time with biz disputes/divorces/inheritence wars etc etc.

by jdycbsj

12/11/2025 at 11:03:41 AM

Nobody is asking for the data to be perfect at the margin. Just for it to be readily visible at all.

by potato3732842

12/11/2025 at 1:50:19 AM

>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.

by fsckboy

12/11/2025 at 1:56:13 AM

Apple Maps has had "Look Around" (their implementation of Street View) for a while now.

by lewisgodowski

12/11/2025 at 1:56:01 AM

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.

by fragmede

12/11/2025 at 2:16:21 AM

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.

by SigmundA

12/11/2025 at 7:40:28 AM

My little Swedish village has full Look Around coverage, and clicking on the ⋯ icon shows an “Imagery” menu item that tells me the month and year the coverage was last updated. I think you’re underestimating where they’re currently at.

by robin_reala

12/11/2025 at 1:21:45 PM

In the US is has basically zero coverage outside any major city. Google on the other hand has exentiqive coverage into rural areas, albeit some of it old, at least its there, where it has newer coverage it usually has multiple one at different times allowing one to look back in time as well, very useful.

by SigmundA

12/11/2025 at 8:56:29 PM

I just double-checked my village. Every single road and cul-de-sac that I could find, with no exceptions, has full coverage on Apple. Google on the other hand, has coverage for maybe 50-55% of the roads. The worst example is a residential area on the outskirts where they’ve driven the car in, down one side-street, then given up and gone home.

On the other hand, they do have historical coverage, have to give them that.

by robin_reala

12/12/2025 at 2:11:31 AM

Yeah so not sure why but Look around coverage is much better in Europe than the US for some reason which seems odd since Apple is US based.

You can see the very poor US coverage here: https://brilliantmaps.com/apple-look-around/

Of course compared to Google Street view there is no comparison on a world wide basis as you can see on the same page.

by SigmundA

12/11/2025 at 3:52:48 AM

In areas with partial coverage Apple Maps has basically the same overlay showing where Look Around is available. It just doesn't have a great indicator as to why the option is greyed out when there's no coverage.

by plorkyeran

12/11/2025 at 1:20:00 PM

I mean in Google Maps you can drag the little man over the map and it has a map layer that highlights all the roads available, so you can easily see where it is and is not. Not randomly picking a point and seeing if indicator is available.

by SigmundA

12/11/2025 at 8:12:21 AM

Actually… last time I checked some local addresses Apple Maps had newer streetview data than Google.

by baxtr

12/11/2025 at 1:32:46 PM

As interesting as StreetView is, it's such a colossal privacy invasion, it's absurd. In my neighbourhood, you can literally see in peoples windows, into their living rooms.

by encom

12/11/2025 at 6:26:33 PM

And how is this any different from walking down the sidewalk? They're on the road, they're not stuffing cameras into your living room window to try to catch you walking around nekkid or anything. It is literally documenting what public view looks like.

by psunavy03

12/11/2025 at 7:07:09 PM

The biggest difference is that you would have to actually travel there and look, rather than scanning the whole city from your recliner.

by amanaplanacanal

12/11/2025 at 9:54:22 PM

The difference, as usual with this kind of thing, is scale.

by jen20

12/11/2025 at 12:47:04 AM

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.

by shalmanese

12/11/2025 at 2:44:09 AM

I have a theory: They realized the right approach is to focus purely on the yes/no of what you choose to consume, rather than trying to optimize the consumption experience itself.

Remember how YouTube and Netflix used to let you rate things on 1-5 stars? That disappeared in favor of a simple up/down vote.

Most services are driven by two metrics: consumption time and paid subscriptions. How much you enjoy consuming something does not directly impact those metrics. The providers realized the real goal is to find the minimum possibly thing you will consume and then serve you everything above that line.

Trying to find the closest match possible was actually the wrong goal, it pushed you to rank things and set standards for yourself. The best thing for them was for you to focus on simple binary decisions rather than curating the best experience.

They are better off having you begrudgingly consume 3 things rather than excited consuming 2.

The algorithmic suggestion model is to find the cutoff line of what you're willing to consume and then surface everything above that line ranked on how likely you are to actually push the consume button, rather than on how much you'll enjoy it. The majority of which (due to the nature of a bell curve) is barely above that line.

by B-Con

12/11/2025 at 5:58:20 AM

I think Netflix realized that reducing ratings to a simple thumbs up/down was a bad idea after all. A while back they introduced the ability to give double thumbs up which, if you can treat non-rating as a kind of rating, means they're using a four point scale: thumbs down, no rating, thumbs up, double thumbs up.

by ozbonus

12/11/2025 at 8:34:08 AM

Netflix are right that 5-stars is too many, it translates to a 6 point scale when you include non-rating, and I don't think there is a consistent view on what "3 stars" means, and how it's different to either 4 stars or 2 stars ( depending on the person ).

For some people 3 stars is an acceptable rating, closer to 4 stars than 2 stars. For others, 3 stars is a bad rating, closer to 2 stars than 5 stars. And for others still, it doesn't give signal beyond what a non-rating would be, it's "I don't have a strong opinion about this".

Effectively chopping out the 3-star rating, leaves it with a better a scale of:

   - Excellent, I want to put effort into seeking out similar content
   - Fine, I'd be happy to watch more like it
   - Bad, I didn't enjoy this
   - Terrible, I want to put effort into avoiding this
With the implicit:

    - I have no opinion on this
But since it's not a survey, it doesn't need to be explicit, that's coded into not rating it instead.

These are comparable to a 5 point Likert scale:

    "I enjoy this content"

   - Strongly agree
   - Agree
   - Neither Agree nor Disagree
   - Disagree
   - Strongly Disagree
The current Netflix scale effectively merges Disagree and Strongly Disagree, and for matters of taste that may well be fine.

