I worked on Google Maps monetization, and then on Maps itself.
Monetization was a dismal failure. I don't know how well they're doing now, but Maps was a gigantic money-loser, forever. I'd be a little surprised if it didn't still lose money, but maybe less. I don't what those "pin ads" cost, but I'd bet it's way less than a search ad.
If you don't believe that, that's fine. "What about indirect revenue?" you ask? Google consciously does not want to estimate that, because such a document could be discovered in patent litigation. As it is, there are tons of patent lawsuits about Maps, and the damage claims always tried to get at Ads revenue, because Maps revenue was nil.
Caveat: I could be way out of date here. I've been retired a while now.
As for the UX: "enshittification" and big-company bureaucracy describe it pretty well.
I know, because they tried to sell it to me when I was at a megacorp, they resell the real time location and local data correlated to user characteristics, as data service to large discrete customers. This includes constant real time information about where people are traveling to, businesses being frequented by demographics, with a sophisticated query interface for asking relatively complex questions of maps derived data. It has some differential privacy layers but we suspected it could be attacked to suss out individuals with sufficient care and effort. Our impression was “holy shit that’s creepy” and it convinced us to never put our sensitive workloads or data in any Google product, cloud or other.
Not directly related but last time I was this creeped out is when a antivirus company wanted to sell us crazy amount of data on our customers.
Apparently AV companies lose money on the customer endpoint protection (it’s basically for free!) but make it up on selling users data. Also on the business licenses though
Google Maps design is becoming less detailed over the years. It's really apparent when compared to OSM.
It is necessary to search for a lot of things in Google maps as they are otherwise not visible.
You can't really navigate off Google maps without turn-by-turn navigation.
I wonder whether this is a strategic drive from Google to make maps more like search to enable advertising or whether they truly think this is the superior user interface.
Yeah it's weird, very often a venue on a street is simply not visible unless zoomed in TO THE MAX. And then it's not any weird obscure thing, it's a restaurant or coffeeshop that's been there for years.
There was some articles on here about how maps have been changing over the years (also other map apps). The gist is that why would you need to show street names anymore? On printed maps that's the only thing you have, but that's not how most people navigate anymore. They search for a place or POIs and then use navigation.
So the things most people care about have changed, streets are less important now and things like attractions or "active areas" are more important. Yeah, some people still read maps the "old way", but now probably those are in the minority so catering to them isn't worth it anymore.
Of course that's only one aspect next to the question of what makes the most ad money.
Yea it's got some really odd behaviors that I can only attribute to Yelp style behavior from Google.
I was literally on the same block as a restaurant and it wouldn't show in maps at all, though the other 3 restaurants on the block were, and the only way to get it to show up was to Google it then click on the maps link. As soon as I took focus off the restaurant it disappeared again.
I can only presume it's because they hadn't paid Google or were being punished for some reason. It lead to me looking for more examples and found many places, including some major ones in the city I'm visiting, were excluded for no apparent reason, even ones with 4.9 ratings, and the only correlation between them was that they either were inherently more "indy" than the rest and thus likely to avoid engaging in certain aspects of Google or were close to a more powerful competitor.
This was particularly shocking when Wendy's wasn't being shown at a strip mall but the Burger King was....
I'm not sure why they could add "personalities" or "modes" like simple, tourist, night-life, etc. Seems rather obvious to just about anyone who thinks more than 30 seconds about it
I was working on web maps before google maps steamrolled (effectively killed) the competition. The big thing for us was that we couldn't compete with the storage and licensing requirements for satellite imagery. I suspect it was the same for other local competitors at the time: our local data was objectively better, but google's was just sexier, and you couldn't compete with free.
I've long since switched fields, but the irony is that the company I was working for survived and I heard maps for various business use is now much more expensive than our offer used to be and several large clients eventually switched back.
As a user, I loved maps when it came out. The pre-rendered tiled maps were clean and fast. The web UI was clean and responsive. Streetview was (and still is) absolutely mind boggling. Heck, I even applied to work for google maps at the time.
Nowdays maps is an absolute shitshow. I find it utterly unusable for almost any purpose except for streetview, which is the only reason I still know how it looks like.
Peole forget that millions of people submit data to Google Maps for free. I placed all the local postboxes on google maps, people sibmit information about their businesss, opening hours, etc. This is hugely valuable.
Also google grew laxy. Not tskes them a year to add a royal mail postbox
Also, everybody by default shares their location when using it, no? So they get live feedback on traffic relatively for free (till some lawsuit will ban it). I can see it often changing and recalculating as I drive, albeit with some lag.
I don't think you can estimate overall worth of Maps to Google directly and easily. Its still #1 driving solution I use, its not perfect in dense traffic in cities but otherwise OK and for free, plus their estimates are pretty accurate.
Agreed. And not just that, but also the fact that people use Google Maps for car navigation means Google can derive the location of traffic jams by comparing current speed with the speed limit.
This is hugely useful for navigation since it means these bottlenecks can be avoided, some thing which is not possible unless this data is available.
with giant data beast company like google, everything is about indirect revenue. Just because map doesn't make money, doesn't mean it won't drive up other ad revues.
I personally think that ads on maps were a bad idea even for monetization. At glance, this seems to be a plausible ads inventory for local businesses but in reality this doesn't scale very well compared to Search or App ads (or even Display) since most of ads will be limited to a very narrow area so big advertisers don't feel as strongly as other channels. They could design ad campaigns specific to local areas but this increases overall complexity and makes it really hard to plan and optimize its budgets. Also, it's worth mentioning the difficulty of measuring offline conversions accurately... Some degree of automation might help, but at this state it's not really a great place for advertisers.
I hate ads as much as the next guy, but I actually think that if this were better implemented, it wouldn't be that bad.
