24 ms·

Google Maps' Moat

• NelsonMinar 9y ago
  It sure is nice having Justin O'Bierne writing publically about maps again. His old 41Latitude blog was phenomenal and then got blackholed when he went to work at Apple Maps. Then he left Apple and is back in the free world and doing phenomenal analysis of digital mapping like this article. I can't wait for him to finish his book.
  • nicoboo 9y ago
    Definitely the most detailed analysis about map readability and features selection over time and in different areas. We might disagree on some points but his work is truly amazing and always interesting. I agree with you over his previous blog and about his position at Apple Maps, great to see him doing what he does best.
  • icc97 9y ago
    It is ridiculously brilliantly detailed. I love the obsessiveness the has gone on to figure out the Google Maps changes. It's wonderfully written too, easy to follow through his logic without having to re-read sections.
  • danvoell 9y ago
    My first thought reading the post was "Is this a book?" It might as well be.
  • rkuykendall-com 9y ago
    > he went to work at Apple Maps ??? He writes a lot of this article like he's trying to guess from press and outside observation what Apple is doing / planning. If he was JUST working there, wouldn't he know all this? Should his 'outside observations' be considered to be him fitting outside information to what he already knows?
    • NelsonMinar 9y ago
      I think he left Apple over a year and a half ago. But yeah, his observations about Apple Maps are particularly well informed. http://www.tested.com/tech/573368-brief-comparing-digital-cartography-apple-and-google-maps/ http://www.tested.com/tech/573368-brief-comparing-digital-ca...
• donalhunt 9y ago
  I'm not overly surprised that Google have added so many buildings in such a short time... This IS the same company that re-encoded the whole YouTube corpus (which while small at the time was still a considerable about of content) in a weekend to improve the user experience (SD -> HD launch).
  • PuffinBlue 9y ago
    I can't find anything about this re-encode - do you have a link to read about it?
    • l1n 9y ago
      It's mentioned at the end of this blog post: https://youtube.googleblog.com/2009/11/1080p-hd-comes-to-youtube.html https://youtube.googleblog.com/2009/11/1080p-hd-comes-to-you...
      • archon810 9y ago
        Doesn't mention a time-frame though.
• 40acres 9y ago
  What an incredible post. I just love this guys blog, I wonder how long it took to research all of this. As a side note this gives me great confidence that Waymo will come out of the self driving car race in pole position.
  • ghaff 9y ago
    Up to a point. At that point an autonomous system needs to be able to interpret and react to the physical world as it actually is at the moment as opposed to how it's supposed to be.
    • taneq 9y ago
      This is why efforts based on exhaustive mapping make me nervous. Things change, sometimes rapidly. The vehicle should be using its maps as a general guide, not as some kind of ground truth.
      • canoebuilder 9y ago
        The vehicle should be using its maps as a general guide, not as some kind of ground truth. Not to sound like a jerk, but I would be shocked if there were anyone working on this that was not pursuing things in this way. It just seems kind of obvious that you can't have some big hunk of metal rolling around, following some abstracted track from a map, without "looking" where it is going.
        • ghaff 9y ago
          Cars obviously have sensors for real-time data capture. However, the question is how well they handle new signage/lights, road changes, construction, flooded lanes, etc. when those aren't in the database. It's fair to say that autonomous driving today is some point between "we run 100% off maps" and "we can handle things like a human could if we lost access to our maps." (And much closer to the former.)
        • taneq 9y ago
          And yet we have Waymo building 2cm-resolution maps and not operating outside of mapped areas, and (more scarily) Tesla geotagging false positives where Autopilot misidentifies some roadside feature and panic brakes.
• sharpercoder 9y ago
  Google maps is improving since the day I first saw it - that must have been around 2003 or so. The improvement on the data is phenomenal if you look at it over then past 10+ years; The amount of times I blindly trust GM to go somewhere increase every year. I suspect the edgecases will be solved slowly, like navigating to a shop inside a mall, a market stall, an ad-hoc gathering, a planned building, et cetera. Typing in an address, going there by directions, verifying the building front without extra time needed for travel is truly magic.
  • agumonkey 9y ago
    GM saved us from missing a wedding using an near obsolete razr i over 3G while the in-car GPS was directing us into oblivion. Not only GM was generally right, the overal intertial refresh rate was smooth .. extremely surprising.
  • Stratoscope 9y ago
    This is all true, but of course there will always be a few missing features that seem so obvious and useful that you wonder why they still don't have them. For me it's one or two announcements of the actual destination address at the end of the drive. If it's not an address I'm familiar with and not a business with a sign out front, by the time I get there I've usually forgotten the street number! But when I arrive all I hear is "your destination is on the right." It would be so great if the last two announcements were: "Your destination, 123 Main Street, will be on the right in 800 feet." "Your destination, 123 Main Street, is on the right."
    • Pxtl 9y ago
      For me the problem with Google Maps is how appallingly badly it fails when things go wrong. The offline mode is prone to silently getting locked in "rerouting" and just completely leaving me hanging for 10 minutes at a time. And if it loses gps signal, it doesn't seem to think the driver needs to know about this. A Silent failure is terrible.
      • killjoywashere 9y ago
• jld 9y ago
  Google Maps is my pick for the coolest website on the internet. Truly a killer app.
  • 0003 9y ago
    Can maps be a killer app?
    • mcrady 9y ago
      I launched Google Maps for mobile in 2005. In 2006, Eric Schmidt was worried that Yahoo Go was a killer app. My claim that Google Maps was the real killer app fell on deaf ears. :)
      • guelo 9y ago
        If Schmidt's worry about Yahoo Go led to Google's purchase of Android Inc. around the same time frame then I would say you were both right.
        • mcrady 9y ago
          Android was acquired in 2005. Larry was the driving force behind the acquisition, IIRC.
      • danso 9y ago
        I consider myself an old tech geek but "Yahoo Go" rings absolutely no bells for me. What was Google Maps for mobile in 2005? Those were flip phone days for me.
        • mcrady 9y ago
          We launched on j2me flip phones and soon added support for blackberry. The displays were small and most phones didn't have GPS.
        • mcrady 9y ago
          And here's info about Yahoo Go: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Go https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Go
• ajkjk 9y ago
  Things like this make me think that it's a shame humanity is duplicating all this work instead of collaborating to do it once. One of the awkward failures of capitalism, I guess. At least when your product is something physical you end up with twice as many outputs. When it's just data you just do the same work twice.
  • todd3834 9y ago
    Isn't open street maps exactly that? I guess the shame is that big corporations don't all contribute to that rather than try to compete? It is a thought provoking idea but I struggle to see which side I prefer. I think competition is one of the things that drives innovation.
    • danso 9y ago
      FWIW, Samsung is the corporate booster behind Mapzen, which provides free mapping APIs while contributing to OpenStreetMap: https://trademarks.justia.com/860/91/mapzen-86091461.html https://trademarks.justia.com/860/91/mapzen-86091461.html https://mapzen.com/about/ https://mapzen.com/about/ > Mapzen is an open and accessible mapping platform...Based out of the Samsung Accelerator, we support the geo community through building tools and collaborating on open source mapping projects. We believe that a healthy mapping ecosystem is one that is diverse, sustainable, and accessible to all.
  • lquist 9y ago
    I think I understand what you mean but I think that is actually the proper functioning of capitalism not a failure. If Apple/TomTom/etc. didn’t create maps, Google wouldn’t invest resources in making theirs better.
  • clement75009 9y ago
    As the article shows, there's always some subjectivity in mapping. It is essential that there be competition and different approaches to that enormous task.
  • arikrak 9y ago
    You can say that about every single instance of competition. Yet when governments run things they don't generally do as good a job...
• chaostheory 9y ago
  I'm still wondering why Waze doesn't incorporate Google Maps data and Google Maps doesn't incorporate Waze traffic data? Or does this already happen since Google has owned Waze for a while now? If not, I find it strange for the two to continue to be silo'd.
  • stefanpie 9y ago
    I've heard stories, guesses, and claims that the current traffic data shown on google maps is potentially aggregated from smartphone GPS and accelerometer readings on android phones or though their Google apps. It's crazy and amazing to just think about it.
    • on_and_off 9y ago
      I always thought this was officially a feature of maps ? I worked for a couple of years in a valley with only 2 access points. Quite often, when it is time to go back home, the trafic would be jammed. I activated Google Now (or at least I think it was already called that way ?) and without fail it would warn me that there is no point in leaving the building right now since everything was jammed. The same info was visible on maps.
      • SEJeff 9y ago
        And no doubt they pull from obviously free public sources such as sigalert as well. More data to feed to their hungry compute engine.
