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I was (briefly) on a Maps-adjacent team at Google circa 2015. From the outside, you just can't imagine how few Google engineers are responsible for how many pr

I was (briefly) on a Maps-adjacent team at Google circa 2015. From the outside, you just can't imagine how few Google engineers are responsible for how many products and data integrations. One example: back then it was a dozen people (literally) responsible for every single business's hours, category, and more for all of planet Earth. They automate the crap out of it and the automation mostly works (scrape structured data off websites, Google My Business, various aggregators, etc.) but it means there's no conceivable way you could provide customer support that will keep up with the volume of support requests because the support requests often ultimately have to get routed to an engineer... and there are only a dozen engineers on the team that owns stuffing all this data into Maps. And those engineers are supposed to be doing mostly feature work. Over time accuracy got better, but 95% accuracy, to say nothing of 99.9% accuracy, is unachievable to the point of being a non-goal. One of this team's bigger time sucks was just other Google engineers complaining about inaccurate data. Someone would go to their favorite restaurant, notice the hours were off, or the business category was wrong, and file a ticket. Then the team would sometimes manually edit the listing to fix it. Sometimes they'd say "no, you have to deal with the same shitty data as all our customers". But that was just the requests coming in from a few thousand users who had access to the internal ticket system and new which component to file stuff under. (Incidentally: this is the origin of the Maps feature where you can now just directly edit a listing and if other users, agree, it gets published.) So, yeah, there isn't really a scalable way to manage support requests. But HN works for some subset of cases, and I too upvote the cases that get complained about here. EDIT: accuracy in the raw data was pretty bad but on a view-weighted basis it was pretty respectable IIRC (>90%). Turns out most people on Maps are looking at the same small subset of establishments, so you have to get those right even if that means making choices that reduce accuracy on other listings.