One way I commonly use google maps is as a restaurant or bar finder. Like "show me open restaurants around me". I even do this when at home and feel like eating out for whatever reason. I don't want to walk too far away or take transit. I just want to see the restaurants in a 10-minute walk radius around where I am which are open and what they serve. Now, sure, I'd like to see all restaurants, not just those which took out ads. But I'd be fine with those being featured at the top of the list.
Instead, what I get, is ads for hotels down the street when I'm already home. Or ads for a carpet store chain, which was closed that particular day (national holiday), which you also can't really miss if you set foot in the square.
Regarding monetization, they could probably figure a way to tell that if I click on the restaurant's pin, then follow directions there and stop at the address, I'm likely dining there.
The author notes that Google does seem to be leaning in to the sector where they really make a lot of sense, hotels. I'm going to Delhi for work next week and how I picked a hotel was going to maps, zooming out from the venue a bit, and letting hotel pins appear.
It's also been downright unusable. While navigating it hides all the business names from me so I can't browse the stores are along my way. I constantly have to exit navigation, approximately remember the route, browse the stores, and then re-enter navigation mode. This is only one of many pain points.
Its assistant is also useless.
"OK Google, zoom in the map by a factor of 1.5"
"OK Google, stop hiding the businesses"
"OK Google, add a stop for the last Safeway before the turn onto route 120"
Yes the classic dance of “zoom in slightly further, but this time without arbitrarily removing 3/4’s of my search results that I know exist here, and showing me other random locations”
Or “good lord just show me the street name please”
You can click the search icon while in navigation mode, to search along the route. It doesn’t work that great as you have to zoom to an aprox area and it seems somewhat arbitrary what comes up. It will show you how many minutes of detour a location would add, which is quite nice when choosing among a bunch
I recently watched this show on netflix called "The Billion Dollar Code" that went into the details about maps beginnings and other companies claim to the idea. It was pretty interesting.
I can also recommend "Never Lost Again: The Google Mapping Revolution That Sparked New Industries and Augmented Our Reality" (https://amzn.com/0062673041) about the evolution of Google Earth, Maps, and Street View. Written by one of the founders of Keyhole (the company that built what became Google Earth), the book is mostly about the founding of Keyhole and its mapping technology, but has some insider info about the political maneuverings between Google's Search and Geo teams over owning the map ads because everyone knew it would be a big deal.
Brilliant show, though it is about Google Earth. Made me uninstall Google Earth from my phone though, the picture it paints of Google and their legal people is not pretty.
If google can't make money with maps, why isn't Maps taken out of google into a charity/non-profit backed thing. There's OpenStreetMap, and Wikipedia wouldn't mind having a Map I guess.
That way it'd help a bit with the monopoly heat and maintaining it could be slightly cheaper. I don't know the legal stuff, but I'd rather have a company supporting a non-profit than burning money internally, so I hope the incentives follow that (yeah, probably not true thanks to lobby and having rich people run governments)
> If google can't make money with maps, why isn't map taken out of google into a charity/non-profit backed thing. There's OpenStreetMap, and Wikipedia wouldn't mind having a Map I guess.
Assuming maps still loses a good chunk of money, how would it survive as a charity or non-profit? Where would the money come from? Who would donate to the charity?
So you already can use OpenStreetMap, but don't? Presumable because Google Maps is better? So maybe the answer is that "we" don't make Maps a non-profit majority of people (me and, apparently, you included) actually prefer superior ad-supported product?
This part is probably what keeps Maps valuable as an asset, and it's such a huge moat that letting it go would be irreversible. Building a similar product from scratch takes tremendous capital and local deals, we've seen how much of an effort it is for Apple to even have a viable product, coming up with a competitive offering would require double that.
Even if all counted for Maps was net 0 in the balance sheet, I feel there would be no Google CEO agreeing to let it go just for antitrust relief. They'd probably let Youtube become independant before that.
It takes serious funding to make an excellent mapping app that contains worldwide business info, and a whole hell of a lot of paid review staff. A non-profit/charity can't really tackle this well. And since having a good mapping app is so important to the use of a smartphone generally, it makes sense for the two major smartphone OS vendors to each have a platform-standard mapping app.
But is Maps actually a net loss for Google, or are they using Hollywood-style accounting techniques to make it <i>appear</i> unprofitable as an additional disincentive to the lawsuits that AlbertCory mentioned?
Just a couple weeks ago, Google announced they're going to re-photograph Street View in my country, though, which is still running on the initial 2007ish data. How would that be profitable? The idea of virtual ads placed onto pseudo 3D walls was already present when Street View started but apparently didn't deliver economically. Maybe they want to break resistance this time around as they had lots of data protection complaints/requests for blocking a particular lot from displaying unblurred at my place?
Mind that they don't only take pictures. The cars are full of sensors. From GPS to verify coordinates of roads, over Wifi to scan SSIDs for locating devices without GPS to LIDAR to scan 3D features and probably a lot more ...
Are you talking about Germany? Google never stopped creating new images in Germany, they've just decided they would put the new images online (which they already did).
One of my biggest peeves with Google Maps is its lack of respect for my zoom level. When I tap the centering button, NO, I don't want to zoom in. If I wanted to zoom in, I'd zoom in!
Couple that with the roughly decade-old removal of the +/- zoom buttons, and I basically don't bother with Google Maps any more except for turn-by-turn navigation.
Why do you need +/- zoom buttons? You can just double-tap the screen but hold down the second tap, then slide your finger up or down to zoom in/out as an alternative to pinch-zooming.
