
Google Maps' Moat - rafaelc
https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat
======
sytelus
Many people don't realize why Google maps are so much better than anything out
there. I would actually give lot of credit to Marissa Mayer who suddenly
became in charge of maps from otherwise more higher position. Thanks to her
influence in Google SLT and ability to make impressive arguments, she was able
to make a case for maps as core pillar in Google's offering and consequently
obtain huge investment and large talent pool to work on it. Creating these
level of details _world wide_ requires dazzling amount of investment that even
some small governments can't afford. In most companies, you will not get green
lighted for this because there is no real revenue coming in and its basically
social charity in form of a free app. Now the reality is that you can't do
self-driving cars without great maps and the day Google pulls its map app from
iOS you can bet Apple is going to have a giant hole in their balance sheet.

~~~
aluhut
No love for OpenStreetMaps here? In Germany it is often superior to everything
out there. Especially due to the mappers/updaters motivation and nice
gamification tools like StreetComplete or more professional tools like
Vespucci.

[https://github.com/westnordost/StreetComplete](https://github.com/westnordost/StreetComplete)

[http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Vespucci](http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Vespucci)

~~~
whazor
Same in Netherlands. Google Maps has recently become worse and worse. Small
pedestrian roads are missing, and the navigation is getting stupid. Google
applies the one-way limitations for cars also on cycling routes.

~~~
iNerdier
To go with the comparison mentioned in the article though, Apple maps doesn’t
even have an option to cycle at the moment. I never use it in London for just
that reason. They’ve decided that it’s more important to add ride sharing as
an option before cycling in what I can only assume is a product of their being
in suburban America.

~~~
sandworm101
>> is a product of their being in suburban America.

Close, but imho is has more to do with liability, a fear common at all
american companies. Car drivers are licensed. They can be expected to obey
traffic laws. So when google sends them down the wrong way on a one-way road,
nobody blames google. They blame the adult who listened to their phone rather
than the signs. But bicyclists are not licensed. If google says that a road is
open to cyclists when it isn't, and something bad happens, few will blame the
12yo unlicensed cyclist just following their phone's directions. This is why
google, imho, seems to be limiting bicycle routes to those areas with the most
clearly defined paths, preferably separate from roads.

And the one-way thing for bike routes is likely based on the widespread
understanding that bicycles on roads must obey all the rules that cars do.
Going the wrong way on a one-way road is illegal in many areas no matter what
vehicle you use. This may never be enforced, but google's legal team probably
isn't willing to depart from the letter of the law.

~~~
maxerickson
On my phone, Google's bike routing happily sends me down a 35 MPH, 4 lane
highway, crossing under a rail bridge where there is no shoulder.

It also presents an alternate route, but the traffic environment here isn't
such that the route under the viaduct makes any sense.

(this is in small town usa)

~~~
panglott
I cycle in a mid-cized American city that has had a "Bicycle Friendly America"
Silver ranking for several years now, and the Google Maps bicycle directions
have been extremely iffy since they were introduced. I just checked how Google
Maps routes my normal cycle route home, and it's very close to good, but in
fact is quite bad.

It routes me onto a dangerous arterial road rather than the pleasant multiuse
park path that is directly adjacent to the arterial road (and which is my
normal cycling route). The Google Maps recommendation here is quite bad and
possibly dangerous. The alternate route goes on another heavily-trafficked
road rather than the quiet surburban street a block away that is a designated
cycle route marked with bicycle signs and sharrows (which was my previous
cycling route).

------
ChuckMcM
A couple of things stand out for me from the article, one is that this sort of
aerial image to detailed map was one of the things the US Government was doing
with satellite images in the 70's, and with Google's compute resources if it
this seems like the kind of 'side' use that would be encouraged. It is
certainly a more useful use of compute resources than computing cryptohashes
:-).

The second thing was that Google owns all of their data. When I was there Maps
was pretty new, Google was digesting the acquisition of the Keyhole folks (who
became Google Earth) and was complaining bitterly about how restrictive the
usage rights were for the map data from a major mapping company. They kicked
off a program to become independent of third parties for map data and to have
the most accurate data in the world.