ta17711771 6y ago
> you just can't imagine how few Google engineers are responsible for how many products and data integrations. I mean, I've seen understaffed, shitty-service companies since I was a kid. How is this unique? Fuck them all.
- snoshy 6y ago
  A lot of times, I would agree with you. In this case though, things might be a bit different. I'm not sure if you agree, but Google Maps has revolutionized physical location for a large portion of people today. Democratizing a thing mainly involves scaling it, and scaling things rapidly is a difficult task. Having only a few qualified people ready for a task of this magnitude is not surprising to me.
  - pdonis 6y ago
    > Having only a few qualified people ready for a task of this magnitude is not surprising to me. So what you're saying is, there is this hugely valuable application that has "revolutionized" things for a large fraction of the population, but it's perfectly normal that Google can't be bothered to put more than a piddly number of people on it? If it's really that valuable, Google should not handle it in this half-assed fashion. They should charge money for it, just like any other business that has something it knows is hugely valuable to a large number of people. But instead, they prefer to sell everyone's eyeballs to advertisers. How does this make sense?
    - anchpop 6y ago
      Something I think is underappreciated is that if something is supported by ads instead of a subscription, then it is more accessible to people who don't have very much money. Google used to run a program called Contributor which let you pay them the minimum amount you'd have to to opt out of ads (you basically just paid them and they used your money to automatically outbid everyone who wanted to advertise to you). I wish they brought this back because I really liked it. They changed it completely so it only worked with "participating sites" [0], which was basically nobody, then killed it altogether (but left the page up). [0]: https://contributor.google.com/v/beta https://contributor.google.com/v/beta
      - pdonis 6y ago
        > if something is supported by ads instead of a subscription, then it is more accessible to people who don't have very much money There's an easy solution to this: what economists call price discrimination. Basically, people who can afford to pay more, pay more, and people who can't afford to pay more, don't. It looks like the Contributor program you describe could have been set up to do this.
luckylion 6y ago
If I may ask you, because that's something I've wondered many times with Google: why are the docs and self-help support option so basic on most of these things? I understand the idea of "automate it, it must scale", but especially then I'd expect the systems to add/correct/delete info to be super streamlined, the documentation to be very thorough and covering all business cases etc. Yet it feels like the opposite is true: the GUIs are generally sub-par and feel like "okay, we have a great API. Can you throw some GUI on it?", the documentation is short and often either outdated or did not cover certain cases in the first place, and "what to do if this doesn't solve your problem" is rare. Is that "we want to be a platform, not a service provider" and meant to discourage end-users from using the system directly and pay a professional agency instead that handles the support issues? Because that's really the only explanation I've heard so far that makes some sense. It feels like Google is putting more manpower in developer relations than in customer relations and I've never understood why.
- mjw1007 6y ago
  On documentation: I've seen dozens of articles on this site about hiring practices from large technical companies, and Google in particular. I don't remember seeing anything suggesting they even verify that the people they're hiring are capable of writing basic documentation, let alone that they appreciate the importance of it being complete, correct, and up to date. Every indication is that Google vastly undervalues documentation, both for internal and external purposes.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    > Every indication is that Google vastly undervalues documentation, both for internal and external purposes. This just seems to be companies as a whole. Documentation is a low-status activity (no promotions or raises available for doing it) that still requires decent cognitive function, so it is not something you want to do when you are energized and ready to go nor something you can do when tired and not in the mood to work. There are no automated tests to tell you that the documentation no longer works, so the engineers would need to periodically check. We have automated tests in code because engineers won't comprehensively check everything. In my org we frantically document when an engineer gives notice. Otherwise, we can't even keep the URLs updated or maintain a running list of configuration variables.
thayne 6y ago
> the support requests often ultimately have to get routed to an engineer it sounds like there needed to be (needs to be?) tooling to allow customer support to make these changes. Fixing these kinds of things really shouldn't be something that engineers should have to do manually.
- IggleSniggle 6y ago
  There is no customer support for products like this because there is no customer. Not in that way, anyway.
- jdm2212 6y ago
  There are various ways for businesses to tell Google stuff -- structured data on their website, working with aggregators, Google My Business, etc. The problem is that (a) business can mistakenly enter wrong data (b) businesses can lie (c) businesses can fail to enter any data (d) businesses can fail to update data. Google can't let any random idiot with a smartphone edit Google Maps, and they also can't let any random idiot waste a potentially unlimited amount of customer support time on what might well be an erroneous change. So they came up with a thing where you can edit Maps but the edits only apply if some conditions that can be automatically checked are satisfied (recency, user edit quality track record, agreement among users, stuff like that). But building and validating that was a big project spanning quite a few teams and several months. The opportunity cost often isn't worth it for that (I don't know whether it was in this instance, either... but it is really cool IMO.)
bsder 6y ago
> One example: back then it was a dozen people (literally) responsible for every single business's hours, category, and more for all of planet Earth. This wouldn't matter if Google weren't a de facto monopoly. If Google were forced to spin Maps out such that it had to stand alone or die rather than being subsidized by the Eye of Sauron, these problems would begin disappearing.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  > If Google were forced to spin Maps out such that it had to stand alone or die rather than being subsidized by the Eye of Sauron, these problems would begin disappearing. Yes, because businesses struggling for cash invest in support for people who aren't paying them...