  • Viper007Bond 9y ago
    Waze data does show up in Google Maps. If you click on one of the hazards or whatnot in Google Maps, it'll often say it was reported via Waze.
  • lifeformed 9y ago
    Check this out: https://www.google.com/maps/@47.0826736,-122.677911,16z/data=!4m3!15m2!1m1!1s%2Fx%2Fsos-9021f5e64c4fec34!5m1!1e1?hl=en https://www.google.com/maps/@47.0826736,-122.677911,16z/data...
• EGreg 9y ago
  These building footprints, complete with height detail, are algorithmically created by taking aerial imagery and using computer vision techniques to render the building shapes. I could have guessed that before the punchline. And it's not that difficult to add for a company with tens of billions in cash. What are you doing, Apple? Fix your OS and Maps!
  • londons_explore 9y ago
    You need aerial imagery from different angles. Thats surprisingly hard to buy from imagery providers, because most of them only want to point their cameras directly downwards.
    • pbhjpbhj 9y ago
      Lenses don't work that way, surely. Any image taken directly downwards will include angled elements offset at a greater angle away from the centre line. Also, how hard is it to add an extra camera or two if you're already flying over, sure double/triple the data but that must be relatively easy to handle once you have the infrastructure for image handling and such.
    • bacon_waffle 9y ago
      Or with lighting from different angles - different time of day.
    • on_and_off 9y ago
      Do we know how Google obtains this data ? Could drones be used here ? It looks like it would be a good way to refresh this data often on the cheap. (drone is the loosest sense, a balloon would do the trick)
      • puzzle 9y ago
        A couple of public blog posts made it obvious that Google flies planes.
    • angch 9y ago
• exikyut 9y ago
  I doubt anybody will see this comment, but I'll leave it here anyway just in case. While using Maps the other day to get bus directions I got pulled up short and had a very big laugh after Maps gave me a route that would have required I walk through my neighbor's living room and backyard, and then jump my back fence in order to get home. :D Maps apparently thinks that the internal roads in the townhouse complex next to mine will provide access to my house. This most definitely is not the case :D I'd like to forward this to someone internal, both for the fun of sharing it with an actual human being and also because I don't share _exactly_ where I live (town, okay; house and street, not so much). On the same note, I wouldn't mind making friends with random people in various teams - Search, Maps, etc - because I often see glitches and have nobody I can tell. My email's in my profile, FWIW, and I have no problem with anybody forwarding it on and/or random incoming emails from engineers if that happens to work :)
  • dannyw 9y ago
    You can actually edit it yourself and make a correction. A local guide community member will review it.
    • mafro 9y ago
      I've done a few similar minor-edits to maps and they're always approved. This ultra-localised data needs to be crowd-sourced.
      • exikyut 9y ago
        Interesting.
    • exikyut 9y ago
      Oh. Thanks!
      • lucb1e 9y ago
        Note that you're contributing to a for-profit that has no interest in sharing this data back to you unless it's a financial win for them. If you want to contribute to a map that is open and free for everyone to use, like the Wikipedia of maps, I'd suggest OpenStreetMap. Its quality varies, but in the Netherlands and Germany it is often better than any commercial map. USA I have no idea.
• wutbrodo 9y ago
  Is there a reason anyone uses Apple Maps, aside from wanting to avoid Google out of principle/privacy/monoculture concerns? To be clear, these are entirely legitimate reasons, but I was wondering if the product has any direct benefits for the user (which is a coherent subset of reasons given the modal users' level of concern about systemic issues). I'm not trying to randomly snipe at Apple here, I just know very little about Apple Maps beyond the bad press its gotten and Apple's general software product competency weaknesses. EDIT: Thanks for the responses, that's all pretty much the kind of thing I was wondering about
  • gr33nman 9y ago
    I use Apple Maps when walking because of the nice turn by turn integration with the Apple Watch.
  • brianxq3 9y ago
    I use it primarily because of integration with the lock screen and integration with CarPlay.
    • freetime2 9y ago
      I would like to use it for these reasons, and also that the Apple Maps UI just feels a little nicer to me than the Google Maps app on iOS. There's also the unfortunate fact that Apple doesn't allow users to select a default maps application, so Apple maps integrates better with Messages and other 3rd party apps. But even with all of these reasons, Google's data and search capabilities are so much better than Apple's that they make Apple Maps feel unusable by comparison.
  • adrr 9y ago
    Apple doesn't allow non-apple maps apps to be used with CarPlay.
  • thex10 9y ago
    I find it a much better view of the transit layer, and I actually enjoy its navigation UX, but that's about it.
• peterburkimsher 9y ago
  tl;dr - Google Maps has buildings and Areas of Interest (streets with more businesses) based on satellite & street view data. "Google is creating data out of data ... It makes you wonder how long back Google was planning all of this—and what it’s planning next" My guess is that they weren't planning it. Somebody decided to use their 20% time to learn TensorFlow and process the Street View imagery for fun, and that side project got promoted into Maps. When I downloaded 10 years of church notice sheets, I was trying to get the lyrics of the songs in Chinese. I later realised that I could also find the most common song names, and then focus my Chinese-learning on those songs. Big data is all about gathering more data than you know what to do with, and figuring it all out as you go.
  • pbhjpbhj 9y ago
    I reckon Google's 3D building designer, that allowed people to plot buildings and place them on the map was used to train an AI to create buildings from features ... maybe. The page says satellite data, matched with street level, but I often see planes flying over my UK city and imagine they could do radar or similar tracking to match with visual data.
  • puzzle 9y ago
    This was definitely planned, only perhaps not in this kind of detail. The Geo organization's motto paralleled the company's (to organize the world's information, etc. etc.), only at a geospatial level. The data you see in Google Maps came and probably still comes from a pipeline of pipelines that rebuild the whole planet on a regular schedule. Since we're talking about all of Earth, random stuff here and there could cause hiccups and delays. Information comes from all sorts of sources, including custom HW (streetview camera, etc.), flying their own planes, owning a satellite company for a few years, and so on. In one shape or another, it all predates Tensorflow by years.
  • eref 9y ago
    I do not get what makes this post so popular. Google Maps is often better and uses automatically extracted features from photogrammetry. Eh. 350 points at most.
• dvt 9y ago
  I accidentally used Apple Maps once as I was going to a (new) doctor's office. I realized I was using Apple maps halfway through my drive and I joked with myself that it wouldn't bring me to the right place. I was heading to a fairly large medical complex in Orange County (CA) and I sort-of had an idea of where I was going anyway, but boy, was I wrong. According to Apple maps, the doctor's office was literally in the middle of a field. I missed it the first time around (drove past it for a few miles, following my GPSs instructions) and then soon realized that I was already going through residential areas. Never again, Apple. For context, this was 3 months ago. This doesn't seem like a hard problem to solve. My guess is that Apple just gave up.
  • Lunatic666 9y ago
    In Singapore the Apple Maps capabilities seem to be a little better, after they introduced bus lines a couple of months ago I’m using it as my main guide to go around the city or when I’m lost. The general direction is always correct, points of interest or businesses are sometimes missing, but it feels like they’re improving, so I don’t think they gave up on it. I think they just don’t put so much effort on it compared to Google, because the data gathered from the service doesn’t have the same value for Apple.
    • ghshephard 9y ago
      The problem in Singapore is that Apple (or whoever they contract this to) hasn't updated major parts of the city in several years - Go take a look at Maxwell Road near the Singapore Chinese Cultural Center connecting to Central Blvd from Straits Blvd - that road hasn't been there since 2015 (at least, maybe longer) - but Apple Still says that it exists and uses it for directions. Maps are one area where Apple has a "meh, good enough" attitude, but Google really seems to want to really bring the next level of quality.
      • kuschku 9y ago
        I live in a city in Germany (280k population) where Google hasn’t updated the 2D satellite images since 2004. A few months ago, they introduced 3D buildings, and Earth shows up-to-date satellite imagery now, but still didn’t update the satellite imagery used in the Maps app. Worse yet are maps and transit – roads and sometimes entire districts missing, data from somewhere between 2005 and 2009, and no transit data at all. Every other map service has it all. Apple, Here, Bing, OSM, everything. Google doesn’t. And yet people here continue using Google Maps, because "it’s the default", and Google Now can only give you estimates from Google Maps.
• encoderer 9y ago
  I recently switched to Apple maps primary for car play after 10+ years. I haven’t looked back. Building outlines are not much of a moat for me.