And if you turn the problem into an algorithm that can be parceled up between
machines, you have way more of that than people. It's the one thing that the
previous generation of computer companies didn't get, when computers are cheap
having 50,000 of them isn't all that much different than having 5,000
especially if you can code up ways for them to route around damage. I think
Maps is a good indication of what you can do when you think like that.

~~~
peterburkimsher
Detailed maps are certainly valuable. Getting those from satellites is
impressive, and requires high-resolution imagery as well as lots of computing
power.

We can get some satellite imagery for free from weather satellites, but it's
nowhere near the resolution needed for street maps.

[https://hackaday.com/2017/12/05/grabbing-raw-images-from-
a-n...](https://hackaday.com/2017/12/05/grabbing-raw-images-from-a-new-
russian-satellite/)

~~~
ChuckMcM
Sadly you are stuck buying it from a satellite company (expensive) or buying
your own satellites (more expensive). My feeling is that 'Maps' is Google's
insurance policy against the erosion of search advertising margin.

I could easily see Google making turn by turn or map detail a "small"
$4.99/month service rather than having it be free.

------
NelsonMinar
It sure is nice having Justin O'Bierne writing publically about maps again.
His old 41Latitude blog was phenomenal and then got blackholed when he went to
work at Apple Maps. Then he left Apple and is back in the free world and doing
phenomenal analysis of digital mapping like this article. I can't wait for him
to finish his book.

~~~
rkuykendall-com
> he went to work at Apple Maps

??? He writes a lot of this article like he's trying to guess from press and
outside observation what Apple is doing / planning. If he was JUST working
there, wouldn't he know all this? Should his 'outside observations' be
considered to be him fitting outside information to what he already knows?

~~~
NelsonMinar
I think he left Apple over a year and a half ago. But yeah, his observations
about Apple Maps are particularly well informed.
[http://www.tested.com/tech/573368-brief-comparing-digital-
ca...](http://www.tested.com/tech/573368-brief-comparing-digital-cartography-
apple-and-google-maps/)

------
40acres
What an incredible post. I just love this guys blog, I wonder how long it took
to research all of this.

As a side note this gives me great confidence that Waymo will come out of the
self driving car race in pole position.

~~~
ghaff
Up to a point. At that point an autonomous system needs to be able to
interpret and react to the physical world as it actually is at the moment as
opposed to how it's supposed to be.

~~~
taneq
This is why efforts based on exhaustive mapping make me nervous. Things
change, sometimes rapidly. The vehicle should be using its maps as a general
guide, not as some kind of ground truth.

~~~
canoebuilder
_The vehicle should be using its maps as a general guide, not as some kind of
ground truth._

Not to sound like a jerk, but I would be shocked if there were anyone working
on this that was not pursuing things in this way. It just seems kind of
obvious that you can't have some big hunk of metal rolling around, following
some abstracted track from a map, without "looking" where it is going.

~~~
taneq
And yet we have Waymo building 2cm-resolution maps and not operating outside
of mapped areas, and (more scarily) Tesla geotagging false positives where
Autopilot misidentifies some roadside feature and panic brakes.

~~~
dillondoyle
If all the cars are always mapping and collecting data will maps ever be out
of date?

~~~
taneq
Think of all the many times a software developer says "X will never happen."

Then think of what percentage of the time they're _right_.

------
irrational
One thing I really appreciate about Google Maps is how accurate the times are.
There have been numerous times where google maps says is will take x minutes
to get there and I think "Nah, I'll be able to get there faster than that."
Nope, I've never had google maps be off by more than a minute or so. I think
it must take into account not just road conditions and traffic, but also how
much I am likely to go over the speed limit.

~~~
Aramgutang
Very much agree, with only one caveat: unpaved roads.

Google Maps estimates are wildly off when parts of the drive are along unpaved
roads in Australia. It assumes a ludicrously low speed of 30-40 km/h for such
roads, when most cars are able to go 80+ km/h, depending on the road. I've
beaten Google arrival estimates by more than 2 hours on some drives.

When planning drives involving unpaved sections, we usually ask Google for the
estimates for the paved sections (which are generally accurate), then estimate
the unpaved sections based on the distance and a guess at a reasonable speed
for the road.

I've also noticed that Google is much better at estimating speeds along
unpaved roads that have mobile signal coverage. It seems like it uses user-
generated driving data for them to some extent, but not at all for the ones
without coverage. This leads me to think that they accept real-time user data,
but will not "queue" the gathered data on the app for uploading later, when
mobile signal is available.

This seems like a strange decision, given that unpaved roads and lack of
mobile coverage correlate by nature. I suppose it's probably a security-minded
decision, to prevent malicious agents from easily uploading bad data. Or maybe
a quirk of the way Waze data plays into this.