Google play services API's are deliberately designed to be hard to reimplement by third parties. In the case of maps, the placeId of every business or POI is internal to Google, and no other provider can give you a map for a matching placeId.
speaking of monetization, i’d happily pay a $10 monthly fee for these features as a biker:
- weather along route
Google knows the weather, it knows the route… Just add a layer! better yet suggest a reroute. i pay for a separate app for this currently.
- motorcycle friendly features
bigger buttons for usage with gloves; selection of straight, curvy, unpaved etc roads; right now it’s just Highway or non Highway
- ability to create a group and show their live locations on the map.
Something better than WhatsApp live location. The current approach that Google maps uses is cumbersome and non-intuitive. also if a route is updated, an option to update everyone else’s shared route.
- local info, POI, etc
you know my location and interests, tell me some interesting stuff over Bluetooth about the city or POI’s i’m passing by.
From my perspective as an advertiser, mobile/local PPC has taken over, be it Local Service Ads or regular search ads listings that show up in maps.
SMART ads that use your GMB profile instead of your website go GANGBUSTERS for brick and mortar clients, who love them.
I wonder how long you have been gone, and if it's possible that they have taken over so much since you left that your statements here are no longer true.
If it’s not making money anyway it’s strange they pull tricks that are just another thing to make Google look greedy and bad, where they very clearly hide businesses to punish them for not taking out an ad.
It makes Google look like the mob and everyone sees it. Everyone would understand if they would show businesses that pay at the top of the list but somehow instead they went this way, incomprehensible.
> "What about indirect revenue?" you ask? Google consciously does not want to estimate that, because such a document could be discovered in patent litigation.
Could you tell us more how you came to this conclusion? Did someone high up ever literally tell you "we're not doing that because it could show up in discovery"? And if not, why have you concluded that?
Ads and Search use the data from maps to make up the difference.
Even just the ability of search to serve local seeking queries is a huge defensive moat, but the marginal revenue from having a model of the world is worth it.
Given your firsthand experience and the industry's evolving nature, do you think there have been any significant shifts in Google Maps' monetization approach since your time working on it?
What kills me is I'd easily pay 50~100 eur a month if Maps had to be non ad subsidized.
This is to me Google's most everyday impacting product, and what makes the difference between me being stranded/lost or making it in time. The stories of people ending in a lake for blindly following directions are cheeky, but decent maps are just that important, and Google Maps, how flawed it can be, is currently the best for so many areas.
You'd pay 50-100 euro a month ? Why ? How did you arrive at this number ? Even before google maps, the standalone navigation devices didn't cost that much. To stretch this, if maps is 50-100 a month, how much is the total bill of all software you use ? Surely, the h/w, OS, browsers etc. should be orders of magnitude more than what they are today too.
50 eur a month is insanity. I bet that i and all the other 'poors' like me would start buying $5 permanent paper maps and asking for directions again. That's the kind of hemorrhagic price that only someone who never thinks about the cost of groceries or gas could pay. I'm not trying to tell you that you're a rich asshole or anything, but i do want to communicate that those numbers are vastly detached from the reality of most people. I'd pay 50 eur one time but monthly is a lot. Just pin me to the version i paid for, don't update road closures or any of that other bullshit and let me opt out of the parasitic subscription pricing.
That’s a stretch but I agree id pay 50 bucks a month for a total Google Subscription: gmail google maps docs and drive. All of it. No ads, personalized only to serve me. And bring back reader and I’ll pay 100.
The only case I can think of where google is the best is traffic updates. I use OSM primarily, osmand particularly for navigation, and I've tried going back to google a few times, every time I try it it's worse than the last time.
You may be willing to pay €50 a month for it, but most people can't afford that and wouldn't pay it.
Criticize Google Maps all you want, but it is easily one of the most useful apps to me, especially as someone who's been been living nomadically the last 5 years. It's kind of scary how dependent I am on this app. Anytime I need to find a restaurant, dentist, electronics store, etc. - I'm looking first on Google Maps and my life is basically dictated by the results.
I have lists like "Places to Work" which is a list of all the nice coffee shops and places I like to work out of (currently have 200). I star hotels + AirBnBs I'm staying in, and bookmark a ton of things. I rely on it for public transportation. If I could only pick 3 apps on my phone, Google Maps would definitely be one of them.
I do wish there were better alternatives and I hate being overly dependent on one company. Unfortunately the open source alternatives like OpenStreetMap don't really even compare.
I have a similar experience. The addition of all the places details and reviews that are accessible inside of Google Maps has actually expanded its usefulness. Google Maps has grown to be more than just navigation software for me. I live in the US but was in Berlin recently. It seems that Google reviews have supplanted Yelp as the main platform for reviews over there. It honestly made things simpler and easier and I can see in the US it looks to be trending in the same direction.
I actually have more of an issue with the busyness of google.com and the search in Youtube than I do with the changes in Google Maps.
Critising products that serve billions of users every day as "useless" is a latest fun past time for a sect of contrarian HNers that can't think of the world outside their use-cases and bubble.
Same here. I complain a lot about google, I mean a LOT. I use Firefox, I tried DDG for a while and now am trying to mostly use ChatGPT (which actually is typically immediately helpful in code questions which is my number one google search activity.
However Maps and Gmail. I don't have and probably don't need a replacement.
Waze is a decent alternative, if not mostly for the community driven aspect of it. Sometimes it’s too aggressive to save 1-2 minutes but it knows tolls , when they’re open, and just as accurate if not more than google maps at times
I don't understand this at all, how can Waze be a decent alternative when it doesn't show, well, anything? [At least where I live,] there's no photos, rating, comments, no info about opening times, no way to get there unless I'm driving (which in this European capital I am totally not), and even if I'm driving there's no info on parking zones (you can't just park anywhere on the street). Waze is literally 100 % useless for me in the city.
I understand the ads and everything else, I don't not enjoy it but I understand.