  - luckylion 6y ago
    Businesses struggling for cash need to improve their product to cater to their customers. The users may be the people that go look up real estate agents. The customers are the real estate agents. Google gets away with the quality level of their services because they are the information discovery monopolist.
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
    Before google maps, there was yellow pages, tomtom, etc. Solutions in the market existed. If google wasn't subsidizing maps, the map-making race to the bottom might have found a different business model than "support people who aren't paying them." But google offers maps at a loss and now there's dramatically fewer viable business models in the space.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  Would the world be better off without free (to users) GMaps and free GMail? I think those two services are incredibly strong products and gmail is additionally a positive equalizing force, allowing much closer to everyone to participate in modern communications. It’s maybe technically true that these problems would disappear if maps had to feed itself, but I think that would be a net negative for the world.
chrismorgan 6y ago
I find a part of the problem to also be that it simply doesn’t have a good channel for many of the problems I find on the maps themselves. Got a typo in a business listing, wrong opening hours, &c.? Sure, you can fix that. Got a road segment slightly wrong? OK, you can straighten it out. Any other case where the underlying map data or presentation is wrong? Nope, you can’t report it, and any attempt to report the issue by the channels that are available will fail to have any effect. And that’s the problem, Maps just doesn’t seem to be interested in providing, y’know, maps. It’s focused on being a business directory instead. Take https://www.google.com/maps/place/Navarre+VIC+3384,+Australia https://www.google.com/maps/place/Navarre+VIC+3384,+Australi... as an example: that pin and label on the map is almost 5km south of Navarre, because they seem to have taken the entire suburb area (which in rural areas is regularly many kilometres across) and picked a point on its boundary—I dunno, maybe the furthest point south, maybe just the start position of the polyline—rather than taking a sane point that represents where the town actually is (e.g. its post office) or even a midpoint in the suburb area. When you look through rural areas you find a substantial fraction of the labels are wrong by several kilometres. Head south to the next town, Landsborough, and it’s marked 4km down the road from where it actually is. I’ve seen some places 10km off the mark. I’ve attempted to report the Navarre case six or seven times over the last few years while living there, by three different ways (none of which is properly applicable), and it’s still stubbornly in the wrong place. (Yes, I’m mentioning this here on the off chance that someone relevant will see it and pay attention.)
- chrismorgan 6y ago
  Update: it worked! My brother just pointed out to me that Navarre is in the right place now, and Landsborough is too. Others that I didn’t mention aren’t fixed, though. As an example, Tooborac is labelled 6km south-west of the actual town.
- blackboxlogic 6y ago
  This might be the right time to suggest OpenStreetMaps. I turned to it after not being able to fix things in Google and endless advertising. OSM data is flaky... but you can fix it!
dmortin 6y ago
> One example: back then it was a dozen people (literally) responsible for every single business's hours, category, and more for all of planet Earth. And why is that? Google is not a poor company, can't they add a separate data support team for Maps which is a pretty important application? Is Google that cheap? Why should feature engineers work on data support? I understand they implement automatic validation for data, but in addition to that there should be a separate data team which checks data manually.
- IggleSniggle 6y ago
  I can imagine. Google is a company of engineers that want to engineer things. The people that work there don't want to run a business, they want to make enough money to be able to engineer things and not worry about how to pay for that. The idea of needing to roll out, manage, moderate huge teams of people to manually review data and make judgment calls would mean needing to take responsibility for the listings and needing to care about micro-accuracy. Google doesn't want to be the "documentation team of the world," they want to be the "automated documentation generator for the world." Because that's an interesting engineering problem. As soon as it becomes primarily a people problem, Google individuals would just rather work on other things all things considered. Even if there is a business case for making this information more accurate, it's just a fundamentally different mindset. You can't hire your way into getting that work delegated very easily either when the mindset of "solve it once with code so that you don't need to solve it 5 billion times by hand" permeates the culture.
onetimemanytime 6y ago
>>back then it was a dozen people (literally) responsible for every single business's hours, category, and more for all of planet Earth. Well, they are startup, low on cash so we should understand. As they start making money, no doubt they'll step up. /s Google should shunned by us and investigated for antitrust.
saalweachter 6y ago
> From the outside, you just can't imagine how few Google engineers are responsible for how many products and data integrations. I mean, from one perspective, sure, it'd be nice if there were a team of thousands to handle this problem. But from another perspective, you just said there were a dozen people staffed to handle a single feature of a single product. Out of how many features, out of how many products? My first job was at a start up back in the comparison shopping era where our goal was to get every product for sale on the internet into one place. For several years, I was responsible for all of indexing and search; another engineer was responsible for everything related to the front-end, another for everything related to crawling and scraping, and a forth worked on a variety of projects. Four engineers to cover every store's inventory in the world. So, you know, coming from that world, the idea that there are a dozen people responsible for just business hours is crazy. (For completeness, our engineering team fluctuated as high as a dozen when the company was flush with investor cash, down to four for a long stretch when the company went bankrupt for awhile, and then up to a half dozen or so when the company was profitable for a span.)
- cameronbrown 6y ago