It would be interesting to conduct social science with a similar scale with merged Disagree and Strongly disagree to see if that gave it any better consistency.

by xnorswap

12/11/2025 at 11:13:32 AM

When given a 5-star choice “very bad/bad/ok-ish/good/very good”, I rarely pick one of the extremes.

I suspect there are others who rarely click “bad” or “good”.

Because of that, I think you first need to train a model on scaling each user’s judgments to a common unit. That likely won’t work well for users that you have little data on.

So, it’s quite possible that a ML model trained on a 3-way choice “very bad or bad/OK-ish/good or very good” won’t do much worse than on given the full 5-way choice.

I think it also is likely that users will be less likely to click on a question the more choices you give them (that certainly is the case if the number of choices gets very high as in having to separately rate a movie’s acting, scenery, plot, etc)

Combined, that may mean given users less choice leads to better recommendations.

I’m sure Netflix has looked at their data well and knows more about that, though.

by Someone

12/11/2025 at 6:25:11 PM

I apply my own meaning to the 5-star rating, and find it to work really well: 1 = The movie was so bad I didn't/couldn't finish watching it. 2 = I watched it all, but didn't enjoy it and wouldn't recommend it to anyone. 3 = The movie was worth watching once, but I have no interest in watching it again. 4 = I enjoyed it, and would enjoy watching it again if it came up. I'd recommend it. 5 = a great movie -- I could enjoy watching it many times, and highly recommend it.

by unbalancedevh

12/11/2025 at 9:23:13 AM

> The current Netflix scale effectively merges Disagree and Strongly Disagree, and for matters of taste that may well be fine.

I'm a bit skeptical about this.

To me there's a big difference between "This didn't spark joy" and "I actively hated this": I might dislike a poorly-made sequel of a movie I previously enjoyed, but I never ever want to see baby seals getting clubbed to death again.

Every series has that one bad episode you have to struggle through during a full rewatch. Very few series have an episode bad enough that it'll make you quit watching the series entirely, and ruin any chance at a future rewatch.

by crote

12/11/2025 at 1:42:38 PM

YouTube doesn't have ratings any more, because people disliked the wrong things which made Susan very sad.

I stopped rating things on Netflix, because after doing so for a long time, Netflix still thinks I'd enjoy Adam Sandler movies, so what's the point?

by encom

12/11/2025 at 4:20:21 PM

YouTube got ratings, you may still up- and downvote. They however don't show down votes anymore.

by johannes1234321

12/11/2025 at 5:12:01 PM

Yes, you can vote but only the uploader can see it, making it pointless and equal to no ratings.

by encom

12/11/2025 at 6:12:25 PM

They're only useless in that they aren't displayed for your peers, but that was always the least-useful function.

Being able to see a counter that reads as "Twenty-three thousand other people also didn't like this video!" doesn't serve me in any meaningful way; I don't go to Youtube to seek validation of my opinion, so that counter has no value to me. (For the same reason, the thumbs-up counter also has no value to me.)

But my ratings remain useful in that the algorithm still uses the individualized ratings I provide to help present stuff that I might actually want to watch.

As we all know, investors and advertisers love growth; Youtube thrives and grows and gathers/burns money fastest when more people use it more. The algorithm is designed to encourage viewership. Viewership makes number go up in the ways that the money-people care about.

Presenting stuff to me that I don't want to watch makes the number go up -- at best -- slower. The algorithm seeks to avoid that situation (remember, number must only go up).

Personally rating videos helps the machine make number go up in ways that benefit me directly.

---

Try to think of it less like a rating of a product on Amazon or of an eBay seller; try not to think of it as an avenue for publicly-displayed praise or admonishment. It's not that. (Maybe it once was -- I seem to recall thumbs-up and thumbs-down counts being shown under each thumbnail on the main feed a million years ago. But it is not that, and it has not been for quite a long time.)

Instead, think of it as one way in which to steer and direct your personalized recommendation algorithm to give you more of the content you enjoy seeing, and less of what you're not as fond of.

Use it as a solely self-serving function in which you push the buttons to receive more of the candy you like, and less of of the candy that you don't like.

by ssl-3

12/11/2025 at 7:36:21 PM

I have literally not rated anything at all, ever since YouTube removed dislikes, and my recommendations are working fine. Ratings indicate(d) if a given video was likely to be a waste of my time or not, and in an age of AI slop, this feature is more desirable than ever.

Someone should make a SponsorBlock/Dearrow-type addon to flag AI slop.

by encom

12/11/2025 at 8:12:07 PM

> I have literally not rated anything at all, ever since YouTube removed dislikes, and my recommendations are working fine.

How can you know how green the grass is on the other side of the fence if you've never even seen it?

Isn't it like Shrodinger's Grass, or Green Eggs and Ham, at that point?

(And if your recommendations are working fine, then what is this "AI slop" that you're complaining about? I don't find any of that on my end.)

by ssl-3

12/11/2025 at 8:17:09 PM

> Shrodinger's Grass

Fantastically apt, IMO. Kudos.

by rkomorn

12/11/2025 at 10:09:23 PM

You only assume recommendations are based on ratings, but you don't know. And I have seen your metaphorical green grass, because actual ratings were a thing up until about 4 years ago, remember?

>I don't find any of that on my end.

Good for you. The true crime genre has been hit hard by AI slop.

by encom

12/11/2025 at 10:31:58 PM

> And I have seen your metaphorical green grass, because actual ratings were a thing up until about 4 years ago, remember?

I remember this conjecture of yours (that ratings unilaterally ceased to matter as soon as they stopped being displayed to users) very well.