  • krisdol 9y ago
    I switched as well, for different reasons. Some things I found that I liked about apple maps: its navigation has speed limit information and I much prefer its design. It seems less busy, and it gets out of my way. Something about google maps just felt really cramped. I know that sounds really subjective, but I enjoyed using one more than the other. That said, google has better directions and estimates. And maybe that should trump all. It hasn’t been enough of an issue to convince me to reinstall.
    • Viper007Bond 9y ago
      It's a bit of a hack but I run Waze in the background when I'm doing navigation via Google Maps. It'll play a sound at me when I exceed the speed limit and it'll warn me about upcoming road hazards (and cops!).
      • pinko 9y ago
        Speed trap warnings are the one killer feature keeping me locked into Waze.
    • gonyea 9y ago
      Google Maps has a show speed limit toggle, behind a setting.
      • puzzle 9y ago
        I think that only works in the Bay area and Brazil for now.
  • Viper007Bond 9y ago
    Do you ever manage to get where you're actually trying to go though? ;) In all seriousness, I've found Apple Maps search to be absolutely horrendous, either missing places or having them in the wrong spot.
• matt_s 9y ago
  When can we get a flight simulator using Google Maps data? It doesn't need the fidelity of data for names of streets, places, etc. just the imagery. If they can extrapolate building details like bay windows, then they should be able to model entire areas from enough heights and angles to represent it much better than what I've seen in flight simulators for personal use (at least last I looked).
  • dabockster 9y ago
    Google Earth used to have a very basic flight sim. Not sure if it still does, though.
  • flyinghamster 9y ago
    There's already a flight simulator in the Google Earth desktop app, under the Tools menu.
  • jurjenh 9y ago
    Didn't google earth have exactly this in the early days? I can't remember exact details, but pretty sure it was an easter egg - ctrl + alt + a would launch it.
• 4684499 9y ago
  I can tell Google is pretty upset that they don't have real time cams everywhere.
  • stefanpie 9y ago
    But they do have Android and all the smartphones that use Android or have Google maps installed and those smartphones also probably have GPS recivers and accelerometers.
  • adrianN 9y ago
    That's the real reason why they invest so much in self-driving cars. It'll be just millions and millions of eyes for them.
    • snowpanda 9y ago
      Makes me wonder what their end goal is. It's a bit unnerving.
• jonlucc 9y ago
  Maybe it's naive of me, but I would assume it won't take 6 years for Apple to redo the work that Google is ahead on. For one thing, they now know a specific feature to work toward, which cuts some time out. Then, they can likely throw more cycles at this problem than Google could 6 years ago, again reducing Google's lead. Lastly, they probably have a lot of stored raw data (satellite images specifically) that Google didn't have at the start and took time to collect multiple angles over time.
  • ryen 9y ago
    I think you're confusing ideas/features with execution. Apple knew very well at the onset what to build. But they executed poorly and underestimated the amount of non-trivial human involvement in correcting mistakes and combining many layers of information into a cohesive and [mostly] robust experience. These kinds of applications aren't Apple's strong suit, and Google is years ahead on technical abilities on the data correction and feedback front as well as custom satellite hardware and software design. Although Apple may be moving on that [1]. [1] https://9to5mac.com/2017/04/21/apple-satellite-hardware-project-google-execs-maps-ar/ https://9to5mac.com/2017/04/21/apple-satellite-hardware-proj...
• calbear81 9y ago
  I was pleasantly surprised to how much attention to detail and thought goes into the cartography design on Google Maps. Just yesterday, I noticed this little gem when searching for the Channel Islands off of California: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Channel+Islands+National+Park/@33.9639291,-120.0316649,11z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x80e852ce2cb67915:0xf5e49558723a3acc!8m2!3d34.002611!4d-119.7099239 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Channel+Islands+National+P... Try zooming in and zooming out slowly and watch what happens to the labeling of the islands since they are actually a collection.
• mastax 9y ago
  Great article, but it has me thinking: what is holding Apple back? My ideas: - Apple is just a few years behind; they launched a decade later. Come back in 3 years and they'll be close to parity. - Apple only needs Maps to be good enough to avoid PR disaster, since they need a reasonable default on iOS. On the other hand Google needs to be good enough to beat competitors since they want to make money on traffic, usage data, and the Maps API. - Google's use of reCAPTCHA gives it a huge edge over competitors in mass image classification.
  • bobdole1234 9y ago
    About 3GW of computing power. No really. Apple lacks the raw computing capacity to be able to pull this off, even if they had the algorithms and data already.
    • kumarvvr 9y ago
      With their cash pile, they could surely expand, considering the long term returns on such expansion of computing power. Maybe Apple just dosent see the need to improve or dosent see any revenue potential with Maps.
      • bobdole1234 9y ago
        Apple is actually paying for Google's capacity. http://www.crn.com/news/cloud/300080062/cloud-makes-for-strange-bedfellows-apple-signs-on-with-google-cuts-spending-with-aws.htm http://www.crn.com/news/cloud/300080062/cloud-makes-for-stra...
        • posixplz 9y ago
          Apple's forte is not high-caliber software engineering, or scaling huge infrastructure, as is the case at AWS/GCP. Apple's track record in recent years is pretty shoddy, and downright embarrassing in the last several months.
      • adventured 9y ago
• bschwindHN 9y ago
  Maybe all those smart engineers could put their heads together and figure out how to not zoom into street view when I want to view a picture on a review. And maybe return me to where I was in the review list instead of taking me back to the top level business information. What a feat of engineering that would be.
• cooper12 9y ago
  Hmm, this really does make me worried for OpenStreetMap. If the competition is so powerful and has a moat protecting it that will only grow larger, how can it ever hope to catch up? This isn't a case like Wikipedia where it entered a market that was barely there (e.g. online/software encyclopedias). Instead, you have to face off against giants with enormous resources and the money for any type of data. Amateur volunteers working on their own areas won't really be able to keep up. And it'll be even harder to recruit more workers because the competition is so entrenched/good while OSM can be subpar in some aspects. Oh, and these volunteers will instead give their time to Google because it's something they already know and use (I have a friend who does things like answer questions, take pictures of places, for points).
  • maxerickson 9y ago
    Niantic switched Pokémon Go and Ingress over to using OpenStreetMap as the base map last week. That's one way OSM can compete with Google, it is available for the low price of attribution. Pokémon players have quite some interest in improving OSM. OSM can also end up with data for things that Google doesn't find interesting. Google doesn't have the nice walking path/bike trail in a local park that I added to OSM several years ago.
    • rmc 9y ago
      > is available for the low price of attribution That depends. The OSM licence requirements depends on what you do. If you don't produce a geo database, then there's only an attribution requirement, otherwise you have to attribute and release changes to the data you made, along with any other data that you mixed in. It's like BSD for some uses, and GPL for others.
    • cmg 9y ago
      I noticed the swap only because - at least in my residential neighborhood in a small city - OSM has sidewalk data on their maps, which Google did not.
  • rmc 9y ago
    > this really does make me worried for OpenStreetMap. If the competition is so powerful and has a moat protecting it that will only grow larger, how can it ever hope to catch up? When OSM started in 2004 (before Google Maps), the only real place you could get map data was from governments. The idea of everyone walking around with GPSes to make their own map sounds like it'll never work. And yet here we are. > This isn't a case like Wikipedia where it entered a market that was barely there (e.g. online/software encyclopedias). The encyclopedia market did exist, for decades, before Wikipedia. I'll bet very few people are buying family encyclopedias now.
• zippergz 9y ago
  I just wish that they would combine Waze and Google Maps. The Google Maps UI is SO MUCH NICER than Waze. It truly pains me to use Waze because it's so ugly. But at least in my area, it's much more effective at routing me around traffic (sometimes too aggressive, but I'd rather err on that side), and its warnings for things like accidents and objects on the road are incredibly useful. I use Waze every single day for my commute to and from work, and it's really indispensable. Every once in a while I decide to give Google Maps another shot because the interface is so much nicer, but I always miss the data quality from Waze. I don't understand why they can't have the best of both in a single app at this point. I realize that some Waze data is surfaced in Google Maps, but it's not the same as "there's an object on the road in 500 feet" or "we're re-routing you because traffic changed ahead." Maybe Google Maps does do those things, but I have never witnessed it, and Waze does it all the time.
  • aembleton 9y ago
    I guess it's a matter of preference. I prefer the Waze UI when I'm driving. I find it easier to see the route to follow.
• ncdev 9y ago
  Google also uses (used?) a great deal of human judgment in Maps (note: these sources are a few years old now) [1, 2]. [1] https://www.wired.com/2014/12/google-maps-ground-truth/ https://www.wired.com/2014/12/google-maps-ground-truth/ [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/how-google-builds-its-maps-and-what-it-means-for-the-future-of-everything/261913/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/how-g...