What I really don't get is the product is hiding a lot of stuff for no reason. Whenever I zoom in my neighbourhood: it doesn't display all the streets, some shops are missing even at maximum zoom, search is removing some results that should match my query, etc...
I have slowly lost trust in the products (except for navigation), it's still my main source but I usually double check with google search or apple map.
> Why? What's the point? It's a map. Street names are pretty much the #1 most important thing.
My pet theory here is mislaid/misaligned interests: 90% of Google Maps users are probably using it for automotive navigation, not for identifying cross-streets.
A more strident person would argue that Google is consequently, in part, responsible for reinforcing America's obscene car dependence. I'll leave them to make that argument :-)
I don't want to say it's always true, but every time I see that (or rather don't see a street name) and investigate it, the name is there, just not on-screen. It's still idiotic design, but if you traverse along the length of a road the name is visible, just elsewhere.
This complaint is interesting to me because in the last few years I've noticed street names have become more and more abundant. For example, I am looking at the 100ft zoom level (what my scale shows in the bottom right) and this street which is 2000 ft long is labeled 9 times. For major rivers there's always a label on screen. This didn't used to be the case for me. I used to have to really work to find labels but now it's very good.
That’s what you get when you fire the last actual mappers and just leave developers to keep it running. Google thrives on data quantity, not on quality.
Is it just me or have you guys also noticed that the routes suggested by Google Maps have gotten worse?
It seems that it only takes into account current traffic jams and not the ones which will occur 30mins into the trip.
For instance, there's this spot in my city where I know there is a traffic jam at around 3:20 PM every day. I usually set off from home around 2:50 PM, which means I'll hit that congested area by 3:20 PM. Interestingly, there are a couple of alternative routes I could take to avoid getting stuck. However, Google Maps keeps pushing me towards the route that's bound to get jammed, simply because there's no traffic showing at the exact moment (2:50 PM) when I'm starting. Doesn't it make sense for the app to use past data to predict the traffic jam?
On the other hand, it often insists on taking me through strange shortcuts and weird backroads just to save a minute or two.
I came here to look for someone talking about it and totally agree, Google Maps routes are getting really worse over time and now I switched to Apple Maps almost exclusively.
I can understand the jam thing but the weird route thing is crazy, especially because that route often makes you spend more time not less. It prefers weird backroads with lots of turns instead of straight larger roads (and that's stupid) but a thing I noticed traveling a lot for work in a hilly area is that it doesn't seem to take road pendency into account. Sometimes it makes you go up and down a hill instead of staying in the valley road that goes around it: it take twice the time IRL but is like it thinks "whoa, 5km instead of 7, that's a great optimization" and that's incredibly stupid.
Apple maps is more conservative and tries to stick to larger roads if possible only sending you into more obscure ones if it is very convenient.
Another thing is that Google Maps is really aggressive on labeling something as a road: sometimes they are off roads, tractor paths or large trails that a car cannot travel on but it doesn't care.
Those are my impressions traveling mostly in Italy and bordering countries.
> It prefers weird backroads with lots of turns instead of straight larger roads (and that's stupid)
Part of that could be driving style.
Getting to one nearby city really has two main routes for me—the single lane highway, or the backroads with a bunch of weird turns and stuff.
You hop on the highway and besides a couple of towns you pass through you more or less just space out for an hour and then you’re there. Your speed on the highway is pretty much fixed. There’s heavy enough traffic that even if you were to try and pass and drive aggressively you’re never really beating the map estimate. Often you come in a bit longer because it only takes one person doing 15-20 under the speed limit to just create a rolling roadblock.
The back roads, however, are basically empty. How fast you get there is pretty much up to you.
The highway is faster and less stressful for my wife. The back roads are faster and less stressful for me. I’m not even speeding much or driving aggressively. I’m just comfortable actually doing the speed limit through those areas and passing where necessary.
I don't use maps much because it talks too much and unlike Yandex you have to both listen to it and look at it to make full use of it. It's zooming features are shit. It doesn't reroute automatically when it think you've already arrived etc etc.
But I do recall seeing some sort of green, fuel save mode which I assumed would prefer straights to hills etc.
I haven't driven in mainland Italy but Google Maps is nearly useless in Sicily. Their road network is designed for itinerary-style navigation which to my knowledge no navigation app has a concept of. Like you said it's foolish to assume that backroads are conveniently navigable as if the only differences are speed limits and number of lanes (and maybe hills for "eco mode").
I noticed this one too as I was planning my route last night. Google Maps can’t detect one way streets anymore and suggested roads that are marked no entry. I’m glad I zoomed in and was able to read the sign.
I am not sure what is happening to Google Maps lately but this is bad.
This is something I have wondered a lot about: whether the routing is based on current conditions, or if it takes into account what usually happens on your route as your journey unfolds.
Your comment seems to suggest the former.
I live in France and school vacation, especially during the winter break, yield to horrendous tragic keeps from the Paris region towards the Alps. I needed once to drive through them, but not towards the ski resorts, just more south.
There were several possible routes but the fastest one was chosen despite the fact that it would hit the bottleneck right at the worst time. Another route, summer 20 min longer, was not taken into consideration at all despite avoiding the bottleneck.
Similar experience and I which I knew why they offer a particular route.
I often end up regretting using Google maps if I know the routes, usually I feel I'm happier with my choice, not sure if it's a psychological thing but I don't think so because I feel I consistently make better choices based on my knowledge of an area.
I guess there can be a lot to know about a road, especially in regional areas which Google probably knows nothing about.
The other thing I find interesting is that most people I know cannot drive anywhere without Google maps or similar, so there are probably a lot more people using these routes than alternatives.