And unlike you, I can see over to the other side of the fence -- in the present day -- at a whim: All I have to do is fire up YouTube in a private session on a disused device. It's fucking awful over there; it's complete bedlam.

by ssl-3

12/11/2025 at 10:49:10 PM

Yes, a blank YouTube session is the 10th circle of hell Dante didn't know about. What's your point?

by encom

12/11/2025 at 11:00:02 PM

Same point as always: That it definitely doesn't have to be that way at all.

(I can't make you take the blinders off and use that utterly useless, vestigial Thumbs Down button, though. You're free to live your life with as blindly and with much suffering as you wish, no matter what anyone else thinks.)

by ssl-3

12/11/2025 at 11:14:46 PM

Please take your meds. I told you my recommendations are working fine, my YouTube is not a default bottomless pit of despair.

by encom

12/12/2025 at 12:38:58 AM

We all get the YouTube experience that we deserve, I guess.

by ssl-3

12/11/2025 at 8:28:48 AM

Yes! It started changing when the shifted from DVD which are sold based on the physical asset to the contract deal for content.

Their objective shifted to occupying your time, and TV you’ll accept vs. movies you’ll love is a cheap way to do that.

by Spooky23

12/11/2025 at 8:24:09 AM

I mean, if you read about how current industry-standard recommendation systems work, this is pretty bang on, I think? (I am not a data scientist/ML person, as a disclaimer.)

If e.g. retention correlates to watch time (or some other metric like "diversity of content enageged with"), then you will optimize for the short list of metrics that show high correlation. The incentive to have a top-tier experience that gets the customer what they want and then back off the platform is not aligned with the goal of maintaining subscription revenue.

You want them to watch the next thing, not the best thing.

by _petronius

12/11/2025 at 7:08:46 AM

I think Spotify and other streaming services have a problem very similar to the restaurants. Take an artist with a 40 year career and a dozen acclaimed albums and bags of songs almost everyone loves, and when that artist comes up it is always the same one or two songs. The most played songs, causing feedback and making the problem worse. In my mind, one of the core reasons for asking for recommendations is to discover something different, which means ignoring or maybe even penalizing popularity, because you are likely already familiar with the popular by definition.

by stubish

12/11/2025 at 2:42:42 PM

I found Spotify surprisingly good at recommending new music. Not amazing, but considering how low the bar is thanks to other services like Netflix I'veveen pleasantly surprised.

For example it recommended a band with just a hundred monthly plays which I loved. Almost all bands it recommends has less than 10k monthly plays, so not huge "safe bets", and most are quite decent.

by magicalhippo

12/11/2025 at 3:38:06 PM

Netflix's DVD recommendations worked this way. It identified cohorts with similar categorical preferences and recommended content other people in the group enjoyed.

by kevin_thibedeau

12/11/2025 at 2:38:28 AM

I have horrible news for you. Google had it, then they killed it

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

by locofocos

12/11/2025 at 7:46:47 PM

Woah I remember this. Totally forgot about the feature.

by johanyc

12/11/2025 at 6:31:30 AM

From the comments it seemed that it didn't work well for everyone?

by samlinnfer

12/11/2025 at 6:56:55 AM

If the service actually shows you things you want to see, then you're less likely to click on ads (or "sponsored results") which you also don't want to see.

Perhaps more importantly, if such organic growth is possible, it lowers the incentive for businesses to buy ads.

by RobotToaster

12/11/2025 at 9:43:47 AM

>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.

I don't want for Google to collect data on me, build a profile and "understand" me. I want Google just to return relevant search results.

by DeathArrow

12/11/2025 at 7:39:23 AM

I was part of the team that built exactly this. It launched in 2010. Some Googlers of that era are probably still annoyed at all the internal advertising we did to get people to seed the data. This is one of the launch announcements: https://maps.googleblog.com/2010/11/discover-yours-local-rec...

> Google Maps shows you what the average person thinks is a good restaurant

I'm fairly sure this isn't true. At least, I still get (notably better) results searching while signed in. Couldn't tell you what the mechanism for that is these days, though. But at least back in 2010, the personalization layer was wired into ranking. You can see in the screenshots how we surfaced justifications for the rankings as well.

Pretty much immediately after launch, Google+ took over the company, the entire social network we had was made obsolete because it didn't require Real Names(tm), and a number of people who objected (including me) took down all our pseudonymous reviews. Most of the team got split off into various other projects, many in support of Google+. As best as I can tell the product was almost immediately put into maintenance mode, or at least headcount for it plummeted like 90%. Half of my local team ended up founding Niantic, later much better known for making Pokemon Go.

As for why collaborative filtering didn't take off, I can offer a few reasons. One is that honestly, the vast majority of people don't rate enough things to be able to get a lot of signal out of it. Internally we had great coverage in SF, London, New York, Tokyo, and Zurich since Geo had teams in all those places and we pushed hard to get people to rate everything, but it dropped off in a hurry elsewhere. The data eventually fills up, but it takes a while. I'm told we had 3x the volume of new reviews that Yelp had at the time, but Yelp mostly only covered the US, while Google Maps was worldwide, so density was quite low for a long time. It was probably 5-10 years before I started hearing business owners consistently talk about their Google reviews before their Yelp reviews.

Another thing is that people are really bad at using the whole rating scale. On a 1-5 scale, you'll probably find that 80% of the reviews are either 1 or 5 stars. Even more so in a real life situation where you meet the humans involved. While you can math your away around that a bit, at that point you're not getting a ton more signal than just thumbs up/down (anecdotally I've heard that's why Netflix moved away from 5 stars). And then at that point, you might be getting better signal from "were you motivated enough to rate this at all?", which is why there's the emphasis on review counts. Many people just won't review things badly unless things have gone terribly wrong. I sat in on a few UX interviews, and it was really enlightening to hear users talk about their motivations for rating things, many of which were way different than mine.

by splonk

12/11/2025 at 1:41:01 PM

Interesting reading, thanks!