  • maxerickson 9y ago
    Yeah, here the buildings quickly disappear outside of dense areas. Which could be a result of prioritizing the denser areas with an automated system, but there's lots of missing buildings in the built up areas too.
  • splonk 9y ago
    I think people generally wildly underestimate the scope and impact of Ground Truth (or are entirely ignorant of it). Back when Apple Maps launched (and probably just after GT had been publicly acknowledged), I had a chat with an Apple journalist, and basically told him that Apple had no idea what they were in for. They'd fix the obvious big public bugs (turning off of highway overpasses) easily enough, but they would remain way behind on data quality. Back then Google was spending something like a billion dollars a year for GT and Street View alone, which is a massive organization that Apple just didn't have, wasn't likely to build, and couldn't license. Add to that a huge lead in satellite imagery, custom flyover data, business data from web search, customer feedback from their incumbent maps app, and I just didn't see any way that Apple was going to come even close to Google's map quality in the next several years. Basically the only question to me was if/how quickly they'd reach "good enough" status for their users to avoid tarnishing their brand. Story time: Back before GT was used widely, I think some street addresses were placed by just linearly interpolating them along the road. Charleston and Rengstorff are a bit weird near the Google campus, so for a while people looking for directions to the shopping center on the other side of the freeway would find themselves getting directed (embarrassingly!) to the Google Maps building, with its big red pin in front reminding them how they'd been led astray. After giving directions to these lost souls one too many times, I got annoyed enough to rant to someone about how terrible the data was. He agreed, took me over to a what I now know must have been a GT operator, got it fixed, and told me it would be live within a month. So I got to say that I'd personally served some Maps traffic, and reduced load on a low performance server as well (my QPS is pathetic).
• Aloha 9y ago
  I've been an apple maps user since day 0 - and other than a sometime annoying inability to FIND an address - its been remarkably reliable for me - even driving to places in the middle of nowhere - YMMV though - if you live in a different place, your luck may vary significantly. I'm also not someone who gets lost easy either however, and learned how to navigate pre-GPS - so again, YMMV.
• cycrutchfield 9y ago
  I wonder if they are using a technique similar to pix2pix (https://github.com/phillipi/pix2pix https://github.com/phillipi/pix2pix) under the hood to turn satellite images into structure depth maps.
• m3kw9 9y ago
  The direction capabilities is what makes me use google maps more, it’s just more reliable in general and gives better routes. Sometimes Apple would give these really dumb routes. I would say ‘why would you do that?’
• ClassyJacket 9y ago
  It's surprising to me that Apple has 3D building data from Flyover already, but doesn't use it. They have reasonably good 3D scans of cities, with textures, and it doesn't seem that much of a stretch for them to differentiate between trees, cars etc. and turn that into building shapes - even if it requires human sorting, Apple does have billions of dollars. They could end up with more detailed buildings on their 2D view than Google. That being said, they probably simply don't care. Maps is a means to an end for Apple, and likely not itself a direct money maker. People use it because Apple has a captive audience - you can't set your default Maps app on the iPhone to anything else. I don't get the feeling anybody actually likes it, altho I do enjoy using Flyover to see those 3d scans from time to time. Minor criticism of this great article: a side-by-side view of the images would be better for comparison and more comfortable to the user than an automatically changing gif.
  • saagarjha 9y ago
    > They have reasonably good 3D scans of cities, with textures, and it doesn't seem that much of a stretch for them to differentiate between trees, cars etc. and turn that into building shapes Are they not? The area around me has somewhat decent outlines of stuff like trees that I'd assume is coming from the satellite data, since it looks too odd for a human to do manually… > I don't get the feeling anybody actually likes it I enjoy using it. It's well integrated with iOS (and IMHO looks prettier than Google Maps as well).
• jonknee 9y ago
  Google also has a giant lead in trails / feature names. I hike a ton and Google has been adding trails at a brisk pace. I just checked the Snoqualmie Pass area about an hour outside of Seattle and Apple Maps has almost no trails, named mountains or named lakes (even quite large ones). A few trails show up as unnamed roads. There's also no relief shading to tell where the mountains are or a terrain view for contour lines.
  • niroyb 9y ago
    I've added a lot of those places manually through the "Add a missing place" in the menu. The review process either takes 2 days or stays in limbo forever. Google maps also gamified the contribution process so you can get internet points for improving their maps.
    • Tempest1981 9y ago
      I was curious about these "internet points", and found this: https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/13/google-maps-updates-it-local-guides-program-with-a-new-points-system-and-more-levels/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/13/google-maps-updates-it-loc... "... guides who get to level four will now get three months of free access to Google Play Music and 75 percent off rentals in the Google Play Movie store."
      • wingworks 9y ago
        Yep, it's a shell of its former glory. They used to give out Google Map shirts at the end of the year if you contribute allot, as well as 1TB of free Google Drive storage for a year. You also sometimes get invited to try some map-related apps before it becomes public. Very rare though.
    • lucb1e 9y ago
      Just to make sure, you're aware that this information you're contributing is to the benefit of a company that has no interest in sharing the data back with you if it's not a financial win for them? Because that's the reason I don't want to contribute: I can't even export my own changes in a standard format, let alone our collective contributions or even all data.
• cjensen 9y ago
  Google Maps, Apple Maps, and Bing Maps will all try to murder you if you ask for directions from Santa Maria, CA to Ventura, CA. The obvious route is to follow the freeway that was built on the best route between the two cities. Instead, all three really enjoy routing you onto a two-lane twisty mountain road that is five minutes shorter if you are driving a sports car and all the lights are green. Heaven help you if you are driving an RV. I've sent corrections to both Google and Apple about this. They both did nothing.
  • shaklee3 9y ago
    I've driven highway 154 many times. It's nowhere near as bad as you say, and is actually a nice break from 101.
  • saagarjha 9y ago
    You're talking about 154, right? It's not that bad…
  • thesimp 9y ago
    I recognize this. I live in a part of the Netherlands where there is only ONE highway going through the area. Yet Google Maps and TomTom both want to send me through the nature reserve instead of via the highway running parallel to the nature reserve. The reason is that the route through the nature reserve is a few kilometers shorter and the speed limits are set wrong. Both Google Maps and TomTom think you can drive at highway speeds on those roads. Signs have been setup to block cars from entering those roads during morning and evening rush hour. But still you see many people taking that road, blindly following the map instructions.
  • anc84 9y ago
    Do you mean you would prefer the 101 route? That's what both Google, Bing as well as all OSM routers I tried suggested. https://i.imgur.com/vIWC5ti.png https://i.imgur.com/vIWC5ti.png
    • cjensen 9y ago
      Yep. Normally they prefer the side route. I'm sure if traffic is bad on the side route they will adapt and take the sensible route instead.
• droopybuns 9y ago
  Android is a botnet that is collecting data. Google should be paying you to use their harvesters.
  • k3a 9y ago
    I don't get why this was downwoted? By using google maps one contribute back traffic data and route problems for free + you share your position which can be sold to billboard advertisers for analysis...
• scooter_de 9y ago
  The problem of "under addressed" places in the world is addressed (no pun intended) by several companies. Eg. What3Words (w3w.co) has created a grit of 3mx3m squares which cover the entire planet. Each of this squares is identified by three words. Post/Mail organizations in several countries already accept those addresses. Google also has the OLC (Open Location Code) to address an area of adjustable size on earth. I find w3w very convinient to communicate a place over a voice connection (radio) or by writing it down on paper. Nothing you couldn't do by sending latitude and longitude, but more convinient.
  • heartbreak 9y ago
    I’m only aware of one government postal org that uses w3w. Are there others beyond Côte d'Ivoire?
  • saagarjha 9y ago
    While the concept is interesting, the issue I have with What3Words is that they force you to use their service to figure out what an address actually means. In other words, you can't use it at all without being bound to their whims. Kind of a big deal when working with something as open and public and universal as addresses.
    • scooter_de 9y ago
      I don't understand your "what it means" statement. Can you elaborate a little bit plz?
      • maxerickson 9y ago
        Say I successfully convey to you a 3 word address from my proprietary location database: Beep boop blort. Without access to my database, you don't have much information.