Even worse: here in Hamburg, a major German city with very high Google Maps usage, The S-Bahn line S1 is closed through the tunnel right in the centre of the city an entire month, and yet it has not been updated at all. Same thing occurred when the S1 from the airport to HBF was closed last month. These are very high capacity lines and it is tourist season. Anyone trying to use Google Maps is going to be very confused. Closures are only taken into account like 50% of the time.
Hamburg has almost half the population of Berlin, yet Google can't keep up with major scheduled line closures.
Google Maps has become noticeably worse at public transit directions in the last few years. In NYC it seemingly does not ingest service changes from the MTA API, I’ve had multiple friends complain about it.
Apple Maps is updated in near real time, I tell anyone who listens to use it for PT directions. The “Transit” app is great too.
It's deeply concerning that the only alternative to Google Maps being terrible is to use Google's Waze. The only thing stopping another Inbox situation is the threat of anti-competition law.
I tried it. It started pinging me mid drive to call out the nearby Burger King or something and offer to reroute me there.
Last thing I need when I’m trying to navigate unfamiliar urban areas while operating a heavy piece of machinery at high speed is more distractions and more things to process.
In the app, you also can't adjust your departure time to see if there's a better time to leave. You have to use the web UI which doesn't have a way to share this information (beyond a starting point and finishing point) with the app.
I wish google would do weekly updates here. I live in a small city in the midwest USA and one road has been closed for construction for over a month and google maps still wants me to go that way.
It's really bad in London. Instead of telling you the road is called Oxford Street (quite a famous road!) it shows instead the road number, A40, which is not known by 95% of the local population, nor by 100% of visitors.
A population of 9 million but big tech's allergy to scaling customer support means they don't pay a local person to adjust things for local expectations.
Looking at Google Maps you get the feeling it's optimized for being a road atlas for long-distance driving. There's so few details on the maps and basically the only thing visible is the road network (and businesses) until about zoom level 17.
You just reminded me of my own mapping annoyance. Apple Maps, while navigating, will keep zooming the map as I approach my destination. The scale keeps changing! For a lot of areas, this makes it possible to glance at the map, see that my dot is 32 millimeters away from the destination, drive for a bit, glance again… still 32 mm away. The same unit length on my screen represents 3 miles or 300 feet.
I wish there was some visual indication of the scale, other than a tiny line in the bottom right corner.
Something that catches me out when driving is the scale adjusting for speed. It makes sense, but a junction that looks quite close suddenly starts moving further away from you as you slow down for it and the maps zooms in. It's an odd UI quirk.
Not furnishing your users with knowledge that could reduce their reliance on your service is Marketing 101.
Google maps does not want help people gain awareness of their surroundings or improve their navigation skills. It wants users to depend on Google maps.
Another stupid thing they've done is to use local language for street and place names. Why the hell even have a phone language then? Just switch everything over to whatever language people are speaking in my immediate vicinity then! There is a reason I have chosen English as the language of my phone, because that's what I can read properly.
At some point I noticed someone had "helpfully" translated some concert venue names in Copenhagen into English, so Krudtønden became "The Powder Keg", etc. That's not useful, as locals might well not understand what it means if you ask directions or search for a website. It's on Østerfælled Torv, would you have that read as Eastern Commons Market?
Places with other alphabets seem to vary. Greece shows me only Latin transliterations, but Syria shows me both Latin and Arabic in many cases, which is useful — I can read one, and match the shape of the letters for the other.
Not sure if I understand your point. If you're in Spain you want to see Street names written in Kanji or Greek? Or do you want the street name translated to your phone language?
It's been like that for a frustratingly long time. I've tried Open Street Map, but it doesn't quite cut the mustard (skittles). I think I'm going to have to try again, OSM fits my ideology better.
...he complained, in an article on a website where 30% of vertical space is used by an autoplay video ad featuring an idiot asking me whether I'd eat "mustard Skittles".
Out of admittedly slightly perverse curiosity I opened the site without adblock : at some point when scrolling the whole page is covered with ads. An eyesore indeed.
I was never able to stop the auto play video. Just make it small and pinned to the bottom. Playing something and wasting data the whole time I read the article.
I prefer to just not visit websites that are full of obnoxious ads. I find it's a good screening technique for garbage content that isn't worth reading in the first place.
Unsurprisingly, there's a significant correlation between useless sensationalized clickbait articles and websites fully of intrusive trashy ads.
I would add to this article that a major issue with Google Maps has been businesses trying to SEO-pad their business names on Google Maps, to the detriment of readability.
This is also against their TOS – the "business name" form is supposed to be their legally registered business name, the one that they probably have signage for. Moderators simply don't enforce this, and with Map Maker basically gone, the community of moderators is somewhat of a cloak and dagger group now.
I have tried to clean some of these up via submissions, because in spite of agreeing with the points of the article and using mostly Apple Maps for navigation, Google Maps still is better in terms of having a lot of community sourced data and overall place discoverability (along with Yelp, which Apple Maps seems to no longer source data from).
Examples of these business names:
- {name} - {city name} Axe Throwing
- {name} License Agency - (Vehicle/Vessel not drivers license)
- {name of a local chain} - {neighborhood or city name}
Some of this is a UX problem or perhaps data architecture problem – in the case of local chains, I imagine many are dealing with people calling in orders and showing up at the wrong place to pick up their order. Google Maps could do a better job showing the neighborhood/locality/"local name" of the area in the search results.
> {name of a local chain} - {neighborhood or city name}
Wait, what's wrong with this? This is just good practice. It's helpful to be able to, when communicating with someone, unambiguously refer to the exact location, e.g. Westville Chelsea v Westville East v Westville Hudson v Westville Wall Street.
This would be solved by dividing it up on 2 distinct fields, a business name field and a title field. Then a business can put their SEO crap in the title field and google maps can decide how much of the info to display when.