BTW I'm familiar with linkrot, but I just discovered link poisoning.

I was reading the blog post on my Android phone and saw the Maps links to Firefly and Home Restaurant. So I tapped the Home Restaurant link and it took me to the Google Maps app in my normal home position with my home in the center. I thought for a moment that maybe it confused Home restaurant with my home.

So I tapped the Back button and nothing happened. Tapped it several more times with no luck. Finally I used the ||| button and swiped Maps up to kill it.

Then I tried the Firefly link, with the same results.

On the web, both links work fine, but someone forgot to test that these old links still work on Android.

Turns out that Home Restaurant is closed, but Firefly is alive and well. Their menu looks tasty, and the FAQ is something to behold:

https://www.fireflysf.com/faqs

If anyone here ever wants to write an FAQ with charm and grace and humor, read this one and learn. It is the gold standard!

by Stratoscope

12/11/2025 at 11:36:29 AM

Thanks for the insights. Nice to hear the facts of a situation in addition to all the guesses and assumptions (which can be interesting too of course)

by gennarro

12/11/2025 at 3:37:37 PM

> 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.

by stronglikedan

12/11/2025 at 5:31:41 AM

Beli is a pretty popular app with this functionality

by arvindh-manian

12/11/2025 at 1:22:18 AM

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.

by scratchyone

12/11/2025 at 10:22:54 AM

> 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.

This kind of ties into "but your computer is broadcasting a cookie and you're being tracked" paranoia though.

People have been convinced by uninformed twaddle that somehow folk are looking through their screen at them to see what they're doing and that this is bad, but it also means you get fed an awful lot of adverts that really don't fit your demographic.

I don't mind if advertisers or supermarkets are profiling me based on things I like. You want to show me things I like? Good. The flip side is I'd prefer you not to show me things I don't like.

Youtube seems to be hilariously bad at this latter part, and all I get are adverts for a bank I'm already with and have been for 30 years, adverts for online gambling sites which I will never be interested in, adverts for Google's AI slop which I will never be interested, and adverts for online grammar-checking services that don't work in the UK because they convert everything into some weird North American creole dialect, which - again - I will never use.

Yes, take a look at my restaurant-using profile. Recommend stuff I like.

by ErroneousBosh

12/11/2025 at 8:49:16 AM

> 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.

I mean... this sounds like the perfect use case for a third party app like "My taste restaurant finder"? There are undoubtedly apps out there like this.

I don't think Google Maps (a general purpose maps app) should try to be everything for everyone. It's good enough for what it is.

by davedx

12/11/2025 at 11:30:42 AM

The reason is money. Google (in spite of what they would have you believe) does not show you what is "good" for you, it shows you what it gets paid to show you (paid in various, sometimes very complicated ways).

I am sad that Google services are so popular, because it makes the world a little bit worse for everyone. This includes not only Google Maps, but also Gmail (did you know that Google is quite active at censoring your E-mail and you will never see certain E-mails?).

I would really like to see more competition, ideally without the ever-present enshittification (I'm pretty sure Apple Maps will go down the drain, too, because KPIs and money).

by jwr

12/11/2025 at 3:38:32 PM

Ain't nobody want to pay for shit.

by Workaccount2

12/11/2025 at 12:42:15 AM

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.

by modeless

12/11/2025 at 11:37:38 AM

Maps's search as a whole is terrible even from a UX perspective: search something with some filters, realise that you want to change a letter in the search? Byebye filters.

Some filters are available with a specific subset of words but not with another.

Zoom in a location, look for a common word? There are good chances it will zoom out and send you to the other side of the globe instead. Then pan back, hit "Search in this area" and bam it works.

Some devices can make reviews and some can't (tested on different devices, even Google ones).

Search for a specific word which might be in a review (say, "decaf") and you get even stuff which doesn't even remotely contain the word (I'd expect an empty result if no place has mentioned my keyword).

And many more.

It's just insane how a huge company just seem focused in making a "good enough" experience instead of being the leader. Maybe it's for the best but if they went 1 sprint/quarter into "let's fix glaring BS UX issues in our products", they would probably destroy so many alternatives out there.

Maybe it's on purpose to avoid some anti-trust kind of response? We'll never know.

by xandrius

12/11/2025 at 6:48:57 PM

Years ago I worked on the Google Maps team. IMO Google has underinvested in Maps UI for a long time due to a lack of competition and a lack of appreciation for the value of the product because the amount of direct revenue attributable to it is low. It's practically in maintenance mode.

by modeless

12/11/2025 at 3:13:50 PM

No, advertising is Google's core business.

by LocalH

12/11/2025 at 12:49:31 AM

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.

by shalmanese

12/11/2025 at 1:16:36 AM

SERP = Search Engine Results Page. I’m pretty sure what you mean is simply “3 results”, and not “3 search engine result pages”

by dieortin

12/11/2025 at 9:47:48 AM

>I've said for decades that Google is terrible at search in every area except Google Search.

From my point of view Google Search is terrible, too. Is hard to find relevant results, you mostly get results optimized to make money, or junk. You have to explore tens or hundreds of results to find the needle in the haystack.

by DeathArrow

12/11/2025 at 12:57:30 AM

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.

by modeless

12/11/2025 at 1:08:31 AM

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.

by shalmanese

12/11/2025 at 6:25:26 AM

Youtube is not in the business of giving you accurate search results or information. It's now in the business of getting you to watch any video, related or not to your query, in order to serve you ads.

by jerlam

12/11/2025 at 3:47:21 PM

> It's now in the business of getting you to watch any video, related or not to your query, in order to serve you ads.