  Usually at Google, small teams are the norm (~5-10) people and they completely own features and products. I think OP mentioned their team was responsible for all data ingestion in Maps, not just business hours. That's not a small problem by any stretch of the imagination because of the consequences of getting it wrong.
  - jdm2212 6y ago
    The team I'm thinking of was responsible for structured data ingest/extraction -- business hours and such things, but not all data.
6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
> EDIT: accuracy in the raw data was pretty bad but on a view-weighted basis it was pretty respectable IIRC (>90%). Turns out most people on Maps are looking at the same small subset of establishments, so you have to get those right even if that means making choices that reduce accuracy on other listings. If we looked at a breakdown of whose info was accurate and whose was incorrect, there'd probably be some harmful biases in there, is that right? Isn't there some sense of responsibility here? Like, it's understandable how difficult it is to do this in a way where there aren't a small fraction of people being harmed, but that's not really a defense that they aren't causing harm. It seems like a defense along the lines of "It's impossible to be the good guys at scale for free, so of course we can't be the good guys."
- jdm2212 6y ago
  There's no way around the precision/recall tradeoff. Every map and business listing ever created has this problem; either you carefully vet listings, in which case you miss lots and by the time you publish they're out of date anyway, or you publish whatever you've got and a lot of it is crap. You have to pick some balance of precision and recall. The yellow pages and paper maps did the same thing. They were handmade so they aimed higher on precision and lower on recency/recall. (Imagine opening a new business the day after the Yellow Pages has gotten dropped off at everyone's front door. You're screwed for the next year or whatever.) Maps hasn't picked the wrong balance; it's just a different balance that as a user you have to understand and account for.
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
    A single precision-recall curve isn't an immovable fact of life. You can bump up the whole PR curve with money, for example spending on customer support and letting people fix issues when they're being harmed by google maps's mistakes. When I said "It's impossible to be the good guys at scale for free, so of course we can't be the good guys," I wasn't arguing that it is in fact possible to do it the way google is, just better. The argument is that doing it with a different business model or just not doing it are also options. Who knows what emerges? Maybe there's an alternate universe out there where google introduced an automatically gnerated encyclopedia and wikipedia was relegated to an openstreetmaps-like background, while people on alternate-HN argue about how alternate-google simply can't do any better because of how fundamentally hard the problem is (and it is fundamentally hard, no argument there).
dannyw 6y ago
Anecdote: I once went to a mini golf / bar place and the Google Maps listing said it was closed for today only. I went in and the owner said they’re open. Once I got in, I saw dozens of Googlers were doing a team building event. I suggested a edit to revert the “closed today” hours and sent a picture of the hours. The edit was somehow rejected immediately. As a “local guide” who volunteers to improve listings of local businesses, this left a sour taste in my mouth. I also don’t believe that out of the 50 Googlers who were there that day, not one tried correcting the “error”. This leads me to believe it was malicious.
- jdm2212 6y ago
  The business owner probably put "closed for private event" or some such in structured data on the website or in Google My Business. Your edit was rejected because it conflicted with a highly credible recent update (the one from the business owner).
reaperducer 6y ago
you just can't imagine how few Google engineers are responsible for how many products and data integrations If Google was a scrappy startup with a few dozen employees, people might be more sympathetic. But Google has hundreds of billions of dollars at its disposal to fix the problem. It could purchase a small country and employ every person in that country to fix its problems. But Google won't admit that people can do what algorithms can't, and that's what causes Google to get so much hatred from the public.
- otterley 6y ago
  As a person who works for a similarly-endowed company, let me tell you: no amount of money you can spend right now can give you qualified engineers you need to make every function of every business work perfectly. Finding qualified engineers who have the skills you're looking for who aren't happily employed and making above-market rate already is often a real challenge. And this is for positions that would increase the run rate or help make a business more profitable! But when it comes to businesses that are not profit centers - like maintaining business listings - I would expect those to run pretty lean. Google isn't a charity, after all.
  - detaro 6y ago
    It's kinda funny and sad that the reaction to "these companies shouldn't try to solve everything with software and invest in actual customer support infrastructure" is "but it's sooo hard to find engineers to solve all this automatically!". Which is exactly the point the parent comment made.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - noodle 6y ago
    > Finding qualified engineers who have the skills you're looking for who aren't happily employed and making above-market rate already is often a real challenge. As a happily employed engineer who has FAANG recruiter friends and gets scouted fairly regularly, I think you also forgot "and is willing to jump through the hoops you put in front of them". Also, this doesn't sound like it needs to be an engineering problem. A customer support team could alleviate the workload. Even if its an internal-only, non-public support team, just people whose job it is to do the manual data scrubbing. This sounds like a possible revenue opportunity as well. People would probably pay for the ability to ensure accurate data for their Places, which could also serve as a way for G to ensure the Place data is valid and meets their editorial guidelines. Don't know if this already exists or not but it sounds like it should.
ssalazar 6y ago
I wasn't there so I can't argue with your experience, but the fact that engineering is so heavily involved seems like the crux of the issue. These are fundamentally product and data management issues. Why would an engineer need to be involved in updating a phone number? Sure, in some cases a support issue may call into question fundamental architecture issues and require engineering to get involved. But a good product management process can look at the volume of support requests and say "90% of these could be solved with features X,Y,Z and training a support team."