Of course moderation would still be a thing, perhaps a character limit of 25 for the name should be enforced unless they can demonstrate why that is too little.
Coincidently the separate fields is how Apple Maps does it, although their title field appears made up of a category list item, presumably to keep it consistent and free of spam.
> {name of a local chain} - {neighborhood or city name}
What I'm starting to see a lot which is frustrating is:
{name of completely not local chain} - {neighborhood or city name}
Such as "Local Town Plumbing" with a national telephone number to some plumber referral service and will be located where there is an empty field or other non-business.
I was disappointed that apple took yelp stuff away from apple maps as well. For restaurants though, clicking on the "menu" link for restaurants takes me to the yelp page for that restaurant.
Obligatory business listing:
https://goo.gl/maps/nRH1hnjAkJKfpLcu8
(yes, this is real and apparently pretty decent)
(and yes, the name went viral which doubled the marketing win)
I wasn't sure if I was imagining it but this seemed to change in the last year or so for restaurants on my phone. I used to zoom into the local area when travelling, and click the food icon to see what's around. Now it zooms out and shows a 25km radius. Useless when I want to pick up lunch within a 5 minute drive.
I have to zoom in and pan around like a bird pecking for crumbs.
At least Google has this feature. I'd like to use Apple Maps sometimes, but the search is terrible and you can't even coerce it with a feature like "search in this area".
Readit News
Monetization was a dismal failure. I don't know how well they're doing now, but Maps was a gigantic money-loser, forever. I'd be a little surprised if it didn't still lose money, but maybe less. I don't what those "pin ads" cost, but I'd bet it's way less than a search ad.
If you don't believe that, that's fine. "What about indirect revenue?" you ask? Google consciously does not want to estimate that, because such a document could be discovered in patent litigation. As it is, there are tons of patent lawsuits about Maps, and the damage claims always tried to get at Ads revenue, because Maps revenue was nil.
Caveat: I could be way out of date here. I've been retired a while now.
As for the UX: "enshittification" and big-company bureaucracy describe it pretty well.
Apparently AV companies lose money on the customer endpoint protection (it’s basically for free!) but make it up on selling users data. Also on the business licenses though
I do not understand what resell means here. Who is google selling to first?
And in the monetization meetings it was never even discussed.
What is your take on that?
So the things most people care about have changed, streets are less important now and things like attractions or "active areas" are more important. Yeah, some people still read maps the "old way", but now probably those are in the minority so catering to them isn't worth it anymore.
Of course that's only one aspect next to the question of what makes the most ad money.
I was literally on the same block as a restaurant and it wouldn't show in maps at all, though the other 3 restaurants on the block were, and the only way to get it to show up was to Google it then click on the maps link. As soon as I took focus off the restaurant it disappeared again.
I can only presume it's because they hadn't paid Google or were being punished for some reason. It lead to me looking for more examples and found many places, including some major ones in the city I'm visiting, were excluded for no apparent reason, even ones with 4.9 ratings, and the only correlation between them was that they either were inherently more "indy" than the rest and thus likely to avoid engaging in certain aspects of Google or were close to a more powerful competitor.
This was particularly shocking when Wendy's wasn't being shown at a strip mall but the Burger King was....
I've long since switched fields, but the irony is that the company I was working for survived and I heard maps for various business use is now much more expensive than our offer used to be and several large clients eventually switched back.
As a user, I loved maps when it came out. The pre-rendered tiled maps were clean and fast. The web UI was clean and responsive. Streetview was (and still is) absolutely mind boggling. Heck, I even applied to work for google maps at the time.
Nowdays maps is an absolute shitshow. I find it utterly unusable for almost any purpose except for streetview, which is the only reason I still know how it looks like.
Also google grew laxy. Not tskes them a year to add a royal mail postbox
I don't think you can estimate overall worth of Maps to Google directly and easily. Its still #1 driving solution I use, its not perfect in dense traffic in cities but otherwise OK and for free, plus their estimates are pretty accurate.
This is hugely useful for navigation since it means these bottlenecks can be avoided, some thing which is not possible unless this data is available.
Google decision makers must know of its importance as a moat, a data collection pipe, a vehicle for other services and so on.
No offense, but trying to squeeze direct revenue out seems kinda laughable. Or maybe even a way to plausibly deny the indirect revenue importance.
Dead Comment
One way I commonly use google maps is as a restaurant or bar finder. Like "show me open restaurants around me". I even do this when at home and feel like eating out for whatever reason. I don't want to walk too far away or take transit. I just want to see the restaurants in a 10-minute walk radius around where I am which are open and what they serve. Now, sure, I'd like to see all restaurants, not just those which took out ads. But I'd be fine with those being featured at the top of the list.
Instead, what I get, is ads for hotels down the street when I'm already home. Or ads for a carpet store chain, which was closed that particular day (national holiday), which you also can't really miss if you set foot in the square.
Regarding monetization, they could probably figure a way to tell that if I click on the restaurant's pin, then follow directions there and stop at the address, I'm likely dining there.
Its assistant is also useless.
"OK Google, zoom in the map by a factor of 1.5"
"OK Google, stop hiding the businesses"
"OK Google, add a stop for the last Safeway before the turn onto route 120"
None of this stuff works.
Or “good lord just show me the street name please”
(I don't know to what extent the tech stack is shared between the two.)
That way it'd help a bit with the monopoly heat and maintaining it could be slightly cheaper. I don't know the legal stuff, but I'd rather have a company supporting a non-profit than burning money internally, so I hope the incentives follow that (yeah, probably not true thanks to lobby and having rich people run governments)
Assuming maps still loses a good chunk of money, how would it survive as a charity or non-profit? Where would the money come from? Who would donate to the charity?
