6 ms·

I cannot comprehend how the developed world gave up the POI landscape to one American company. Without a fight or second thought.

vosper 5y ago
Didn’t Google put a lot of the POI data together themselves? And aren’t there lots of competitors? And nothing but money stopping another player from entering the market?
- jiggawatts 5y ago
  When Apple Maps got released and everbody made fun of how bad it was, it was revealed that Google Maps had something like 6000 people working on it for years and years, funded through Alphabet corporation's search monopoly and ad revenue. Not the maps ad revenue, that's a pittance. The search revenue. And note that a company that was the world's biggest (or nearly so) at the time failed to catch up, and has still failed, despite also dipping deep into an unrelated (near-monopolistic) source of funding. They apparently "only" had 1000 staff. There aren't lots of competitors, and nobody has a hope in the world of catching up with Google Maps and their illegal use of their monopoly to dominate other markets. Even other companies illegally abusing their own near-monopoly position have failed!
  - scrollaway 5y ago
    I don't understand this take. Google Maps is one of the world's greatest modern achievements. It's an incredible resource, and it's free. I have no idea what the actual numbers are but if you told me it collectively saved hundreds of billions of dollars a year i wouldn't be surprised. Not to mention the cultural value of being able to teleport virtually anywhere in the world and see the streets, visit places etc. Isn't it a good thing that Google, for all their ills, put their money to work on this? Isn't this one of those capitalism success stories so many people here rave about?
    - xapata 5y ago
      I was on my way to an important meeting and Google Maps had an outage. I panicked, and it took me a good 5 minutes to realize there were other map products that I could use to get directions.
    - slownews45 5y ago
      A fair number of HN takes are snark and critique I think these days, it's a bit more reddit now? I think folks underestimate just HOW MUCH data google maps has and how many users it has, and the integration / scale is impressive particularly as some parts of the system are real time. They seem to update both street view and satellite data pretty frequently, and you can go back in time in sat vie as well, so we have a geo and time dimension now. When I do routing I can route by walking, transit, driving etc. It seems to know every train / bus route and stop and even schedule. It seems to have most businesses. With street view I can zoom from space to a street and see a storefront. This is stuff the CIA spends $20 billion on and gets a crappy product only 3 users at a time can use in a room.
      - durnygbur 5y ago
        > When I do routing I can route by walking, transit, driving etc. It seems to know every train / bus route and stop and even schedule. Not only that but they seem to route through the "most popular" or "most attended routes" crowdsourced by their unaware users. Meanwhile others just calculate the "best time" or "shortest path" routing.
        eythian 5y ago
        I've wondered about this. I sometimes use it for biking if I'm going to an unfamiliar part of the city, and its biking directions sometimes end up a bit weird, like taking a path that, while slightly shorter, is a bit more uncomfortable (crossing somewhere with busy traffic for example.) I've also noticed that it doesn't know about many easy to cross places that everyone uses and will suggest a longer route to an "official" U-turnable spot. So, for the sections of the route I know I often ignore its directions and go my preferred way and just let it catch up. Assuming that many other people around here are making the same choices as me (perhaps a big assumption in some cases, definitely not all), it still has kept recommending the less-preferred routes.