~~~
zippergz
It's not just unpaved roads. I also find that "private" roads (inside gated
communities) around me are often extremely far off in terms of speed limit.
There are private roads around here with speed limits of 45+ MPH that Google
seems to calculate as 15-25MPH. It really throws off the time estimates if
you're coming from or going to one of those neighborhoods. And it's been like
that for YEARS. If they were using user-generated data, I'd expect that it
would eventually get better, but I've seen no evidence of it. Waze does a
better job at this.

~~~
patcheudor
It also apparently sucks if one of those private roads you turn down happens
to be a private driveway and you are a car thief.

[https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/google-maps-digital-
trespass-...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/google-maps-digital-trespass-
unanticipated-risk-jerry-decime/)

------
sharpercoder
Google maps is improving since the day I first saw it - that must have been
around 2003 or so. The improvement on the data is phenomenal if you look at it
over then past 10+ years; The amount of times I blindly trust GM to go
somewhere increase every year. I suspect the edgecases will be solved slowly,
like navigating to a shop inside a mall, a market stall, an ad-hoc gathering,
a planned building, et cetera.

Typing in an address, going there by directions, verifying the building front
_without extra time needed for travel_ is truly magic.

~~~
Stratoscope
This is all true, but of course there will always be a few missing features
that seem so obvious and useful that you wonder why they still don't have
them.

For me it's one or two announcements of the actual destination address at the
end of the drive. If it's not an address I'm familiar with and not a business
with a sign out front, by the time I get there I've usually forgotten the
street number!

But when I arrive all I hear is "your destination is on the right."

It would be so great if the last two announcements were:

"Your destination, 123 Main Street, will be on the right in 800 feet."

"Your destination, 123 Main Street, is on the right."

~~~
Pxtl
For me the problem with Google Maps is how appallingly badly it fails when
things go wrong. The offline mode is prone to silently getting locked in
"rerouting" and just completely leaving me hanging for 10 minutes at a time.
And if it loses gps signal, it doesn't seem to think the driver needs to know
about this. A Silent failure is terrible.

~~~
killjoywashere
I was driving once, with a Google Maps engineer giving directions. We had
flown thousands of miles to visit a place, which we had visited the day
before. During the second drive over, from the hotel, he expounded on the
awesomeness of Maps (which is truly awesome, don't get me wrong) right up
until his phone said "Your destination is on the left" and all we had was a
fence with a grass field on the other side. We were looking for a complex of
buildings we had seen before, so this was clearly not correct.

To his credit, he immediately started thinking through what had gone wrong,
but it was so awesome to be a witness to that moment.

------
donalhunt
I'm not overly surprised that Google have added so many buildings in such a
short time... This _IS_ the same company that re-encoded the whole YouTube
corpus (which while small at the time was still a considerable about of
content) in a weekend to improve the user experience (SD -> HD launch).

~~~
PuffinBlue
I can't find anything about this re-encode - do you have a link to read about
it?

~~~
l1n
It's mentioned at the end of this blog post:
[https://youtube.googleblog.com/2009/11/1080p-hd-comes-to-
you...](https://youtube.googleblog.com/2009/11/1080p-hd-comes-to-youtube.html)

~~~
archon810
Doesn't mention a time-frame though.

------
hota_mazi
The article keeps mentioning satellites but Google's imagery data is mostly
provided by planes, not satellites. They have their own fleet of planes, which
they have hollowed out and redesigned (with the supervision and authorization
of the FAA) and fitted with their cameras.

Also, it's not as simple as "Google has a six year lead on Apple in imagery":
it's more that Apple can't keep up. As the article correctly states, Apple
started collecting aerial imagery around the same time that Google did, they
just haven't been able to execute on it as fast as Google did, and by now,
they probably never will.

~~~
kuschku
If Apple can’t keep up with Google, how is anyone ever expected to launch a
competitor to Google without VC money?

~~~
Arnt
Same as usual: Picking a niche and trusting that Google prefers to spend its
attention on improving adwords rather than on inventing a niche product.

Google is scary, because it's unusually competent for a big company. But apart
from that it's the same as usual: The bigcos can devote a big team to build
whatever it is you're building and then leverage their existing customer
relationships to sell it to many of their existing customers. But they usually
don't. They work on their big core products instead.

~~~
kuschku
Most bigcos aren't doing that because it's illegal, not because they don't
want to.

If you, e.g., have market dominance in operating systems, you can't prefer any
web browser, install any browser as default, or advertise any based on the OS.
In the same way, if you control web search, you can't prefer one web shopping
site, or one web maps service. And you especially can't integrate one, but not
the other.