  • craigds 9y ago
    Is it really more convenient? Coordinates make sense to everyone and every map tool can understand them. W3W phrases are useless unless you happen to have the app. Also, there are a few amusing clones... http://www.what3fucks.com/ http://www.what3fucks.com/
• CamperBob2 9y ago
  A good summary, if a bit repetitive, of how Apple has fallen behind in the mapping department since Scott Forstall's fateful call to divorce the company from Google Maps. But I think he buries a rather important lede farther down in the post: That sounds great—but living in San Francisco, it’s hard to imagine this working smoothly. That’s because half the time I request a ride, I have to text/call the (Uber) driver to coordinate my pickup spot. The company that really needs to fire its entire cartography department and rebuild or license a new one from scratch is Uber. The deficiencies in their maps add a ton of unnecessary friction to the customer experience, and not just in crowded urban areas. I can only imagine the frustration their drivers must feel, especially since quite a few of them aren't native English speakers. If I were Uber's new CEO, I'd treat mapping and location services as a class-one emergency, up there with any others that people commonly criticize the company for.
  • Tempest1981 9y ago
    From 2016: (what is the latest?) https://www.quora.com/What-map-API-technology-did-Uber-use-to-add-the-map-functionality-to-its-app https://www.quora.com/What-map-API-technology-did-Uber-use-t...
    • CamperBob2 9y ago
      It varies. I can always tell when they change the map provider and/or data in my area, because my Uber Eats drivers start getting lost at different intersections. If I look up my home address on Google Maps, it puts the pin in the correct location, at the actual residence. But as of a few days ago, the Uber Eats drivers aren't making it past the mailboxes at the end of my (long) driveway. They no longer appear to be showing the drivers my GPS location at all, just the location associated with the address of the residential mailbox. Very annoying in a first-world problem kind of way.
• ChuckMcM 9y ago
  A couple of things stand out for me from the article, one is that this sort of aerial image to detailed map was one of the things the US Government was doing with satellite images in the 70's, and with Google's compute resources if it this seems like the kind of 'side' use that would be encouraged. It is certainly a more useful use of compute resources than computing cryptohashes :-). The second thing was that Google owns all of their data. When I was there Maps was pretty new, Google was digesting the acquisition of the Keyhole folks (who became Google Earth) and was complaining bitterly about how restrictive the usage rights were for the map data from a major mapping company. They kicked off a program to become independent of third parties for map data and to have the most accurate data in the world. And if you turn the problem into an algorithm that can be parceled up between machines, you have way more of that than people. It's the one thing that the previous generation of computer companies didn't get, when computers are cheap having 50,000 of them isn't all that much different than having 5,000 especially if you can code up ways for them to route around damage. I think Maps is a good indication of what you can do when you think like that.
  • peterburkimsher 9y ago
    Detailed maps are certainly valuable. Getting those from satellites is impressive, and requires high-resolution imagery as well as lots of computing power. We can get some satellite imagery for free from weather satellites, but it's nowhere near the resolution needed for street maps. https://hackaday.com/2017/12/05/grabbing-raw-images-from-a-new-russian-satellite/ https://hackaday.com/2017/12/05/grabbing-raw-images-from-a-n...
    • ChuckMcM 9y ago
      Sadly you are stuck buying it from a satellite company (expensive) or buying your own satellites (more expensive). My feeling is that 'Maps' is Google's insurance policy against the erosion of search advertising margin. I could easily see Google making turn by turn or map detail a "small" $4.99/month service rather than having it be free.
  • jldugger 9y ago
    > And if you turn the problem into an algorithm that can be parceled up between machines, you have way more of that than people. It's the one thing that the previous generation of computer companies didn't get And some open source data initiatives. Open Street Map, for all it's glory, is surprisingly anti-automation. There's a lot of stuff that could probably be done with programs that they refuse because it's too hard to peer review the massive resulting changesets. Which is unfortunate, because there's a huge potential for processing images from places like Planet to provide new data and annotations that we'll just straight up miss out on.
• callumprentice 9y ago
  I wonder how much of this building information comes from the LiDAR data the StreetView cameras capture along with images. It's a couple of years old now but I wrote something to display the 3D point data for any address and was surprised to find just now that it still works. http://callumprentice.github.io/apps/street_cloud/index.html http://callumprentice.github.io/apps/street_cloud/index.html I wonder if there is a more detailed data set available these days.
  • bob_theslob646 9y ago
    Does it not depend on the area? I believe that not all street view cars had lidar capability. Very cool app!
• irrational 9y ago
  One thing I really appreciate about Google Maps is how accurate the times are. There have been numerous times where google maps says is will take x minutes to get there and I think "Nah, I'll be able to get there faster than that." Nope, I've never had google maps be off by more than a minute or so. I think it must take into account not just road conditions and traffic, but also how much I am likely to go over the speed limit.
  • GeneralMayhem 9y ago
    The crazy thing to me is that it's pretty decent at estimating even in dynamic traffic conditions. Consider US101 in the Bay area at rush hour - if you leave San Jose around 6pm, you'll drive straight into traffic, but by the time you get to SF it'll be significantly lighter. A lesser algorithm would give you a time prediction based on current traffic speeds at all points along your path, which would give you a wildly pessimistic estimate when you leave and only converge when you get close to your destination. But Maps has enough data to know that at that time of day traffic is trending better, and by how much.
    • jjeaff 9y ago
      I just figure they are using the average of other people who took the exact same trip last week when conditions were similar.
      • bob_theslob646 9y ago
        They are using people's locations in real time for traffic. >Traffic density is gathered via crowd sourcing from smartphone users using Google Maps on a mobile application in a route. In a nutshell, Google™ is analysing the GPS-determined locations transmitted by a large number of smartphone users. By calculating the speed of users along a length of road, Google™ is able to generate a Live Traffic Google Map™. https://www.drivingdirectionsandmaps.com/traffic-conditions-on-google-map/ https://www.drivingdirectionsandmaps.com/traffic-conditions-...
  • sonar_un 9y ago
• ineedasername 9y ago
  I think it just shows the primary difference between the two companies. Google is ad-revenue driven by mechanisms that leverage world-scale data mining & analysis. Apple is revenue driven by hardware that leverages high-quality product design. Oversimplifying both I'm sure, but I think most things stem from this.
• nielsbot 9y ago
  Point taken, however I appreciate using a mapping service that doesn't show ads. I also prefer Apple Maps aesthetically... minor point.
• sytelus 9y ago
  Many people don't realize why Google maps are so much better than anything out there. I would actually give lot of credit to Marissa Mayer who suddenly became in charge of maps from otherwise more higher position. Thanks to her influence in Google SLT and ability to make impressive arguments, she was able to make a case for maps as core pillar in Google's offering and consequently obtain huge investment and large talent pool to work on it. Creating these level of details world wide requires dazzling amount of investment that even some small governments can't afford. In most companies, you will not get green lighted for this because there is no real revenue coming in and its basically social charity in form of a free app. Now the reality is that you can't do self-driving cars without great maps and the day Google pulls its map app from iOS you can bet Apple is going to have a giant hole in their balance sheet.
  • puzzle 9y ago
    The more pedestrian reason for Google's investment for its own maps was that the licensing costs for data to use in turn-by-turn navigation, which is many times as expensive compared to simpler uses, were going to skyrocket once mobile adoption took off as projected. You could give millions or billions to TomTom, which is what Apple has been doing, or you could pour the same amounts into creating your own datasets, allowing you to do a lot more than navigation, i.e. anything.
    • zaptheimpaler 9y ago
      Agree, Google has fundamentally understood the power of information/data since the very beginning - its part of their DNA.
      • Splines 9y ago
        I think they understood the economics of depending on an external source for a core part of their business. Much like Netflix, they understood that the way forward was to generate their own content.
        • 9y ago
• jgh 9y ago
  Honestly I _hate_ Google Maps, but it seems like the best thing available. I wish they'd spend less time on building outlines and more time on making the UI not totally suck. Someone should make a maps startup that isn't awful (note: these examples are from the web app, which I prefer, because the mobile app is infuriating to use except for driving directions) For example if I google an address and click the link to Maps, there's no street view button. If I search for "food", the "current location" button disappears...so I have to manually scroll to wherever I am. If I search for a store or whatever in Google and then click the map, there's no current location OR street view! Typing "{whatever} near {address}" works whenever it feels like working. Half the time I get a random address on {whatever} street. The goddamn search overlay takes up about 3/4 of the screen if you accidentally click on something (and they make sure you do). On to the app: The audio driving directions have gotten better...so I give them credit there. I never drive with the display on, so audio directions are crucial. If I'm walking around somewhere and I search for restaurants that's fine..but if I make the mistake of clicking on a restaurant I get a full-screen view of reviews and shit. The map totally disappears! I'm just trying to focus the goddamn thing so I can see where it is!