Youtube was in this business from day 1. Even before Google. Youtube was never going to be anything other than an ad-platform with videos to lure in the products.

Vid.me tried to be a video platform with videos to lure in users, but it went bankrupt, because nobody wanted to pay and nobody wanted to watch ads.

by Workaccount2

12/11/2025 at 9:30:12 AM

It is a very crude method for injecting diversity into search results (and the browsing experience). It can't be turned off and still shows up even if very specific search terms are used.

Hard to believe it is the best possible video search implementation for their ad serving goals.

by data_marsupial

12/11/2025 at 5:40:15 AM

They fear tiktok is outcompeting them with even more aggressive attention hijacking, I guess, so they can't resist showing up something "This wasn't what you were looking at but can I get you to click it?"

by vintermann

12/11/2025 at 1:44:07 AM

To be fair those "unrelated" videos are sometimes videos I'm also interested in, sometimes more than what I'm searching for.

by charcircuit

12/11/2025 at 1:57:32 AM

>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

by fsckboy

12/14/2025 at 6:11:13 PM

This has terrible top suggestions for my city, looks like complete overpriced tourist traps.

by bostonvaulter2

12/10/2025 at 1:05:13 PM

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.

by dzdt

12/10/2025 at 11:25:28 PM

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.

by tkel

12/11/2025 at 3:05:44 AM

It is controlled democratically. The people have democratically ceded their knowledge gathering to large companies. Because people are above all else lazy

by Ferret7446

12/11/2025 at 3:09:12 AM

That's not what democracy is. The algorithm is developed in an organization that is structured as a dictatorship.

by tkel

12/11/2025 at 6:27:49 AM

And each user decided of their own volition to use the service under the pretense of delegating to such an algorithm.

by Ferret7446

12/11/2025 at 6:52:11 AM

"Decide" is a heavily weighted word here. From what did they decide? Was the field from which they were deciding, perhaps monopolized, or ologipopalized? Was there information skewed by the entities hoping to be chosen? Do said entities have stunning amounts of capital and power that let them prevent competition?

by komali2

12/10/2025 at 11:27:54 PM

How exactly would you fix this? Seems no different than any arbitrary person or groups ranking.

by websiteapi

12/11/2025 at 12:31:36 AM

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

by cons0le

12/11/2025 at 8:01:47 AM

> Second, stop moving the map when I search for things.

When I search for 'chicago' I like having the map move to Chicago, even if there's a Chicago Grill, Chicago Pizza and Chicago Trading Company closer.

by michaelt

12/11/2025 at 12:50:57 PM

> stop moving the map when I search for things

Are you saying that if I want to find, for example, where Athens, Georgia is, I need to basically find it manually in the world map?

by stavros

12/11/2025 at 3:09:25 AM

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?

by delichon

12/11/2025 at 3:16:51 AM

There's a couple different threads here.

Can we make a decentralized search engine. Which breaks down into two questions, is it technically feasible and is it socially feasible?

(Maybe the word search would be a bit more broad than retrieving web pages. It could be for everything right.)

I don't know but I'm inclined to say that the difficulty will be more on the social side than on the technical side.

The web was very decentralized 20 years ago, and we had all manner of peer to peer systems already. There just doesn't seem to be much appetite for that kind of thing, at least in the mainstream.

Although there might be something to it, with the AI part of the equation.

Like we had self hostable services for a long time, most people just don't want to be a sysadmin.

Well, I gave Claude root on my $3 VPS. Claude is my sysadmin now. I don't have to configure anything anymore. Life is good :)

by andai

12/11/2025 at 3:20:30 AM

The data is the key though. How did they effectively scrape the data? Does every restaurant have a website? I bet half rely on Google Maps. So IMHO you are too optimistic because regularly and effectively getting the data is the hard part, not the model.

by gleenn

12/11/2025 at 9:23:51 AM

This right here. Every time I see these types of articles, I jump straight to the chapter regarding data, and it usually a single line of "I scraped the data", sometimes with explanation, most times not.

In this case it seems like she used their API to get the data. But as she notes, scraping can quickly mean having to spend money. And that's where the scraping dream ends for many people - if they have to spend money in any way, shape, or form, it's a non-starter.

by TrackerFF

12/11/2025 at 9:48:53 AM

>then the muggles will get it, in a mass, just for the asking of their favorite chat bot

I guess you can do it right now if you tell a llm your preferences.

by DeathArrow

12/10/2025 at 11:37:40 PM

In Germany, businesses routinely bully reviewers into deleting negative reviews, so the scores are meaningless.

I only trust what friends recommend.

by nicbou

12/10/2025 at 11:54:32 PM

Serious question: How do they bully online reviewers?

by patrickmay

12/11/2025 at 12:10:16 AM

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.

by bay_baobab_ii

12/11/2025 at 3:47:29 PM

You just made me check a business where I left a negative review and was threatened with a lawsuit. I didn't remove it, but Google did automatically. Looks like I'm still algo-banned from leaving a review there (I even tried a 5-star review with no text, and was told their AI found it a violation of content policy, lol) but now above most of the obviously bought 5-star reviews with generic test is a 6-month-old negative review with a lot of "likes", stating the owner files criminal complaints against negative reviewers, they appealed to Google twice, they defended themselves in court, and they saw other negative reviews had been reviewed. (possibly mine)

Of course, it also has a reply from the owner, stating this review that says he files criminal complaints against reviewers is a complete lie, and therefore, he's filing a criminal complaint against this reviewer.

by immibis

12/11/2025 at 5:57:13 AM

I already deleted all my reviews from Google Maps. Spent all that money and effort installing a wheelchair elevator in a listed building, then when updating the info to say basically, "it's still not exactly wheelchair-friendly as a 120 year old building, but there is a wheelchair elevator and a HC toilet now", Google algorithmically accused me of lying.