ta17711771 6y ago

> you just can't imagine how few Google engineers are responsible for how many products and data integrations. I mean, I've seen understaffed, shitty-service companies since I was a kid. How is this unique? Fuck them all.

snoshy 6y ago
A lot of times, I would agree with you. In this case though, things might be a bit different. I'm not sure if you agree, but Google Maps has revolutionized physical location for a large portion of people today. Democratizing a thing mainly involves scaling it, and scaling things rapidly is a difficult task. Having only a few qualified people ready for a task of this magnitude is not surprising to me.
- pdonis 6y ago
  > Having only a few qualified people ready for a task of this magnitude is not surprising to me. So what you're saying is, there is this hugely valuable application that has "revolutionized" things for a large fraction of the population, but it's perfectly normal that Google can't be bothered to put more than a piddly number of people on it? If it's really that valuable, Google should not handle it in this half-assed fashion. They should charge money for it, just like any other business that has something it knows is hugely valuable to a large number of people. But instead, they prefer to sell everyone's eyeballs to advertisers. How does this make sense?
  - anchpop 6y ago
    Something I think is underappreciated is that if something is supported by ads instead of a subscription, then it is more accessible to people who don't have very much money. Google used to run a program called Contributor which let you pay them the minimum amount you'd have to to opt out of ads (you basically just paid them and they used your money to automatically outbid everyone who wanted to advertise to you). I wish they brought this back because I really liked it. They changed it completely so it only worked with "participating sites" [0], which was basically nobody, then killed it altogether (but left the page up). [0]: https://contributor.google.com/v/beta https://contributor.google.com/v/beta
    - pdonis 6y ago
      > if something is supported by ads instead of a subscription, then it is more accessible to people who don't have very much money There's an easy solution to this: what economists call price discrimination. Basically, people who can afford to pay more, pay more, and people who can't afford to pay more, don't. It looks like the Contributor program you describe could have been set up to do this.

luckylion 6y ago

If I may ask you, because that's something I've wondered many times with Google: why are the docs and self-help support option so basic on most of these things? I understand the idea of "automate it, it must scale", but especially then I'd expect the systems to add/correct/delete info to be super streamlined, the documentation to be very thorough and covering all business cases etc. Yet it feels like the opposite is true: the GUIs are generally sub-par and feel like "okay, we have a great API. Can you throw some GUI on it?", the documentation is short and often either outdated or did not cover certain cases in the first place, and "what to do if this doesn't solve your problem" is rare. Is that "we want to be a platform, not a service provider" and meant to discourage end-users from using the system directly and pay a professional agency instead that handles the support issues? Because that's really the only explanation I've heard so far that makes some sense. It feels like Google is putting more manpower in developer relations than in customer relations and I've never understood why.

mjw1007 6y ago
On documentation: I've seen dozens of articles on this site about hiring practices from large technical companies, and Google in particular. I don't remember seeing anything suggesting they even verify that the people they're hiring are capable of writing basic documentation, let alone that they appreciate the importance of it being complete, correct, and up to date. Every indication is that Google vastly undervalues documentation, both for internal and external purposes.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  > Every indication is that Google vastly undervalues documentation, both for internal and external purposes. This just seems to be companies as a whole. Documentation is a low-status activity (no promotions or raises available for doing it) that still requires decent cognitive function, so it is not something you want to do when you are energized and ready to go nor something you can do when tired and not in the mood to work. There are no automated tests to tell you that the documentation no longer works, so the engineers would need to periodically check. We have automated tests in code because engineers won't comprehensively check everything. In my org we frantically document when an engineer gives notice. Otherwise, we can't even keep the URLs updated or maintain a running list of configuration variables.

thayne 6y ago

> the support requests often ultimately have to get routed to an engineer it sounds like there needed to be (needs to be?) tooling to allow customer support to make these changes. Fixing these kinds of things really shouldn't be something that engineers should have to do manually.

