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"In Maps, ads will now appear in recommended search queries, on routing pages and during navigation" Ugh, this is sad and clever at same time - during navigati

• michaelbuckbee 7y ago
  My thought was always that they were going to start using businesses as landmarks, aka: "At Monument Dr. - just past the Starbucks where if you stop now you can get a piping hot Venti coffee for only $1.50 - make a right"
  • bsamuels 7y ago
    They already do this; it's roughly in the form of: "take a left at sunset boulevard, right past the jack in the box". I suspected it was a paid ad, but never knew for sure
    • foota 7y ago
      I believe they've stated these are not ads, but are strictly for navigation.
      • fjsolwmv 7y ago
        That makes it an unpaid ad.
        • cameronbrown 7y ago
          Cynically, yes, but this is how humans follow directions anyway. Are your friends giving you an unpaid ad when they say "head down main st, past the Burger King"?
          • whenchamenia 7y ago
            Plausable deniability is the name of the game. If an unusually well informed group has trouble telling, are they free to do either?
          • asdff 7y ago
            That's how you navigate if you had absolutely nothing to follow but word of mouth and need to remember every step, vs. a highlighted line on a map you just chug along without having to think more than a turn ahead, which you are reminded of anyway.
    • JohnFen 7y ago
      That's a terrible practice for me. The way my brain works, street names are far more useful than landmarks, particularly if those landmarks are businesses.
  • zuron7 7y ago
    They already do this heavily in India. Mostly due to a lack of good road signage. Landmarks are what defined navigation. Where I live (Bangalore), we have junctions named after KFC and Sony, cos those stores have been there for so long.
• m463 7y ago
  "How much to route traffic off the interstate past my business?" on a serious note - the Telsa in-car mapping app uses google map tiles, and they are choosng what businesses show up with icons when you look at the map.
  • judge2020 7y ago
    Does Tesla's system already show ads in place discovery/search results? I would imagine they have a "no ads" contract with Google.
    • m463 7y ago
      define "ads"? If something doesn't have "special offer" popups or a slogan, yet bubbles to the top of search results...
  • asdff 7y ago
    It's pretty telling when you search "bar" or something in a given area and the most commercial places pop up with icons and names, obscuring a sea of minor red dots that are also in fact bars. And moving the map tiles doesn't automatically research either. Unless you thoroughly scrubbed an area, searching and researching for "bar" every half dozen blocks, you are only going to gleam a small % of the places in that area. At least they haven't brought this corporatism to google earth desktop yet. I can pull up on the map every single bar and restaurant in Los Angeles in one search if I wanted to.
• cwkoss 7y ago
  Anyone who buys ad slots in Google Maps is basically trying to kill their customers.