  • djsumdog 9y ago
    I really agree with you. I've tried using Here Maps and Waze. Waze is just too much ad/game crap and Here works nice for navigation, but tends to crash the OS or disable mobile data randomly. With most of this article I was like "So what?" So what if Google has intelligent building vectors. It's UI is shit. You can't go back and fourth between different routes easily. You can't easily add waypoints. You can't do a lot of the stuff you could do with traditional maps. And the worst thing, half the time you can't even see the names of streets: https://www.justinobeirne.com/what-happened-to-google-maps/ https://www.justinobeirne.com/what-happened-to-google-maps/ This is especially difficult if you're walking around and just want the name of a god damn street. You gotta zoom in, jiggle things around. Fuck aerial views of buildings. When I'm walking I need to match up actual street signs to find my way around. Open Street Maps is actually pretty nice, although the views are extremely busy. It can be a bit of an overload.
• interfixus 9y ago
  I rely on OpenStreetMap these days. Except for an initial incident where the OsmAnd app directed me to drive 50 kilometers out into the Baltic Sea (but only because I had accidentally downloaded a Polish map instead of a Scandinavian one), it has so far gotten me exactly where I wanted to go, every single time. This in some contrast to the Google Maps navigator, which I have seen throwing some really weird surprises, including faulty info on the placement and nature of a major motorway exit.
• wnevets 9y ago
  Google maps is probably the only service I couldn't live without. I could get a new email address or visit some other video site but maps is just too good and important.
• daveheq 9y ago
  Google Maps downloading building structure and parked truck boxes is WAY too much to download, especially over my limited cell data plan... That's pretty ridiculous, I have almost no need for that.
• an_account 9y ago
  I've been finding that Google Maps has better getting worse in the last year or so at giving simple directions. Their turn-by-turn interface and algorithms have lead to many frustrating situations that it just didn't do before. For example I often find it recalculating my route to a side road, exit, or different freeway even though I was driving on the highlighted path. If I don't watch carefully, and don't notice it happening, I'll follow it off on some crazy recalculated route. I've switched to Apple Maps when not routing to a complex building, like a giant mall. Apple Maps' routing and turn-by-turn has really improved in the last couple years.
• njarboe 9y ago
  Google Project Sunroof[1] is a pretty cool project that I imagine uses this very detailed mapping of buildings. Check it out, especially if you are thinking about getting solar power installed at your home. I think many solar companies use it to do estimates. [1]https://www.google.com/get/sunroof https://www.google.com/get/sunroof
  • gourou 9y ago
    This is excellent. Have they got a tool to tell whether a place is in the sun or the shade depending on the time?
  • fudged71 9y ago
    There may be many more potential uses of this data in the future. Augmented reality, indoor mapping, robotics, etc.
• AlphaWeaver 9y ago
  One thing I thought was interesting was the fact that this article made liberal use of GIFs, but they were great! I have seen many an article using them comedicly and it detract from the message, but here they all conveyed important data! Excellent work!
• saagarjha 9y ago
  > Google had distinct locations for each; but Apple plotted them all at the same location I use Apple Maps almost 95% of the time, and this is one of its major annoyances. If I'm trying to find a location by eyeballing it from the map, it can sometimes be impossible to do so because there's another label on top of it.
• tomaskafka 9y ago
  Just in case anyone would ask 'why' or 'where's the money': - even privacy conscious people give their location data to their map app - google maps + google services (android) do everything they can to collect your location data even while not using the app - how to monetize that data? Measuring online-to-offline conversions! Store visits. This is what retail is after. Anyone can take $5M for an ad campaign, but if there is a single company that can prove that their ads deliver people to the stores, they get the money and they make case for getting more next time. To paraphrase Zenyep Tufekci, we're not just building dystopia to make people click ads, we're also surveilling bilions of people to measure retail ad conversions. https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dystopia_just_to_make_people_click_on_ads https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dy... (oh, and there will be a lot of byproducts of course, as the article mentions. Some of them will even be great PR, such as the self-driving cars)
  • bob_theslob646 9y ago
    >- how to monetize that data? Measuring online-to-offline conversions! Store visits. This is what retail is after. The crazy thing is that I do not believe they have started monetizing maps yet. (Sundar Pichai Implies Google Maps Will Be Monetized With Ads April 28, 2017 - Written By Dominik Bosnjak)[https://www.androidheadlines.com/2017/04/sundar-pichai-implies-google-maps-will-monetized-ads.html https://www.androidheadlines.com/2017/04/sundar-pichai-impli...]
• mooneater 9y ago
  I commented on this on HN 8 years ago -- I said Google Building Maker looks to be "providing an ideal training set for training machine learning algorithms to automatically extract 3D models from aerial photos". That may be the key to this building detail. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=879519 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=879519
• nealmueller 9y ago
  City data is improving. Wilderness data is poor. Ocean data is worst. Satellite view is not what we think it is. Oceanic satellite view is not imagery, but just blue paint. If it were imagery it'd show the Arctic as white. It's been white for 700,000 years. It's melting fast, but none of the mapping technology shows that, which makes it hard for us to protect the earth. fixmaps.org (my site)
• hota_mazi 9y ago
  The article keeps mentioning satellites but Google's imagery data is mostly provided by planes, not satellites. They have their own fleet of planes, which they have hollowed out and redesigned (with the supervision and authorization of the FAA) and fitted with their cameras. Also, it's not as simple as "Google has a six year lead on Apple in imagery": it's more that Apple can't keep up. As the article correctly states, Apple started collecting aerial imagery around the same time that Google did, they just haven't been able to execute on it as fast as Google did, and by now, they probably never will.
  • kuschku 9y ago
    If Apple can’t keep up with Google, how is anyone ever expected to launch a competitor to Google without VC money?
    • Arnt 9y ago
      Same as usual: Picking a niche and trusting that Google prefers to spend its attention on improving adwords rather than on inventing a niche product. Google is scary, because it's unusually competent for a big company. But apart from that it's the same as usual: The bigcos can devote a big team to build whatever it is you're building and then leverage their existing customer relationships to sell it to many of their existing customers. But they usually don't. They work on their big core products instead.
      • kuschku 9y ago
        Most bigcos aren't doing that because it's illegal, not because they don't want to. If you, e.g., have market dominance in operating systems, you can't prefer any web browser, install any browser as default, or advertise any based on the OS. In the same way, if you control web search, you can't prefer one web shopping site, or one web maps service. And you especially can't integrate one, but not the other. The goal of all this legislation was to ensure that a company like Google can't use their advantage in search to gain an advantage in maps, to avoid exactly the current situation.
• fagnerbrack 9y ago
  I searched for the word "scary" in the comments and found 0 occurrences. Are you serious???!!!
• carapace 9y ago
  > But you can’t call a self-driving car and say “oh, I live in the white building and the door is around the corner”. Not until twenty minutes from now... (By the time these cars need it, it will be easy to implement, is my point.)
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• mherrmann 9y ago
  Now I know why Google's reCAPTCHA is asking me to identify store fronts. Identifying cars, street signs etc is obvious for self-driving cars. But my hunch is that store fronts are to better make sense of Street View imagery.
• DanBC 9y ago
  One thing I really struggle with when using Google maps is that I have to zoom in very close to get bus stops to show up. The use case is that I get on a bus at place A, travel by bus to place F going through places B, C, D, and E. I've never been to F before. I use Google Maps to plan a journey, and chose the public transport option. When I'm on the bus I need to know when to get off, and I can only do this by zooming into the map really close. Also, the marked bus route often doesn't follow roads, which means the planner can sometimes tell you to get off at the wrong stop. Here's an image of a bus route that doesn't follow the roads: https://imgur.com/a/TPIph https://imgur.com/a/TPIph
• MrMid 9y ago
  Our local map server, Mapy.cz, has also mapped almost every building in Czech Republic (or at least it seems from my usage of the map)[1], with, presumably, waayy smaller budget. They have also the best tourist ang cycling navigation for our country. [1] https://mapy.cz/s/2gTui https://mapy.cz/s/2gTui
• xuesj 9y ago
  I prefer to use google maps when I am in USA. In China, I have to use Gaode maps with iPhone, China even banned Appple's maps.
  • client4 9y ago
    I've resorted to Baidu at the moment. Google maps in China is garbage. Hot steaming garbage.
• freshyill 9y ago
  I come from a small town with a very large ZIP code that encompasses several other very small towns. Sure, they have the shapes of buildings, but business locations from eight miles away are shown in the wrong town because they’re both on Main Street in the same ZIP code. It’s the same on both Google and Apple Maps. Neither has been responsive to my corrections through the appropriate channels. Who cares about the shapes of buildings if their directions send you to the wrong town?
