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A business model based on data hoarding will never last long-term. As soon as one open source player steps up that's 60% as good, it's over. Like Encarta or Bri
by zelly 7y ago
A business model based on data hoarding will never last long-term. As soon as one open source player steps up that's 60% as good, it's over. Like Encarta or Britannica vs. Wikipedia.
Lasting value comes from the software in between the database and the view. In the case of encyclopedias or maps, the software is the most trivial part.
I really think Google Maps will die. It's just unlikely that for the rest of history, no one will improve OpenStreetMaps to the point that it is competitive.
You need a massive amount of capital to create a redundant data set that has a death clock, doing nothing good for the world but extracting some small rent created by antitrust laws. No thanks.
- traderjane 7y agoApple Maps is way more than 60% there in terms of quality but I still don’t find it very compelling for the same reason I won’t switch to DuckDuckGo - a palpable difference in quality gets me paranoid and makes me double check a lot of stuff. That instinct to double check makes me go “Oh well let’s just use Google.”
- ncmncm 7y agoFortunately, the quality of Google searches has been declining at such a rate that you will soon be double-checking on DDG, instead.
- andai 7y agoDon't they get their results from Google, though?
- Ndymium 7y agoNo, I think it's Bing and their own index.
- jakear 7y agoIt’s pretty much just Bing. Saw posted a bit ago that if you DDG “what is my user agent”, the website preview text will show that it’s Bing. Which means DDG is just whitelabling Bing’s index. I use bing exclusively. Sometimes I don’t find what I want, and switching to google is as simple as swapping out the authority. The query syntax is the same.
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- incompatible 7y agoIt has already passed that point for me, given that Google is a) subject to censorship, on a per-country basis b) likes to return search results that don't have much to do with your query, apparently because that's what "most people" want c) records every query you make from your IP address, with no way to turn it off if you aren't logged in to a Google account d) the results I get from DDG are generally what I need.
- seph-reed 7y agoI'm currently testing out https://beta.cliqz.com/ https://beta.cliqz.com/ If you use Brave, you can easily choose your search engine with `:g` for google. You can also set your own shortcuts for any search box on any website.
- sm4rk0 7y agoIt's all possible with Firefox and DuckDuckGo.
- nyolfen 7y agocustom search keywords have been available in firefox for at least 15 years and chrome since it was released
- mackrevinack 7y agoyou have to use the shift key to type a colon though or if you're in mobile you have to long press. same with duckduckgo's exclamation mark. I much prefer the Firefox method where you add the search shortcut to a browser bookmark and then if you sync your bookmarks to the mobile app. I use gg for Google, gi for Google images. dd for duckduckgo and di for ddg images etc
- asdff 7y agoApple maps has gotten a lot better than release but it still has a long way to go imo. It's probably fine in the bay area at this point, but boy does it do some dumb shit in LA. It's worse than waze, and waze is worthless (an unprotected left across a six lane boulevard is just not happening, among other similar boneheaded moves). Google also spoils me with multi modal options, although the transit estimates seem to be a complete stab in the dark and there are quirks like invisible buses. The bike timing is also useful, but the routing is usually junk and profoundly unsafe. Living here has taught me that all these apps generally suck, just google maps seems to suck slightly less.
- biztos 7y agoLast time I was in SF (last August) Apple Maps couldn’t even correctly locate the Walgreens stores downtown. I so much want it to be good, but Apple refuses to take it seriously even in their own back yard.
- minikites 7y ago>As soon as one open source player steps up that's 60% as good, it's over. Does this imply that Linux is <60% as good as Windows because it's not over?
- Armisael16 7y agoI think it implies that Windows is not a business based on data-hoarding.
- pgeorgi 7y agoFor the use case of running whatever win32 executable is promoted on zdnet.com (or pcworld.com or whatever is out there that appeals to computer users that aren't developers) any given day? Yes.
- owl57 7y agoDo they actually promote non-game win32 executables these days? I thought current fashion is mostly services with mobile and web apps, and sometimes Electron ones?
- yabadabadoes 7y agoWindows is not over? I see Microsoft as similar to IBM now. They will make a lot of money from their Rolodex, possibly more than they ever made before, but they no longer own a relevant platform someone would write new software for.
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- s17n 7y agoTraditional encyclopedias didn't lose because of their intellectual property model, they lost because they were trying to charge money for their product, so a free as in beer competitor was able to take all their market share. A maps data set will require constant updating and the quality of the data set will be determined by the amount of work put into it on an ongoing basis. The question is which number is bigger: the monetary value of the time people are willing to donate making contributions to openstreetmap, or the amount of money that Google makes on map ads and can therefore spend improving the data quality.
- mantap 7y agoThere are parts of the world that have much better OSM coverage than Google maps, e.g eastern Indonesia. I don't think OSM is ever going to beat Google in for instance New York City but it absolutely can and does beat Google in parts of the world that are not profitable for Google to map. That's the problem with a for-profit map: consistency.
- codeka 7y agoThe exact same problem exists with volunteer-maintained maps. In fact it's even worse there because at least with a commercial map, quality is basically correlated with where the users are. With a volunteer-maintained map, quality is correlated with where the volunteers are, which is not necessarily going to be where the users are.
- carlinmack 7y agoThousands of volunteers specifically map remote areas they don't live in through the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap team
- dmihal 7y agoEvery local municipality already maintains GIS data, I imagine that some day these systems will automatically integrate into a public, open database like OSM. Sidenote, the FOAM project is doing some interesting work into geospacial data on-the-blockchain.
- macintux 7y ago> I really think Google Maps will die. It's just unlikely that for the rest of history, no one will improve OpenStreetMaps to the point that it is competitive. From reading the analyses at https://www.justinobeirne.com/ https://www.justinobeirne.com/, plus just generally following the tech industry, I'm convinced Google Maps will never die, at least not in any timeframe relevant to this discussion. Between autonomous vehicles at Waymo and Google's desire to provide intelligent suggestions to their Android and web users, they need to have as comprehensive a data set as algorithmically possible. I suppose it's possible that OSM could become good enough that Google would only need to supply a proprietary layer on top of it for their own needs, but given that they can collect better intelligence about roads and buildings than anyone else through their unwitting spies, I doubt they'd want to give up control over the full stack.
- thw0rted 7y agoThis thread seems to be forgetting that Google Maps didn't just replace the atlas (for looking up names of things) and the dedicated GPS (for routing / directions), they also replaced the radar detector (OK that's Waze, but same people and same data), and the phone book. I don't know about you, but I haven't bothered to look at any of the various "yellow pages" sites (to find a phone number or address), nor at Yelp (to find business reviews) in many years. And to make matters worse, I'm actually one of the volunteers feeding free labor / data to Maps, because I post reviews and make edits to business information. What can I say? They're really good at what they do.