4 ms·

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 t

by 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.
      - sdoering 5y ago
        One thing I regularly encounter is a typical "Tragedy of the Commons" problem with Google Maps. When they do route me, they often tend to route me through residential areas (in Germany these are often traffic reduced areas with respective speed limits). I imagine it is, because these routes tend to be very slightly shorter and often also at least a few seconds shorter in average duration. I tend to use these "Schleichwege" (short cuts only locals know) as a local - but find me using them more and more when I use Google Maps in areas that i am just not familiar with. In bigger cities I (anecdotally) see Google routing lots of traffic through these areas that were before mostly quite with only a few locals using them as short cuts. Now many more people are being routed through to combat the typical road congestion and for google to be able to mostly avoid traffic jams for the users. When considering, that residential streets are not build to encounter this much traffic, they tend to degrade quicker - making the situation even worse for people living there. I do not have a solution - or even made my mind up what to finally think about this. But this is one "data" point more for me to consider when thinking about costs and benefits to society from such a solution like Google Maps.
- 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.

by 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.
    - sdoering 5y ago
      One thing I regularly encounter is a typical "Tragedy of the Commons" problem with Google Maps. When they do route me, they often tend to route me through residential areas (in Germany these are often traffic reduced areas with respective speed limits). I imagine it is, because these routes tend to be very slightly shorter and often also at least a few seconds shorter in average duration. I tend to use these "Schleichwege" (short cuts only locals know) as a local - but find me using them more and more when I use Google Maps in areas that i am just not familiar with. In bigger cities I (anecdotally) see Google routing lots of traffic through these areas that were before mostly quite with only a few locals using them as short cuts. Now many more people are being routed through to combat the typical road congestion and for google to be able to mostly avoid traffic jams for the users. When considering, that residential streets are not build to encounter this much traffic, they tend to degrade quicker - making the situation even worse for people living there. I do not have a solution - or even made my mind up what to finally think about this. But this is one "data" point more for me to consider when thinking about costs and benefits to society from such a solution like Google Maps.
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.