by vintermann

12/11/2025 at 12:03:24 AM

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!!

by chamomeal

12/11/2025 at 12:13:47 AM

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.

by wat10000

12/11/2025 at 12:38:11 AM

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

by pixl97

12/11/2025 at 1:56:20 PM

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.

by tailsdog

12/11/2025 at 8:20:34 AM

Yeah, reviews are useless in Germany as a result. If anyone from Google is reading this, PLEASE add a tag to establishments that remove reviews by legal means!

by alpineman

12/10/2025 at 9:22:32 AM

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)

by Bowes-Lyon

12/10/2025 at 11:36:33 PM

Same!

by HanShotFirst

12/10/2025 at 3:20:41 PM

Same here!

by dddw

12/11/2025 at 12:57:44 PM

I often think it would be cool if there was a widely understood hand sign for asking people in a restaurant how they rate it. You stand outside the window and make the "Is it good?" sign, and whoever sees it from inside would hold up 1 to 5 fingers to give their star rating.

by shellfishgene

12/11/2025 at 2:30:41 PM

Point twice to them. Point to the space in front of your lap. Point to your face and mimic sad face and later happy face, while pointing your thumb down then up, à la Roman emperor.

by WOTERMEON

12/10/2025 at 12:50:04 PM

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)

by sinuhe69

12/10/2025 at 10:48:47 PM

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.

by tokioyoyo

12/11/2025 at 1:08:33 AM

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.

by tkgally

12/11/2025 at 4:04:55 AM

Totally. We’re definitely lucky over here. From my talks with people in restaurant industry in NA, it’s just extremely expensive to start a business, on top of the regulatory restrictions that you’ve mentioned. And obviously the holy grail of money making - liquor. I can get beer in almost every random ramen shop near me. It takes months/years of approval to open a place with a liquor license in Vancouver, Canada. Margins on alcohol are huge, that gives breathing room to little margins places make from food.

by tokioyoyo

12/10/2025 at 10:58:23 PM

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.

by Bjartr

12/11/2025 at 12:08:22 AM

I did exactly this < 10 minutes ago. For my local area.

by dataflow

12/10/2025 at 11:58:40 PM

I disagree, i’m always using Google to find new restaurants and places to go to in my own (fairly large) city.

by tacker2000

12/10/2025 at 10:23:56 PM

The writer is in London where even locals often eat outside their immediate neighborhood.

by harvey9

12/10/2025 at 11:06:41 PM

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.

by embedding-shape

12/10/2025 at 10:45:53 PM

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.

by asdff

12/11/2025 at 12:45:34 AM

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.

by lmz

12/11/2025 at 8:05:28 PM

Works for me. If I search "restaurants", and I see a building full of pins. I can now go to that building and look at all the restaurants.

You don't want to show every business as a default view, of course.

by immibis

12/11/2025 at 12:01:55 AM

+1 to "We audit financial markets. We should audit attention markets too"

by fersarr

12/11/2025 at 6:09:01 AM

Google Maps stopped being a reliable way to find good restaurants a long time ago. Any time in my city when I see a place with a high rating and suspiciously large number of reviews, searching for "five stars" in the reviews inevitably finds customers helpfully mentioning that they got free food in exchange. I've even seen places advertise the bribe openly on Maps. It would be trivial to detect this and punish offenders, but Google chooses not to.

I've been mulling over starting a boutique social network focused on location reviews with real life friends exclusively.

by ozbonus

12/11/2025 at 9:51:18 AM

I've seen several places that have a note printed on their menus offering a discount for a positive review.

by entuno

12/11/2025 at 7:51:53 AM

I'll go against the grain slightly and say that usually Google ratings are quite reliable for me. At times I notice they're exaggerated and it usually coincides with someone coming to ask me to rate them at the end of the meal.

by qweiopqweiop

12/11/2025 at 8:12:22 AM

I don't think this is saying that the ratings are unreliable, but rather that searching by rating isn't a guarantee that a high-rated restaurant will show up due to the other factors at play.

You don't get a sorted list from highest rated to lowest rated, but rather, momentum of reviews, number of reviews, changes in rating etc.

My suspicion is that there probably is also a noticeable difference between companies that advertise on Google vs. those that don't. Anecdotally, the gym closest to me has higher ratings than all the other gyms in my area, but when I moved to the area it never showed up on Google Maps for me. It was only by walking by it that I decided to look it up on Google Maps specifically by name that it showed up for me.

by sunnyam

12/11/2025 at 11:26:13 AM

There are good businesses out there that don't get a lot of reviews because they don't ask for them. Relying upon customers to do this without a prompt is not something I'd recommend.

by dazc

12/11/2025 at 4:48:10 PM

Nicely done. I think from a product perspective it is interesting that:

- Humans really value authentic experiences. And more so IRL experiences. People's words about a restaurant matter more than the star rating to me.

- There is only one reason to go somewhere: 4.5 star reason. But there are 10 different reasons to not go: Too far, not my cuisine, too expensive for my taste. So the context is what really matters.

- Small is better. Product wise, scale always is a problem, because the needs of the product will end up discriminating against a large minority. You need it to be decentralized and organic, with communities that are quirky.

All this is, somehow, anethma to google maps or yelp's algorithm. But I don't understand why it is _so_ bad — just try searching for 'salad' — and be amazed how it will recommend a white table cloth restaurant in the same breath as chipotle.

There are many millions that want to use the product _more_ if it was personalized. Yet somehow its not.

by itissid

12/11/2025 at 6:17:42 PM

> People's words about a restaurant matter more than the star rating to me.