• nkkollaw 9y ago
  Google is amazing. They are the best in using AI and CS in general to make my life easier. I now use 80% Google products for email, phone, photos, maps, etc. I just hope I never lose access to my account :-\
• upofadown 9y ago
  > In downtown Los Angeles, Google’s buildings are so detailed that you can sometimes see the blades inside the rooftop fans. Doesn't that mean that in that case we are just seeing image processing with no real meaning? I am not sure how this represents the first step in the creation of data from data. If we just want to see the buildings we can switch to "satellite" view. Contrast this with something like Open Street Map where you end up with an explicit description of the area that a building covers with no extraneous detail.
  • maxerickson 9y ago
    The discussion of building details is just a side trip. The data from data is more about how they have decent building representations and POIs even in pretty remote areas and so have really wide coverage on their areas of interest.
• gontard 9y ago
  I think google also use geolocalized data collected from android users.
• rasz 9y ago
  >building footprints: Google seems to have them all Curiously I noticed about a year ago corner of my building vanished from Google map, it was there 5 years ago. Even more interesting just checked right now and ANOTHER corner of same building vanished :). Both are still there on sat photo, both are modeled in 3D view, just not on the flat map. What appears to be happening is those building outlines are not coming from 3D map, but from official city documents, and those can be a total mess. I checked some recent (5 year old) buildings, and they are also missing their flat outlines.
• cooervo 9y ago
  Very interesting making data out of data.
• Dayshine 9y ago
  The City of Leicester in England has full 3D textured modelling of everything down to trees and the cars that happened to be out at the time. https://goo.gl/maps/dm8zVDGf5TP2 https://goo.gl/maps/dm8zVDGf5TP2 It's absolutely incredible.
  • anc84 9y ago
    Nokia and others had/have the same, just with less coverage. It is mostly a matter of having money to acquire all the data. The technology to turn imagery and laserscans (or similar) to 3D surfaces is booming for more than a decade.
• EugeneOZ 9y ago
  But still sometimes Apple Maps can find more shops nearby than Google Maps. At least in Barcelona.
• oh-kumudo 9y ago
  Creating data out of data is literally the job of any machine learning model to be honest. And even though it is speculation from my side, but should be not far from the reality because this problem is literally everywhere, that Google spent some really big bucks to do the manual quality control of their data by hiring thousands if not 10s of thousands qualified people. And such quality control itself is quite an art to master, and have to be done on ongoing basis. With good data, then model can better do the tricks, but data is the real gold here.
• ctz 9y ago
  The cartography is pretty good. But I'm convinced nobody who works for Google does actually use Google Maps. The quality of the software and the user experience is terrible and notably worse than ten years ago. Example 1: I had a saved route map from a long while ago. Google Maps can no longer load that map -- it is quietly truncated to the first 10 stops. Given the lack of support, Google apparently doesn't care about losing your data. Example 2: The move from 'old maps' (tile based) to 'new maps' (webgl based) was a shambles. It still doesn't work as smoothly as old maps, and old maps had working features removed like the ability to edit routes. New maps still performs terribly compared to old maps -- it's slower, less responsive, and about a quarter of the time clicks do nothing. I now use Bing maps day-to-day, which is worse than 2010-era Google Maps, but immensely better than 2017-era Google Maps.
  • j_s 9y ago
    No doubt Google Maps is A/B testing towards maximizing their key metrics; the decline in usability is a reflection of how poorly this aligns with the best interests of the end users!
  • bob_roboto 9y ago
    There is so many more examples. Also hardly any of the links in the web version have an URL behind them, so you can't just open them in a new tab when researching something. Arguably one of the core use cases of a map application.
• blunte 9y ago
  Unless I missed it, the essay doesn't include mobile phone location tracking or location search information in the speculation of how Google is doing this rich mapping. I'm sure there's a lot of AoI value in these two sources, so I would expect it to be part of the big equation.
• staticelf 9y ago
  Google Maps is also unbelievable when finding trains and such in other countries with a strange language. When I was in Japan I heavily used Google Maps because I could search using the latin (?) alphabet and get the correct kanji in return. Without Google Maps, I would have been lost a lot more. With Google Maps I easily could find bus rides and stuff that otherwise would have been impossible.
  • pouetpouet 9y ago
    I used Hyperdia.com while in Japan
• Jaruzel 9y ago
  "Google is creating data out of data." That's called 'Information' - Librarians the world over having been doing exactly this for centuries. /facepalm As an aside, the whole article also seems to be written very simplistically, and aimed at a younger audience.
• baybal2 9y ago
  Quite sophisticated are their ways. Chinese and Russian companies are simply relying on armies of human surveyor. Chinese went event further by hiring 3d artists to manually model and texture each building.
• jakubp 9y ago
  To the author of this writeup: thank you, this is a phenomenal story with compelling visuals. Oftentimes I prefer HN comment thread to the original, but in this case I am impressed by high quality analysis of the original :)
• gbbr 9y ago
  This is a very interesting read. But it’s so frustratingly long. It’s like “where are you going with this”. It’s as frustrating as interesting it is. What a unique combo.
• amelius 9y ago
  Aren't building-footprints easy to add using complementary data, such as satellite view and/or street addresses? Perhaps it could be a nice ML project: turning map data + satellite data into fuller looking map data.
  • bob_theslob646 9y ago
    >Perhaps it could be a nice ML project: turning map data + satellite data into fuller looking map data. Yeah, fun ML project. This is how much data there was in 2012... >Combining satellite, aerial and street level imagery, Google Maps has over 20 petabytes of data, which is equal to approximately 21 million gigabytes, or around 20,500 terabytes.Aug 22, 2012(http://mashable.com/2012/08/22/google-maps-facts/#yf0lqw7FlZq3 http://mashable.com/2012/08/22/google-maps-facts/#yf0lqw7FlZ...)
• chmaynard 9y ago
  Earlier this year, Google Maps was directing people traveling to my newly-constructed home to a different location several miles away. I reported the problem to Google via their app, which prompted me to indicate the correct location on a map. The new location was in their database within a day or two, and I received a thank-you email from Google. Amazing.
  • jessaustin 9y ago
    They've definitely gotten better at accepting corrections. Five years ago we just had to tell customers not to look for a driveway that didn't exist a mile away from our actual business. Now it's easy to correct any problems one notices.
    • jrnichols 9y ago
      Apple has too. I've submitted corrections, added places, changed location details, etc and they've all showed up within a couple days. I wonder if Apple has a user reputation thing going on. TomTom on the other hand... different story. They have a map editor tool, that I have yet to get to even load.
  • suvelx 9y ago
    I moved into a newly-constructed home two years ago. I first tried to correct google, and I was told I was wrong. So I tried again, and they fixed it. Then a 'local expert' decided it was wrong and now my address is on the wrong side of the road and none of my attempts to change it to be correct has succeeded. [edit] It looks like I can't even suggest an edit on it as it's a Post Code that's incorrect.
  • dom96 9y ago
    I couldn't disagree more. Perhaps you can help me out but I see no way to correct invalid addresses on Google Maps. How did you do it?
    • chmaynard 9y ago
      I'm currently using Google Maps on iOS 11.2.1. This may do it for you: 1. Bring up the app menu (tap the icon in the upper right). 2. Tap Settings. 3. Tap Edit Home or Work. 4. Tap the elipsis on the right side of the Home item. 5. Follow the instructions...
• dbatten 9y ago
  It's amazing that Google invests so many resources in making a feature like this so awesome, but then they don't have the sense to realize that nobody wants trees rendered as awful looking 3d blobs when they switch to satellite view. Just show me the freaking photo. (I know, lite mode, but the default Google has chosen is atrocious.)
• qubex 9y ago
  “Moat”... isn’t that just a description of “competitive advantage”.
• uptown 9y ago
  I'm surprised Apple hasn't scooped up Foursquare. They seem to have a great database of location information that seems like it'd complement Apple's location services nicely.
• abritinthebay 9y ago
  This starts with the assumption that Google Maps is better. I don’t get it. It’s literally worse at everything I try to use it for. - Directions are so bad I have to recommend Uber drivers not use it. - The mobile website is practically unusable with an appallingly bad UI - The mobile app is not much better, and continually tries to upsell to other google apps. The strange thing is: they own Waze which is better at basically everything. Maybe the experience on Android is better, and their desktop site is great, but I’ve been using Apple Maps and Waze and it’s just so much of a better experience that I think they’ve lost me for good.
• blauditore 9y ago
  If I'm not mistaken, Bing maps had 3D building information years ago already, before Google Maps. The author seems completely unaware of that.
• onatm 9y ago
  Great article but it may cause epilepsy. I felt really dizzy while reading it.