This part is probably what keeps Maps valuable as an asset, and it's such a huge moat that letting it go would be irreversible. Building a similar product from scratch takes tremendous capital and local deals, we've seen how much of an effort it is for Apple to even have a viable product, coming up with a competitive offering would require double that.
Even if all counted for Maps was net 0 in the balance sheet, I feel there would be no Google CEO agreeing to let it go just for antitrust relief. They'd probably let Youtube become independant before that.
Couple that with the roughly decade-old removal of the +/- zoom buttons, and I basically don't bother with Google Maps any more except for turn-by-turn navigation.
I’m not sure who that drives revenue for, though.
I switched back to iPhone over this. I strongly prefer Here We Go to Apple Maps, and it is available on Android.
(Open platform, my ass…)
It's no accident.
- weather along route
Google knows the weather, it knows the route… Just add a layer! better yet suggest a reroute. i pay for a separate app for this currently.
- motorcycle friendly features
bigger buttons for usage with gloves; selection of straight, curvy, unpaved etc roads; right now it’s just Highway or non Highway
- ability to create a group and show their live locations on the map.
Something better than WhatsApp live location. The current approach that Google maps uses is cumbersome and non-intuitive. also if a route is updated, an option to update everyone else’s shared route.
- local info, POI, etc
you know my location and interests, tell me some interesting stuff over Bluetooth about the city or POI’s i’m passing by.
Aren't they charging big money for the API?
Make one of those pins move because it's actually a car, and suddenly your cheeks are getting clapped with 6+-figure bills.
From my perspective as an advertiser, mobile/local PPC has taken over, be it Local Service Ads or regular search ads listings that show up in maps.
SMART ads that use your GMB profile instead of your website go GANGBUSTERS for brick and mortar clients, who love them.
I wonder how long you have been gone, and if it's possible that they have taken over so much since you left that your statements here are no longer true.
It makes Google look like the mob and everyone sees it. Everyone would understand if they would show businesses that pay at the top of the list but somehow instead they went this way, incomprehensible.
Could you tell us more how you came to this conclusion? Did someone high up ever literally tell you "we're not doing that because it could show up in discovery"? And if not, why have you concluded that?
Even just the ability of search to serve local seeking queries is a huge defensive moat, but the marginal revenue from having a model of the world is worth it.
But I think open street maps has a killer feature that Google doesn't have: the community.
Dead Comment
This is to me Google's most everyday impacting product, and what makes the difference between me being stranded/lost or making it in time. The stories of people ending in a lake for blindly following directions are cheeky, but decent maps are just that important, and Google Maps, how flawed it can be, is currently the best for so many areas.
You may be willing to pay €50 a month for it, but most people can't afford that and wouldn't pay it.
I have lists like "Places to Work" which is a list of all the nice coffee shops and places I like to work out of (currently have 200). I star hotels + AirBnBs I'm staying in, and bookmark a ton of things. I rely on it for public transportation. If I could only pick 3 apps on my phone, Google Maps would definitely be one of them.
I do wish there were better alternatives and I hate being overly dependent on one company. Unfortunately the open source alternatives like OpenStreetMap don't really even compare.
I actually have more of an issue with the busyness of google.com and the search in Youtube than I do with the changes in Google Maps.
However Maps and Gmail. I don't have and probably don't need a replacement.
What I really don't get is the product is hiding a lot of stuff for no reason. Whenever I zoom in my neighbourhood: it doesn't display all the streets, some shops are missing even at maximum zoom, search is removing some results that should match my query, etc...
I have slowly lost trust in the products (except for navigation), it's still my main source but I usually double check with google search or apple map.
I know it knows them because it announces them just fine during navigation.
Why? What's the point? It's a map. Street names are pretty much the #1 most important thing.
My pet theory here is mislaid/misaligned interests: 90% of Google Maps users are probably using it for automotive navigation, not for identifying cross-streets.
A more strident person would argue that Google is consequently, in part, responsible for reinforcing America's obscene car dependence. I'll leave them to make that argument :-)
The same thing happens to me. The most useful piece of information is hidden. I've never understood that decision.
It seems that it only takes into account current traffic jams and not the ones which will occur 30mins into the trip.
For instance, there's this spot in my city where I know there is a traffic jam at around 3:20 PM every day. I usually set off from home around 2:50 PM, which means I'll hit that congested area by 3:20 PM. Interestingly, there are a couple of alternative routes I could take to avoid getting stuck. However, Google Maps keeps pushing me towards the route that's bound to get jammed, simply because there's no traffic showing at the exact moment (2:50 PM) when I'm starting. Doesn't it make sense for the app to use past data to predict the traffic jam?
On the other hand, it often insists on taking me through strange shortcuts and weird backroads just to save a minute or two.
I can understand the jam thing but the weird route thing is crazy, especially because that route often makes you spend more time not less. It prefers weird backroads with lots of turns instead of straight larger roads (and that's stupid) but a thing I noticed traveling a lot for work in a hilly area is that it doesn't seem to take road pendency into account. Sometimes it makes you go up and down a hill instead of staying in the valley road that goes around it: it take twice the time IRL but is like it thinks "whoa, 5km instead of 7, that's a great optimization" and that's incredibly stupid.
Apple maps is more conservative and tries to stick to larger roads if possible only sending you into more obscure ones if it is very convenient.
Another thing is that Google Maps is really aggressive on labeling something as a road: sometimes they are off roads, tractor paths or large trails that a car cannot travel on but it doesn't care.
Those are my impressions traveling mostly in Italy and bordering countries.
Part of that could be driving style.
Getting to one nearby city really has two main routes for me—the single lane highway, or the backroads with a bunch of weird turns and stuff.