I find that both offer an incredibly poor signal. I can usually get a much better idea of the quality of the place by looking at pictures of the food (especially the ones submitted by normal users right after their plate arrives at the table). It's more time consuming to scroll through pictures manually than to look at the stars, but I'm convinced it's a much better way to find quality.

Maybe that could be a good angle for this kind of tool. At least until this process becomes more popular and the restaurants try to game that too by using dishonest photography.

by bloppe

12/11/2025 at 6:54:29 AM

Not sure if it's a London thing. In my city neither I, nor the people I know rely on Google maps reviews for picking restaurants. We either know the place, follow a recommendation or try the place based on menu, price, looks, vibe, position etc.

A week ago I went to Venice and I only looked on Google maps to see what the menus and prices are, but I wasn't interested in the reviews themselves or the grade, bacause IMO, people have biases. One evening we went to one of the restaurants I spotted on Google maps but the rest of the evenings we wandered the streets, and picked what was close, if we liked the menus, the prices and the atmosphere.

One of the restaurants had only 3.4 grade on Google maps, few reviews and mostly locals ate there. The food was very good and the service was great.

I do not generally make my mind based on reviews from Google Maps, Booking, Amazon. Of course, if the overall grade is very low, I will give it some thoughts and maybe read some reviews. But generally I don't make a decision based on reviews.

by DeathArrow

12/9/2025 at 10:33:17 PM

The other commenter thought the work was silly, but I think it's brilliant. Keep at this!! You're making me hungry :)

by conartist6

12/11/2025 at 10:01:47 AM

> One practical problem I ran into early on is that Google Maps is surprisingly bad at categorising cuisines. A huge share of restaurants are labelled vaguely (“restaurant”, “cafe”, “meal takeaway”)

It's not only that; cuisines are also difficult to label as certain countries simple do not exist for Google when it comes to that.

I recall last year I wanted to change the type of "Alin Gaza Kitchen", my ex (closed now, unfortunately) fav. falafel place in Berlin from the non-descript "Middle-Eastern" to "Palaestinian" category.

I assumed this was available for any country/cuisine, like "German", "Italian" or "Israeli". But "Paleastinian" didn't exist as a category.

by virtualritz

12/11/2025 at 5:01:16 PM

The vague categorisation is likely on purpose, done by the business owner thinking that it would attract more clients.

You can change it yourself and Google will accept it but if the owner is adamant they will change it back.

by gniv

12/11/2025 at 10:09:03 AM

of course not. There is not such country after all.

by kiney

12/11/2025 at 1:26:39 PM

By that logic, 'Basque', 'Cantonese', 'Cajun', and 'Tex-Mex' shouldn't exist either

by jackbrookes

12/10/2025 at 11:12:37 PM

Nearest hidden gem to me is a Domino's Pizza...

by NoboruWataya

12/10/2025 at 11:31:29 PM

Someone hasn’t tried the cheesy bread!

by cheesyted

12/10/2025 at 11:45:49 PM

Username checks out

by bromuk

12/11/2025 at 8:42:57 AM

Sample of 1, but the hidden gem near me I would actually consider a "hidden gem" that only people from the area know about, and it's a very good family run business.

by lpribis

12/11/2025 at 12:34:19 AM

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 )

by cons0le

12/11/2025 at 5:47:27 PM

Google Maps or any other aggregator has an inherent interest in market participant diversity. A lot of suppliers would mean competition, which results in ad spend, which result in higher revenue for the aggregator. Same with Google Search.

It's an interesting equilibrium point. They want local businesses to suffer enough to pay up for ads. But also not too much that they die. A good local business that does not need to advertise because it is simply good is actually a burden to the aggregator even though it is exactly what the end users want to see.

In the past, when I was a in position to build a search engine, we took the trouble of always including organically ranked results that were genuinely good, regardless of whether we got paid or not. I felt it was a long term investment into creating real value for our end users and therefore our service.

by psadri

12/10/2025 at 11:55:56 PM

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)

by tacker2000

12/11/2025 at 12:40:09 PM

> Google Maps Is Not a Directory. It’s a Market Maker.

I understand the author's meaning, but this isn't what the term "market maker" means. To "make a market" is to stand ready to buy and sell, usually a security, in order to create liquidity in a market. Usually this resolves the issue of timing, because it is unlikely that someone wants to buy at the exact moment someone else wants to sell.

So to "make a market" in London restaurants, Google could buy food during the day and sell it at night when the shops are closed but people are hungry. (This would be silly.)

Perhaps a more precise term is "algorithmic gatekeeper."

by tylervigen

12/11/2025 at 3:12:09 PM

However, market makers have some leverage on the market they operate in, that's what the author probably meant.

by Croftengea

12/11/2025 at 5:02:34 AM

Delivery apps like Grab and Uber Eats are even worse since they have even more perverse incentives (minimising delivery time and maximising 'sponsored' listings).

Other than being willing to scroll a lot, I haven't found any great ways to find new restaurants when using delivery apps, and I'm sure I use them far less because of the tedium involved. I think scraping listings and re-doing the algorithm yourself (as per post) is perhaps the best approach. E.g. Just being able to rank by user rating and filter for no less than 200 reviews and within 5km would be an outstanding improvement on the status quo, which is always the 50 closest restaurants to the delivery address - what a coincidence! - with a few 'sponsored' listings thrown in.

by nomilk

12/10/2025 at 11:10:36 PM

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.

by 0_____0

12/12/2025 at 12:57:16 PM

This reminds me of a post earlier this year, “Looksmapping” [0], where the author ranked restaurants by the attractiveness of the reviewers according to their profile photos.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44461015

by chatmasta

12/11/2025 at 6:37:19 AM

>Because once you start looking at London’s restaurant scene through data, you stop seeing all those cute independents and hot new openings. You start seeing an algorithmic market - one where visibility compounds, demand snowballs, and who gets to survive is increasingly decided by code.