• darkhorn 9y ago
  Satellite imagery for close zoom levels aren't loaded for Turkey! Thete is no problem with Yandex Maps, Apple Maps and Microsoft Maps. https://support.google.com/maps/forum/AAAAQuUrST8Ixm4C6hviZQ/?hl=en https://support.google.com/maps/forum/AAAAQuUrST8Ixm4C6hviZQ...
• dsfyu404ed 9y ago
  Now if only they'd cross reference location history, elevation maps and apply some rules like "don't send someone who usually searches for directions to stuff in SV down a steep dirt road with hairpins in Vermont in December when an alternate route that's 1min slower exists" or give me a checkbox that says "don't add extra steps to a route if the net gain from the step isn't large enough" Edit: Now that I think about it "in $distance turn $direction onto $street just before/after the $business_located_there" or would be great because street signs are much harder read and identify at long distance or high speed would solve my most common problem with google maps.
• dwyerm 9y ago
  The end of the article talking about where the actual doors are reminds me a problem that we had to solve in a previous job: finding your way ON to the road network. Take this address, for instance: "9901 Grant St, Thornton, CO 80229" It is a gigantic Walmart parking lot. When you ask a navigation system to get you back on the northbound interstate highway from here, it first needs to get you out of the parking lot and connected back to the road network. A naive system would just find the nearest road and tell you to drive in that direction. In this case, it would happily tell you to simply drive west a couple hundred meters to I-25 and take a right. It doesn't understand that there's a greenbelt and a retaining wall there. It doesn't understand that the correct answer is actually to go the opposite way -- east to Grant and around to an entrance ramp. Google, by connecting parking lots to the road network has -- perhaps unintentionally -- made this problem go away.
• wdr1 9y ago
  Is the author (Justin O'Beirne) really Apple's Head of Cartography? https://www.crunchbase.com/person/justin-o-beirne https://www.crunchbase.com/person/justin-o-beirne
  • on_and_off 9y ago
    That's him. IIRC he left Apple in 2015 and only after that he resumed publicly talking about mapping products.
• rconti 9y ago
  2 funny things here: 1. None of the images loaded the first time I opened the page. 2. I was actually just griping about how bad google maps is the other day. I was searching for a business, and (at least on iOS) the surrounding businesses are all unlabeled. Apple Maps did a vastly better job of providing CONTEXT for what was around the business I was looking for. I was actually 99% sure I knew where the business was, but at a glance it was very difficult to tell on Google Maps, where on Apple Maps it was far easier -- the emphasis on structures rather than labels hurt them quite a bit in usability in this context. Ordinarily I'd agree, Google maps is "better" but I use Apple Maps most of the time because it's the default on iOS and wrks well enough.
• acd 9y ago
  One should compare Openstreet map vs Google Maps.
  • lucb1e 9y ago
    I'm a big fan of OpenStreetMap and a regular contributor, but that's just not a fair comparison. Using a billion dollars a year, of course Google has street view, satellite view, 3d buildings, live traffic info... all of which I see as nigh impossible for OpenStreetMap. But I still use OSM daily. My main mapping needs are basic needs like everyone else's: where is this thing and how do I get there? OSM is very good at that in every place I've been (most of western Europe). It's also something I believe should be free data (as in freedom), but Google keeps it all locked in. Other basic data about our physical world, like where railways or forests are, is also very accurately in there. When I need advanced stuff like live traffic, or want to see something on satellite, I'll have to resort to other services. And I think that's reasonable: they're costly to setup and maintain, so paying someone for that makes sense. If we make such a comparison, I'd rather see Google Maps starting with a large negative score for keeping it locked-in, and then comparing whether they're actually, functionally better for different common uses, rather than "oh look at this gimmick, they even have the air ducts mapped on the roof over there" as this article seems to do.
• allpratik 9y ago
  What a beautifully detailed post is this! Incredible! Also, I do agree with generated AOI's, Google can leverage it for Waymo and their other products as well.
  • lucb1e 9y ago
    To be honest, at least when looking on my phone, I found it to be a little too detailed. A thousand examples of what we already know. In my head I was playing dramatized commentary: "Gee, the POIs are round but the areas are not, they're square. And they have been adding buildings. Oh boy, could they really? Yes indeed, they seem to be following building contours. My gosh, that is so smart! And look, here as well! And (gasp) another example here!" Maybe I'm too much into openstreetmap and these things are normal to me, but "beautifully" detailed was not my experience. More like google fanboy showing off.
• kuon 9y ago
  Here in switzerland, we've had building shapes for decades (if not hundred of years). Here it what it looks like: https://map.geo.admin.ch/?topic=ech&lang=en&bgLayer=ch.swisstopo.pixelkarte-farbe&layers=ch.swisstopo.zeitreihen,ch.bfs.gebaeude_wohnungs_register,ch.bav.haltestellen-oev,ch.swisstopo.swisstlm3d-wanderwege&layers_visibility=false,false,false,false&layers_timestamp=18641231,,,&E=2537136.13&N=1152194.47&zoom=10 https://map.geo.admin.ch/?topic=ech&lang=en&bgLayer=ch.swiss... I've always found that kind of map way superior to the original "google like" maps. It's great to see that google is catching up, but I am really surprised that a database of building footprint is not something public like it is here in switzerland. Edit: Just discovered the time travel function, here in 1860: https://map.geo.admin.ch/?topic=ech&lang=en&bgLayer=ch.swisstopo.pixelkarte-farbe&layers=ch.swisstopo.zeitreihen,ch.bfs.gebaeude_wohnungs_register,ch.bav.haltestellen-oev,ch.swisstopo.swisstlm3d-wanderwege&layers_visibility=true,false,false,false&layers_timestamp=18601231,,,&E=2538102.48&N=1152776.83&zoom=8 https://map.geo.admin.ch/?topic=ech&lang=en&bgLayer=ch.swiss...
• gideon_b 9y ago
  You wouldn't believe how helpful "areas of interest" were for wandering around foreign cities. I was wandering around a city I didn't know, unable to speak the language, and yet I could easily connect corridors of interesting shops and restaurants.
• jacksmith21006 9y ago
  My biggest issue with Apple maps is lack of lane to get into when driving you get everywhere with Google maps. I can not live without this feature is not the greatest driver and really need this.
• bigbugbag 9y ago
  I was surprised that there was no building in OpenStreetMap as I'm used to OSM having detailed buildings everywhere (in my part of Europe they added cadaster maps). So I tried to locate the place shown in the article on OpenStreetMap and sure enough, if the buildings were missing when the article was writtent, they're not anymore. http://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/126762#map=17/41.33998/-89.12703 http://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/126762#map=17/41.33998... https://framapic.org/04W5qV0AS3t1/8j6obUnCNf1H.png https://framapic.org/04W5qV0AS3t1/8j6obUnCNf1H.png
• tripzilch 9y ago
  The problem is that all of this data isn't open. It's Google's. I understand the immense effort required to create maps of this detail, which is why they are protected by copyright (and database rights, a special subsection of that). However, on the one hand these maps are owned by a single company that has the singular unique infrastructure, on the whole planet, to even begin to attempt to create maps like this, that no other company (not even Apple) could start to try and get close. Google's machine learning and data-crunching abilities have no match, and there won't be a competitor that ever will. And on the other hand, the only way I can access this data is through an app that wants to track me and spy on me so badly it refuses to even remember my recent search queries if I disable Google's Location History. I mean get this, remembering recent search queries used to be a feature that made people consider a program to be "clever" or "smart". I can use ALL this machine learning and fuzzy queries, sound alike typo corrections, super smart Google tech and search with vague hints of queries like that restaurant near the thingy or whatever, and it will give me relevant results! But it refuses to remember my recent queries, a most basic feature that today is just considered basic UX instead of "clever programming", unless I allow it to spy on me. This is literally the tradeoff it's asking me to make: Do you want to be able to use the single most advanced and detailed map of the entire planet available to the public with basic User Experience niceties? Or do you want to keep your privacy and not broadcast your location to a corporation in a foreign country, specifically the one with the biggest, most out-of-control spying agency, that's --just to name one thing why I think the US/NSA and whoever lives there wanting a bite of my privacy can piss right off-- been hacking people in my home country's personal computers and devices, left and right just because anyone who is a sysadmin is considered a "strategic target" even though our countries are "allies" on paper, that apparently doesn't mean shit when attacking citizens' property. Sorry yeah it looks great, just like with cathedrals. Was a bit shit with some caveats/blood/death for the common people during the time they were built, but in a few hundred years we'll probably look at this with awe and wonder.
• mathattack 9y ago
  Is there a limit to the power of Maps when’s it’s not the default on most high end phones?