  - charcircuit 5y ago
    Who cares where in the company money funding it comes from. It's normal for a company to reinvest it's profit from other products to build new ones.
  - marcellus23 5y ago
    Do you have sources on those employee numbers? Also, even if Apple had an equal number of employees and worked as fast as Google, of course they wouldn’t be able to catch up. Google has a head start. But it’s not like Apple isn’t leagues ahead of where Google was in 2011 by now.
    - native_samples 5y ago
      I worked on Maps for a while. The 6000 number must surely include the contractor army that was authoring the maps themselves. Google is a lot bigger than it once was, but when I worked on it there were perhaps "only" 300-500 engineers working on the project. Still an enormous effort. However there were thousands more people in India working around the clock tracing satellite photos and using street view imagery to create in-house maps. So I can believe the raw number.
  - eru 5y ago
    Google doesn't have a search monopoly.
    - deadbunny 5y ago
      They have over 90% of the search market globally[1]. 1. https://sparktoro.com/blog/as-the-antitrust-case-against-google-kicks-off-heres-where-the-doj-should-start/ https://sparktoro.com/blog/as-the-antitrust-case-against-goo...
      - eru 5y ago
        Yes. That doesn't make them a monopoly, though.
  - YetAnotherNick 5y ago
    > Not the maps ad revenue, that's a pittance Source? I was under the impression maps are profitable for Google.
- totetsu 5y ago
  By themselves do you mean how they tricked a bunch of "volunteers" to do it for them with google photos gps metadata scraping, google maps local guides, and Ingress.
- dariosalvi78 5y ago
  one way for making Google maps less relevant would be if all the other companies working on maps, including Apple, would instead curate an open repository, like on OSM. Yes, Google could also make use of it, but it will have to "give back" for example when updating info. I see maps and POIs as an infrastructure-like good, like Linux or Wikipedia, which could be shared and companies could still make money on top of it.
zaik 5y ago
Going for a walk in your neighborhood and adding all the POIs to OpenStreetMap is fun btw.
- slownews45 5y ago
  Some people are even using google street view to do this - not sure what the licensing rules if any are there.
  - Freak_NL 5y ago
    Don't stimulate this. It is a legal grey area and actively discouraged by the OSM community. It's just too close to directly copying from Google Maps, which is infringement of their IP. Morally speaking, any information you derive from a photograph taken in a public area should not be encumbered in any way, but Google's pockets are a little too deep to risk a lawsuit for OpenStreetMap.
    - chrisjc 5y ago
      Be especially careful if you come across an island that you've never noticed before in any of the photos that you're using.
    - slownews45 5y ago
      Not an attorney, but I always thought google had TOS against using their data to create or augment any other mapping related dataset. So I'm not recommending this either. Just wanted to mention that while the OSM community get's very bent out of shape around potential copying by google, it's not impossible people are sneaking a peak at street view and google sat data to augment OSM.
- Freak_NL 5y ago
  You look at your own town in a completely different way; it's refreshing.