Seems a bit weird. That would mean most people in London would chose the restaurant based on Google maps reviews.

by DeathArrow

12/10/2025 at 6:58:33 PM

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.

by monerozcash

12/11/2025 at 1:15:53 AM

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.

by willtemperley

12/11/2025 at 6:45:35 AM

So if you had an online business, you had to do SEO and optimize for search engines. Now, if you have a brick and mortar business you still have to keep the algorithms happy? Sounds like life becomes harder for some business owners.

by DeathArrow

12/11/2025 at 7:30:35 AM

We had a bizarre time as a brick and mortar being even allowed to be on Google Maps. We had to take multiple pictures and videos of outside of our business with our sign, and then schedule a call with someone not in our country (or didn't speak mandarin anyway), then show them in a video call our outside of the restaurant, us locking and unlocking the door of our restaurant, us opening our cash drawer, then showing receipts, then our back storage room. It was super uncanny.

by komali2

12/11/2025 at 1:21:19 AM

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.

by thimkerbell

12/11/2025 at 1:22:02 AM

(they don't fix things anymore, do they?)

by thimkerbell

12/11/2025 at 12:21:53 PM

Google Maps is up for the dethroning to the first competitor that has the same information and shows it all at the closest zoom level.

by whywhywhywhy

12/11/2025 at 2:49:31 AM

Can anyone recommend an alternative to GMaps for searching for restaurants, services, or general "discovery" near a location?

by class3shock

12/11/2025 at 3:26:12 AM

Yelp is the classic. The old Foursquare was also good for discovering where people check in, which is basically a proxy for discovery.

by kccqzy

12/11/2025 at 3:40:40 PM

Dataset seems imperfect, a good local fish and chip shop shown on Google Maps isn't listed.

Interesting points tho.

by philipwhiuk

12/11/2025 at 11:58:03 AM

Google Maps is just advertising now. Not sure why anyone chooses to use it over better alternatives.

by badgersnake

12/10/2025 at 11:45:58 PM

What's google maps? I use OSM

by mistercheph

12/10/2025 at 12:01:44 AM

super interesting project. I would love to generate a similar list for my own neighbourhood

by zem

12/10/2025 at 8:08:29 AM

Yeah!

> "I scraped every single restaurant in Greater London"

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

by digitalPhonix

12/11/2025 at 8:58:29 AM

I would be interested how this was done as well. She mentioned the was using a free tier from Google, so maybe the data is not protected.

by _ink_

12/11/2025 at 11:46:27 AM

Someone chose to ignore Google Maps terms and publicly blog about it

by boyka

12/11/2025 at 12:07:13 PM

This is incredible, thank you for putting in the time to create it.

by zacharybk

12/11/2025 at 9:17:35 AM

Post could benefit from a terser writing that has not gone through AI.

It took me extra effort to distil useful information from all the noise of what otherwise would be a great post.

by kh_hk

12/11/2025 at 11:00:09 AM

Google Maps is the mind killer. We all worry about social media controlling the way we think, feel, vote etc. but Google Maps literally manipulates where people physically go in real life, what they do on holiday, where they hang out, what they eat etc. I got so sick of feeling like a four point five star Google Maps automaton I had to mostly stop with it. In addition to OSM, personal recommendations etc. the best substitute for me for a 4.5 star review is my nose, eyes and ears

by pjs_

12/11/2025 at 12:08:21 AM

pretty cool, i'll check some of these out thanks!

by bbno4

12/11/2025 at 2:10:55 AM

Pretty sure this whole post is generated by AI

by theahura

12/11/2025 at 2:32:45 PM

"rating to low by 1.3" for a restaurant rated 5/5.

WTF? One and zero are not probabilities, and 6 out of 5 is not a rating.

by a3w

12/11/2025 at 6:28:15 PM

Google develops all kind of bullshit because it is funnier than working

by anti-soyboy

12/10/2025 at 11:42:53 PM

> Google Maps is not just indexing demand - it is actively organising it through a ranking system built on

This is where I stopped reading.

by RivieraKid

12/9/2025 at 8:34:42 PM

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.

by x0x0

12/9/2025 at 11:55:35 PM

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.

by rendx

12/10/2025 at 11:24:51 PM

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?

by csoups14

12/11/2025 at 12:03:08 AM

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.

by x0x0

12/10/2025 at 8:07:08 AM

> 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!

by digitalPhonix

12/10/2025 at 6:16:12 PM

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."

by x0x0

12/10/2025 at 10:49:21 PM

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.

by shermantanktop

12/11/2025 at 1:15:36 AM

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.

by x0x0

12/10/2025 at 10:47:37 PM

Uhh, I want a list of all the results. I want to be able to search comprehensively within my map viewer frame.

by asdff

12/10/2025 at 10:59:53 PM

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.

by jeffbee

12/10/2025 at 11:07:07 PM

What is wrong with alphabetical? It's how the yellow pages used to work.

by asdff

12/10/2025 at 11:57:16 PM

Useless but also stupid.

A1 steak house.

AAA1 steak house.

00AAA000 steak house.

by x0x0

12/11/2025 at 7:53:44 AM

Aaaand that's clear signal to avoid those

by febusravenga

12/11/2025 at 12:06:46 AM

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.

by tehjoker

12/11/2025 at 1:33:17 AM

> 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.")

by dash2

12/11/2025 at 5:03:49 AM

Before GMaps, we had the Zagat Guides, which were an important way for many restaurants to start pulling in traffic.

by secabeen

12/11/2025 at 4:39:40 AM

Who the hell cares what garbage chatgpt vomited based on your unspecified chain of prompts?

by noitpmeder