IggleSniggle 6y ago
There is no customer support for products like this because there is no customer. Not in that way, anyway.
jdm2212 6y ago
There are various ways for businesses to tell Google stuff -- structured data on their website, working with aggregators, Google My Business, etc. The problem is that (a) business can mistakenly enter wrong data (b) businesses can lie (c) businesses can fail to enter any data (d) businesses can fail to update data. Google can't let any random idiot with a smartphone edit Google Maps, and they also can't let any random idiot waste a potentially unlimited amount of customer support time on what might well be an erroneous change. So they came up with a thing where you can edit Maps but the edits only apply if some conditions that can be automatically checked are satisfied (recency, user edit quality track record, agreement among users, stuff like that). But building and validating that was a big project spanning quite a few teams and several months. The opportunity cost often isn't worth it for that (I don't know whether it was in this instance, either... but it is really cool IMO.)

bsder 6y ago

> One example: back then it was a dozen people (literally) responsible for every single business's hours, category, and more for all of planet Earth. This wouldn't matter if Google weren't a de facto monopoly. If Google were forced to spin Maps out such that it had to stand alone or die rather than being subsidized by the Eye of Sauron, these problems would begin disappearing.

MattGaiser 6y ago
> If Google were forced to spin Maps out such that it had to stand alone or die rather than being subsidized by the Eye of Sauron, these problems would begin disappearing. Yes, because businesses struggling for cash invest in support for people who aren't paying them...
- luckylion 6y ago
  Businesses struggling for cash need to improve their product to cater to their customers. The users may be the people that go look up real estate agents. The customers are the real estate agents. Google gets away with the quality level of their services because they are the information discovery monopolist.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
  Before google maps, there was yellow pages, tomtom, etc. Solutions in the market existed. If google wasn't subsidizing maps, the map-making race to the bottom might have found a different business model than "support people who aren't paying them." But google offers maps at a loss and now there's dramatically fewer viable business models in the space.
sokoloff 6y ago
Would the world be better off without free (to users) GMaps and free GMail? I think those two services are incredibly strong products and gmail is additionally a positive equalizing force, allowing much closer to everyone to participate in modern communications. It’s maybe technically true that these problems would disappear if maps had to feed itself, but I think that would be a net negative for the world.

chrismorgan 6y ago

I find a part of the problem to also be that it simply doesn’t have a good channel for many of the problems I find on the maps themselves. Got a typo in a business listing, wrong opening hours, &c.? Sure, you can fix that. Got a road segment slightly wrong? OK, you can straighten it out. Any other case where the underlying map data or presentation is wrong? Nope, you can’t report it, and any attempt to report the issue by the channels that are available will fail to have any effect. And that’s the problem, Maps just doesn’t seem to be interested in providing, y’know, maps. It’s focused on being a business directory instead. Take https://www.google.com/maps/place/Navarre+VIC+3384,+Australia https://www.google.com/maps/place/Navarre+VIC+3384,+Australi... as an example: that pin and label on the map is almost 5km south of Navarre, because they seem to have taken the entire suburb area (which in rural areas is regularly many kilometres across) and picked a point on its boundary—I dunno, maybe the furthest point south, maybe just the start position of the polyline—rather than taking a sane point that represents where the town actually is (e.g. its post office) or even a midpoint in the suburb area. When you look through rural areas you find a substantial fraction of the labels are wrong by several kilometres. Head south to the next town, Landsborough, and it’s marked 4km down the road from where it actually is. I’ve seen some places 10km off the mark. I’ve attempted to report the Navarre case six or seven times over the last few years while living there, by three different ways (none of which is properly applicable), and it’s still stubbornly in the wrong place. (Yes, I’m mentioning this here on the off chance that someone relevant will see it and pay attention.)