The goal of all this legislation was to ensure that a company like Google
can't use their advantage in search to gain an advantage in maps, to avoid
exactly the current situation.

~~~
bjt
It's not as clear cut as that. Someone actually has to bring the antitrust
suit. In the last few decades, the US government hasn't been doing as much of
that as they used to. Once in the suit, then you have to argue about the
"relevant market" to determine which other companies count as competitors.
This question probably consumes more time in an antitrust case than any other.
Then you have to argue about how much of that market the defendant controls.

At least in the US, I know of no legislation forbidding a dominant OS maker
from preferring some browser. Microsoft was put under some rules like that
_after_ their antitrust suit, but that's very different from legislation
forbidding all companies from having such preferences.

Europe is different. I've not studied their antitrust law as I have that of
the US, but I believe they're more aggressive on both the enforcement and
legislation sides. I think the average American would be better off if US
antitrust policy were more aggressive than it is now.

~~~
kuschku
Of the three cases I named, 2 already were ruled antitrust violations under EU
law, actually. And against the third, a case is also ongoing.

So, from an EU perspective, it is as clear cut as that :)

------
njarboe
Google Project Sunroof[1] is a pretty cool project that I imagine uses this
very detailed mapping of buildings. Check it out, especially if you are
thinking about getting solar power installed at your home. I think many solar
companies use it to do estimates.

[1][https://www.google.com/get/sunroof](https://www.google.com/get/sunroof)

~~~
fudged71
There may be many more potential uses of this data in the future. Augmented
reality, indoor mapping, robotics, etc.

------
chmaynard
Earlier this year, Google Maps was directing people traveling to my newly-
constructed home to a different location several miles away. I reported the
problem to Google via their app, which prompted me to indicate the correct
location on a map. The new location was in their database within a day or two,
and I received a thank-you email from Google. Amazing.

~~~
jessaustin
They've definitely gotten better at accepting corrections. Five years ago we
just had to tell customers not to look for a driveway that didn't exist a mile
away from our actual business. Now it's easy to correct any problems one
notices.

~~~
jrnichols
Apple has too. I've submitted corrections, added places, changed location
details, etc and they've all showed up within a couple days. I wonder if Apple
has a user reputation thing going on.

TomTom on the other hand... different story. They have a map editor tool, that
I have yet to get to even load.

------
calbear81
I was pleasantly surprised to how much attention to detail and thought goes
into the cartography design on Google Maps. Just yesterday, I noticed this
little gem when searching for the Channel Islands off of California:
[https://www.google.com/maps/place/Channel+Islands+National+P...](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Channel+Islands+National+Park/@33.9639291,-120.0316649,11z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x80e852ce2cb67915:0xf5e49558723a3acc!8m2!3d34.002611!4d-119.7099239)

Try zooming in and zooming out slowly and watch what happens to the labeling
of the islands since they are actually a collection.

------
jonknee
Google also has a giant lead in trails / feature names. I hike a ton and
Google has been adding trails at a brisk pace. I just checked the Snoqualmie
Pass area about an hour outside of Seattle and Apple Maps has almost no
trails, named mountains or named lakes (even quite large ones). A few trails
show up as unnamed roads. There's also no relief shading to tell where the
mountains are or a terrain view for contour lines.

~~~
ghaff
Although I find, in a lot of places, that OpenStreetMaps is a lot better than
Google for hiking trails.

~~~
wingworks
Yeah I agree 1000%, at least for New Zealand, any tracks that art super
popular aren't on Google, but most are on OSM.

Not to mention, I find seeing Googles walking tracks kinda hard, especially if
you're new to an area and want to see what tracks are around.

------
wutbrodo
Is there a reason anyone uses Apple Maps, aside from wanting to avoid Google
out of principle/privacy/monoculture concerns? To be clear, these are entirely
legitimate reasons, but I was wondering if the product has any direct benefits
for the user (which is a coherent subset of reasons given the modal users'
level of concern about systemic issues).

I'm not trying to randomly snipe at Apple here, I just know very little about
Apple Maps beyond the bad press its gotten and Apple's general software
product competency weaknesses.

EDIT: Thanks for the responses, that's all pretty much the kind of thing I was
wondering about

~~~
ProfessorLayton
If I'm being 100% honest, no, other than better integration into the iOS
ecosystem. For me, Apple Maps is pretty terrible all around. It feels like it
was designed by a group of people that don't actually drive anywhere.

Issues:

\- Search results are terrible compared to Google's.

\- While the UI is generally smoother, it lags behind (i.e. It shows a turn a
good bit after I do). This is especially frustrating when driving through
small city blocks and trying to be in the correct lane for the next turn.

\- Lane guidance was finally added, but no way to see ahead like in gmaps.

\- Day/night mode is very fussy. When I'm driving through the Bay Bridge at
night it constantly flips back and forth between day/night due to the overhead
lights.