You hop on the highway and besides a couple of towns you pass through you more or less just space out for an hour and then you’re there. Your speed on the highway is pretty much fixed. There’s heavy enough traffic that even if you were to try and pass and drive aggressively you’re never really beating the map estimate. Often you come in a bit longer because it only takes one person doing 15-20 under the speed limit to just create a rolling roadblock.
The back roads, however, are basically empty. How fast you get there is pretty much up to you.
The highway is faster and less stressful for my wife. The back roads are faster and less stressful for me. I’m not even speeding much or driving aggressively. I’m just comfortable actually doing the speed limit through those areas and passing where necessary.
But I do recall seeing some sort of green, fuel save mode which I assumed would prefer straights to hills etc.
I am not sure what is happening to Google Maps lately but this is bad.
Your comment seems to suggest the former.
I live in France and school vacation, especially during the winter break, yield to horrendous tragic keeps from the Paris region towards the Alps. I needed once to drive through them, but not towards the ski resorts, just more south.
There were several possible routes but the fastest one was chosen despite the fact that it would hit the bottleneck right at the worst time. Another route, summer 20 min longer, was not taken into consideration at all despite avoiding the bottleneck.
I often end up regretting using Google maps if I know the routes, usually I feel I'm happier with my choice, not sure if it's a psychological thing but I don't think so because I feel I consistently make better choices based on my knowledge of an area.
I guess there can be a lot to know about a road, especially in regional areas which Google probably knows nothing about.
The other thing I find interesting is that most people I know cannot drive anywhere without Google maps or similar, so there are probably a lot more people using these routes than alternatives.
Hamburg has almost half the population of Berlin, yet Google can't keep up with major scheduled line closures.
Apple Maps is updated in near real time, I tell anyone who listens to use it for PT directions. The “Transit” app is great too.
https://www.hvv.de/en
Edditt: links to ios and android at the rigth bottom side of the screen (a.k.a scroll down)
Maybe because more people use it? So you cannot really be sole person avoiding traffic jam.
Last thing I need when I’m trying to navigate unfamiliar urban areas while operating a heavy piece of machinery at high speed is more distractions and more things to process.
Deleted Comment
I've been running into this a lot lately. No matter how much I zoom -- no street name. This is Mapping 101.
But why would they? We have to use it anyway.
A for everyone telling me I can enable it always in settings, I will answer that it still gets removed when you start navigation with 'Directions'.
But I still agree street omission is pretty bad.
I wish there was some visual indication of the scale, other than a tiny line in the bottom right corner.
>I've been running into this a lot lately. No matter how much I zoom -- no street name. This is Mapping 101.
Google Maps does this all over Belgium, showing hotels and restaurants and shops and never the street name. Very frustrating indeed.
I use OSM for street names, because it just works.
Google maps does not want help people gain awareness of their surroundings or improve their navigation skills. It wants users to depend on Google maps.
At some point I noticed someone had "helpfully" translated some concert venue names in Copenhagen into English, so Krudtønden became "The Powder Keg", etc. That's not useful, as locals might well not understand what it means if you ask directions or search for a website. It's on Østerfælled Torv, would you have that read as Eastern Commons Market?
Places with other alphabets seem to vary. Greece shows me only Latin transliterations, but Syria shows me both Latin and Arabic in many cases, which is useful — I can read one, and match the shape of the letters for the other.
...he complained, in an article on a website where 30% of vertical space is used by an autoplay video ad featuring an idiot asking me whether I'd eat "mustard Skittles".
Ironic.
Unsurprisingly, there's a significant correlation between useless sensationalized clickbait articles and websites fully of intrusive trashy ads.
This is also against their TOS – the "business name" form is supposed to be their legally registered business name, the one that they probably have signage for. Moderators simply don't enforce this, and with Map Maker basically gone, the community of moderators is somewhat of a cloak and dagger group now.
I have tried to clean some of these up via submissions, because in spite of agreeing with the points of the article and using mostly Apple Maps for navigation, Google Maps still is better in terms of having a lot of community sourced data and overall place discoverability (along with Yelp, which Apple Maps seems to no longer source data from).
Examples of these business names:
- {name} - {city name} Axe Throwing
- {name} License Agency - (Vehicle/Vessel not drivers license)
- {name} - Lunch Buffet (Friday-Sunday) - {cuisine} Restaurant - {city name}
And many now have:
- {name of a local chain} - {neighborhood or city name}
Some of this is a UX problem or perhaps data architecture problem – in the case of local chains, I imagine many are dealing with people calling in orders and showing up at the wrong place to pick up their order. Google Maps could do a better job showing the neighborhood/locality/"local name" of the area in the search results.
Others are just a lack of consistent moderation.
Wait, what's wrong with this? This is just good practice. It's helpful to be able to, when communicating with someone, unambiguously refer to the exact location, e.g. Westville Chelsea v Westville East v Westville Hudson v Westville Wall Street.
And the map TOS state it should be the business name.
I pointed this out as a UX problem, which it is.
Of course moderation would still be a thing, perhaps a character limit of 25 for the name should be enforced unless they can demonstrate why that is too little.
Coincidently the separate fields is how Apple Maps does it, although their title field appears made up of a category list item, presumably to keep it consistent and free of spam.
What I'm starting to see a lot which is frustrating is:
{name of completely not local chain} - {neighborhood or city name}
Such as "Local Town Plumbing" with a national telephone number to some plumber referral service and will be located where there is an empty field or other non-business.
Google Maps usually shows far too much stuff, so I zoom into the area where I am and want to just search that square so I can browse the list easier.
But then it'll zoom out and auto-select the first ad miles away - completely defeating the purpose.
I have to zoom in and pan around like a bird pecking for crumbs.