chrismorgan 6y ago
Update: it worked! My brother just pointed out to me that Navarre is in the right place now, and Landsborough is too. Others that I didn’t mention aren’t fixed, though. As an example, Tooborac is labelled 6km south-west of the actual town.
blackboxlogic 6y ago
This might be the right time to suggest OpenStreetMaps. I turned to it after not being able to fix things in Google and endless advertising. OSM data is flaky... but you can fix it!

dmortin 6y ago

> One example: back then it was a dozen people (literally) responsible for every single business's hours, category, and more for all of planet Earth. And why is that? Google is not a poor company, can't they add a separate data support team for Maps which is a pretty important application? Is Google that cheap? Why should feature engineers work on data support? I understand they implement automatic validation for data, but in addition to that there should be a separate data team which checks data manually.

IggleSniggle 6y ago
I can imagine. Google is a company of engineers that want to engineer things. The people that work there don't want to run a business, they want to make enough money to be able to engineer things and not worry about how to pay for that. The idea of needing to roll out, manage, moderate huge teams of people to manually review data and make judgment calls would mean needing to take responsibility for the listings and needing to care about micro-accuracy. Google doesn't want to be the "documentation team of the world," they want to be the "automated documentation generator for the world." Because that's an interesting engineering problem. As soon as it becomes primarily a people problem, Google individuals would just rather work on other things all things considered. Even if there is a business case for making this information more accurate, it's just a fundamentally different mindset. You can't hire your way into getting that work delegated very easily either when the mindset of "solve it once with code so that you don't need to solve it 5 billion times by hand" permeates the culture.

onetimemanytime 6y ago

>>back then it was a dozen people (literally) responsible for every single business's hours, category, and more for all of planet Earth. Well, they are startup, low on cash so we should understand. As they start making money, no doubt they'll step up. /s Google should shunned by us and investigated for antitrust.

saalweachter 6y ago

> From the outside, you just can't imagine how few Google engineers are responsible for how many products and data integrations. I mean, from one perspective, sure, it'd be nice if there were a team of thousands to handle this problem. But from another perspective, you just said there were a dozen people staffed to handle a single feature of a single product. Out of how many features, out of how many products? My first job was at a start up back in the comparison shopping era where our goal was to get every product for sale on the internet into one place. For several years, I was responsible for all of indexing and search; another engineer was responsible for everything related to the front-end, another for everything related to crawling and scraping, and a forth worked on a variety of projects. Four engineers to cover every store's inventory in the world. So, you know, coming from that world, the idea that there are a dozen people responsible for just business hours is crazy. (For completeness, our engineering team fluctuated as high as a dozen when the company was flush with investor cash, down to four for a long stretch when the company went bankrupt for awhile, and then up to a half dozen or so when the company was profitable for a span.)

cameronbrown 6y ago
Usually at Google, small teams are the norm (~5-10) people and they completely own features and products. I think OP mentioned their team was responsible for all data ingestion in Maps, not just business hours. That's not a small problem by any stretch of the imagination because of the consequences of getting it wrong.
- jdm2212 6y ago
  The team I'm thinking of was responsible for structured data ingest/extraction -- business hours and such things, but not all data.

6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago

> EDIT: accuracy in the raw data was pretty bad but on a view-weighted basis it was pretty respectable IIRC (>90%). Turns out most people on Maps are looking at the same small subset of establishments, so you have to get those right even if that means making choices that reduce accuracy on other listings. If we looked at a breakdown of whose info was accurate and whose was incorrect, there'd probably be some harmful biases in there, is that right? Isn't there some sense of responsibility here? Like, it's understandable how difficult it is to do this in a way where there aren't a small fraction of people being harmed, but that's not really a defense that they aren't causing harm. It seems like a defense along the lines of "It's impossible to be the good guys at scale for free, so of course we can't be the good guys."

