Their example is horrible, but I kind of see what they're (hopefully) trying to get at: more natural ways to "search" for places, specifically for people that d

Their example is horrible, but I kind of see what they're (hopefully) trying to get at: more natural ways to "search" for places, specifically for people that didn't grow up implicitly learning _how_ to search [0][1]. We know to search "vintage store SF" because it'll give exactly the results we want, but there are still large populations out there searching with wildly inefficient queries e.g. full sentences, natural language, unrelated info, etc. And a lot of these queries are valid questions/searches, but don't produce the answer the searcher is looking for. Depending on how this Maps system works, it might work better for those people -- and also provide a new kind of searching for everyone else. Here's a great example from a different domain: a while back I built a book search powered by LLMs that helps you find books that you remember random details of but can't remember much else ("that one where the woman climbs the mountain and gets stuck in a cave for a week", "that one where two cities on opposite mountains communicate by reflecting light", "that one where the main character finds a dragon egg in his grandpa's garage"). Without indexing the contents, reviews, analyses, etc of each book, an LLM was a great solution for finding the right answer to this kind of query which, anecdotally, almost always fell flat in traditional search engines (google, goodreads, amazon, etc). In Maps, I could see this kind of search working well for locations with queries like "that restaurant in KC with the giant painting of a woman spilling soup out of her mouth", "that museum with the open-air room in the middle", "that coffee shop that only hires women", etc). [0] Tangential anecdote from the far end of the spectrum: one of my grandma's first google searches was "Hello there, I'm not sure who I'm writing to but I'm hoping you can help me. Years ago, my friend {Alice} told me about a restaurant she went to in Des Moines that had amazing meatballs. I've looked all over and tried {list of places} but I can't find it. She lived near the YMCA near Main..." More than half of the query was ignored (max 32 words on Google) and not a single result was relevant so she just closed my laptop (and rarely used technology ever again); however, I bet an LLM probably would have given a much better result. [1] There's also an argument to be made that people who didn't grow up around technology are a dying breed, but I think we'll soon find that technology moves fast enough that we don't quite grok all the latest tech -- and in that lens, we might eventually be the ones still using "that legacy way to XYZ" instead of whatever's next.