vosper 5y ago

Didn’t Google put a lot of the POI data together themselves? And aren’t there lots of competitors? And nothing but money stopping another player from entering the market?

jiggawatts 5y ago
When Apple Maps got released and everbody made fun of how bad it was, it was revealed that Google Maps had something like 6000 people working on it for years and years, funded through Alphabet corporation's search monopoly and ad revenue. Not the maps ad revenue, that's a pittance. The search revenue. And note that a company that was the world's biggest (or nearly so) at the time failed to catch up, and has still failed, despite also dipping deep into an unrelated (near-monopolistic) source of funding. They apparently "only" had 1000 staff. There aren't lots of competitors, and nobody has a hope in the world of catching up with Google Maps and their illegal use of their monopoly to dominate other markets. Even other companies illegally abusing their own near-monopoly position have failed!
- scrollaway 5y ago
  I don't understand this take. Google Maps is one of the world's greatest modern achievements. It's an incredible resource, and it's free. I have no idea what the actual numbers are but if you told me it collectively saved hundreds of billions of dollars a year i wouldn't be surprised. Not to mention the cultural value of being able to teleport virtually anywhere in the world and see the streets, visit places etc. Isn't it a good thing that Google, for all their ills, put their money to work on this? Isn't this one of those capitalism success stories so many people here rave about?
  - xapata 5y ago
    I was on my way to an important meeting and Google Maps had an outage. I panicked, and it took me a good 5 minutes to realize there were other map products that I could use to get directions.
  - slownews45 5y ago
    A fair number of HN takes are snark and critique I think these days, it's a bit more reddit now? I think folks underestimate just HOW MUCH data google maps has and how many users it has, and the integration / scale is impressive particularly as some parts of the system are real time. They seem to update both street view and satellite data pretty frequently, and you can go back in time in sat vie as well, so we have a geo and time dimension now. When I do routing I can route by walking, transit, driving etc. It seems to know every train / bus route and stop and even schedule. It seems to have most businesses. With street view I can zoom from space to a street and see a storefront. This is stuff the CIA spends $20 billion on and gets a crappy product only 3 users at a time can use in a room.
    - durnygbur 5y ago
      > When I do routing I can route by walking, transit, driving etc. It seems to know every train / bus route and stop and even schedule. Not only that but they seem to route through the "most popular" or "most attended routes" crowdsourced by their unaware users. Meanwhile others just calculate the "best time" or "shortest path" routing.
      - eythian 5y ago
        I've wondered about this. I sometimes use it for biking if I'm going to an unfamiliar part of the city, and its biking directions sometimes end up a bit weird, like taking a path that, while slightly shorter, is a bit more uncomfortable (crossing somewhere with busy traffic for example.) I've also noticed that it doesn't know about many easy to cross places that everyone uses and will suggest a longer route to an "official" U-turnable spot. So, for the sections of the route I know I often ignore its directions and go my preferred way and just let it catch up. Assuming that many other people around here are making the same choices as me (perhaps a big assumption in some cases, definitely not all), it still has kept recommending the less-preferred routes.
- charcircuit 5y ago
  Who cares where in the company money funding it comes from. It's normal for a company to reinvest it's profit from other products to build new ones.
- marcellus23 5y ago
  Do you have sources on those employee numbers? Also, even if Apple had an equal number of employees and worked as fast as Google, of course they wouldn’t be able to catch up. Google has a head start. But it’s not like Apple isn’t leagues ahead of where Google was in 2011 by now.
  - native_samples 5y ago
    I worked on Maps for a while. The 6000 number must surely include the contractor army that was authoring the maps themselves. Google is a lot bigger than it once was, but when I worked on it there were perhaps "only" 300-500 engineers working on the project. Still an enormous effort. However there were thousands more people in India working around the clock tracing satellite photos and using street view imagery to create in-house maps. So I can believe the raw number.
- eru 5y ago
  Google doesn't have a search monopoly.
  - deadbunny 5y ago
    They have over 90% of the search market globally[1]. 1. https://sparktoro.com/blog/as-the-antitrust-case-against-google-kicks-off-heres-where-the-doj-should-start/ https://sparktoro.com/blog/as-the-antitrust-case-against-goo...
    - eru 5y ago
      Yes. That doesn't make them a monopoly, though.
- YetAnotherNick 5y ago
  > Not the maps ad revenue, that's a pittance Source? I was under the impression maps are profitable for Google.
totetsu 5y ago
By themselves do you mean how they tricked a bunch of "volunteers" to do it for them with google photos gps metadata scraping, google maps local guides, and Ingress.
dariosalvi78 5y ago
one way for making Google maps less relevant would be if all the other companies working on maps, including Apple, would instead curate an open repository, like on OSM. Yes, Google could also make use of it, but it will have to "give back" for example when updating info. I see maps and POIs as an infrastructure-like good, like Linux or Wikipedia, which could be shared and companies could still make money on top of it.

zaik 5y ago

Going for a walk in your neighborhood and adding all the POIs to OpenStreetMap is fun btw.

slownews45 5y ago
Some people are even using google street view to do this - not sure what the licensing rules if any are there.
- Freak_NL 5y ago
  Don't stimulate this. It is a legal grey area and actively discouraged by the OSM community. It's just too close to directly copying from Google Maps, which is infringement of their IP. Morally speaking, any information you derive from a photograph taken in a public area should not be encumbered in any way, but Google's pockets are a little too deep to risk a lawsuit for OpenStreetMap.
  - chrisjc 5y ago
    Be especially careful if you come across an island that you've never noticed before in any of the photos that you're using.
  - slownews45 5y ago
    Not an attorney, but I always thought google had TOS against using their data to create or augment any other mapping related dataset. So I'm not recommending this either. Just wanted to mention that while the OSM community get's very bent out of shape around potential copying by google, it's not impossible people are sneaking a peak at street view and google sat data to augment OSM.
Freak_NL 5y ago
You look at your own town in a completely different way; it's refreshing.