jdm2212 6y ago
There's no way around the precision/recall tradeoff. Every map and business listing ever created has this problem; either you carefully vet listings, in which case you miss lots and by the time you publish they're out of date anyway, or you publish whatever you've got and a lot of it is crap. You have to pick some balance of precision and recall. The yellow pages and paper maps did the same thing. They were handmade so they aimed higher on precision and lower on recency/recall. (Imagine opening a new business the day after the Yellow Pages has gotten dropped off at everyone's front door. You're screwed for the next year or whatever.) Maps hasn't picked the wrong balance; it's just a different balance that as a user you have to understand and account for.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
  A single precision-recall curve isn't an immovable fact of life. You can bump up the whole PR curve with money, for example spending on customer support and letting people fix issues when they're being harmed by google maps's mistakes. When I said "It's impossible to be the good guys at scale for free, so of course we can't be the good guys," I wasn't arguing that it is in fact possible to do it the way google is, just better. The argument is that doing it with a different business model or just not doing it are also options. Who knows what emerges? Maybe there's an alternate universe out there where google introduced an automatically gnerated encyclopedia and wikipedia was relegated to an openstreetmaps-like background, while people on alternate-HN argue about how alternate-google simply can't do any better because of how fundamentally hard the problem is (and it is fundamentally hard, no argument there).

dannyw 6y ago

Anecdote: I once went to a mini golf / bar place and the Google Maps listing said it was closed for today only. I went in and the owner said they’re open. Once I got in, I saw dozens of Googlers were doing a team building event. I suggested a edit to revert the “closed today” hours and sent a picture of the hours. The edit was somehow rejected immediately. As a “local guide” who volunteers to improve listings of local businesses, this left a sour taste in my mouth. I also don’t believe that out of the 50 Googlers who were there that day, not one tried correcting the “error”. This leads me to believe it was malicious.

jdm2212 6y ago
The business owner probably put "closed for private event" or some such in structured data on the website or in Google My Business. Your edit was rejected because it conflicted with a highly credible recent update (the one from the business owner).

reaperducer 6y ago

you just can't imagine how few Google engineers are responsible for how many products and data integrations If Google was a scrappy startup with a few dozen employees, people might be more sympathetic. But Google has hundreds of billions of dollars at its disposal to fix the problem. It could purchase a small country and employ every person in that country to fix its problems. But Google won't admit that people can do what algorithms can't, and that's what causes Google to get so much hatred from the public.

otterley 6y ago
As a person who works for a similarly-endowed company, let me tell you: no amount of money you can spend right now can give you qualified engineers you need to make every function of every business work perfectly. Finding qualified engineers who have the skills you're looking for who aren't happily employed and making above-market rate already is often a real challenge. And this is for positions that would increase the run rate or help make a business more profitable! But when it comes to businesses that are not profit centers - like maintaining business listings - I would expect those to run pretty lean. Google isn't a charity, after all.
- detaro 6y ago
  It's kinda funny and sad that the reaction to "these companies shouldn't try to solve everything with software and invest in actual customer support infrastructure" is "but it's sooo hard to find engineers to solve all this automatically!". Which is exactly the point the parent comment made.
- deleted 6y ago
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- noodle 6y ago
  > Finding qualified engineers who have the skills you're looking for who aren't happily employed and making above-market rate already is often a real challenge. As a happily employed engineer who has FAANG recruiter friends and gets scouted fairly regularly, I think you also forgot "and is willing to jump through the hoops you put in front of them". Also, this doesn't sound like it needs to be an engineering problem. A customer support team could alleviate the workload. Even if its an internal-only, non-public support team, just people whose job it is to do the manual data scrubbing. This sounds like a possible revenue opportunity as well. People would probably pay for the ability to ensure accurate data for their Places, which could also serve as a way for G to ensure the Place data is valid and meets their editorial guidelines. Don't know if this already exists or not but it sounds like it should.

ssalazar 6y ago

I wasn't there so I can't argue with your experience, but the fact that engineering is so heavily involved seems like the crux of the issue. These are fundamentally product and data management issues. Why would an engineer need to be involved in updating a phone number? Sure, in some cases a support issue may call into question fundamental architecture issues and require engineering to get involved. But a good product management process can look at the volume of support requests and say "90% of these could be solved with features X,Y,Z and training a support team."