\- It is pretty frustrating that the line ahead of me is constantly wobbling
around instead of matching the curve/line ahead of me. It feels disorienting
and makes it difficult to see if there's an upcoming left/right ahead. Google
generally does a good job trying to visually match what you're seeing.
[https://imgur.com/a/t3Sxm](https://imgur.com/a/t3Sxm)

\- If I check traffic when I wake up, then go through my morning routine, then
check it again, there's a 90% chance it'll crash on startup.

\- No way to add a stop

\- No street view

and so on...

~~~
carrier_lost
"\- No way to add a stop"

You can add a stop, but it's limited to gas stations, coffee shops and
restaurants. Why? I don't know.

------
ncdev
Google also uses (used?) a great deal of human judgment in Maps (note: these
sources are a few years old now) [1, 2].

[1] [https://www.wired.com/2014/12/google-maps-ground-
truth/](https://www.wired.com/2014/12/google-maps-ground-truth/) [2]
[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/how-g...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/how-
google-builds-its-maps-and-what-it-means-for-the-future-of-everything/261913/)

~~~
splonk
I think people generally wildly underestimate the scope and impact of Ground
Truth (or are entirely ignorant of it).

Back when Apple Maps launched (and probably just after GT had been publicly
acknowledged), I had a chat with an Apple journalist, and basically told him
that Apple had no idea what they were in for. They'd fix the obvious big
public bugs (turning off of highway overpasses) easily enough, but they would
remain way behind on data quality. Back then Google was spending something
like a billion dollars a year for GT and Street View alone, which is a massive
organization that Apple just didn't have, wasn't likely to build, and couldn't
license. Add to that a huge lead in satellite imagery, custom flyover data,
business data from web search, customer feedback from their incumbent maps
app, and I just didn't see any way that Apple was going to come even close to
Google's map quality in the next several years. Basically the only question to
me was if/how quickly they'd reach "good enough" status for their users to
avoid tarnishing their brand.

Story time: Back before GT was used widely, I think some street addresses were
placed by just linearly interpolating them along the road. Charleston and
Rengstorff are a bit weird near the Google campus, so for a while people
looking for directions to the shopping center on the other side of the freeway
would find themselves getting directed (embarrassingly!) to the Google Maps
building, with its big red pin in front reminding them how they'd been led
astray. After giving directions to these lost souls one too many times, I got
annoyed enough to rant to someone about how terrible the data was. He agreed,
took me over to a what I now know must have been a GT operator, got it fixed,
and told me it would be live within a month. So I got to say that I'd
personally served some Maps traffic, and reduced load on a low performance
server as well (my QPS is pathetic).

------
dvt
I accidentally used Apple Maps once as I was going to a (new) doctor's office.
I realized I was using Apple maps halfway through my drive and I joked with
myself that it wouldn't bring me to the right place. I was heading to a fairly
large medical complex in Orange County (CA) and I sort-of had an idea of where
I was going anyway, but boy, was I wrong.

According to Apple maps, the doctor's office was _literally_ in the middle of
a field. I missed it the first time around (drove past it for a few miles,
following my GPSs instructions) and then soon realized that I was already
going through residential areas.

Never again, Apple. For context, this was 3 months ago. This doesn't seem like
a hard problem to solve. My guess is that Apple just gave up.

~~~
ancarda
I was using Apple Maps a few weeks ago, and wanted to get something to eat. I
saw a place called “Shake Shack” and decided to go there. Not only did it not
exist, I checked online, there has never been a Shake Shack in my town,
there’s only a handful in my country.

How Apple Maps got that wrong, I honestly don’t know. Where did the data come
from, and why is it that incorrect?

I reported it, and it’s since been removed, but I can’t do that for everything
in my town, and there’s so much missing; I can’t report that, or edit the map
like you can on OpenStreetMap.

Honestly, why does Apple Maps exist? Either it needs to be like Google Maps
(and just work), or be like OpenStreetMap and let Apple fans edit the map and
get more involved.

I gave them a lot of patience and understanding years ago (mapping the world
is hardly an easy task), but my patience has run out. It’s been a shit show
from day one and I honestly don’t see that changing anytime soon.

~~~
m_mueller
It seems they wanted to be Google Maps but failed. You raise a very
interesting point with OpenStreetMap - just like WebKit, Apple could just have
put some of their billions into boosting that effort, I agree that this would
have been way more productive, especially given how engaged smartphone users
are with their maps.

~~~
robin_reala
They did (partially) use OpenStreetMap at the start of their mapping efforts:
[https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2012/10/02/apple-
maps/](https://blog.openstreetmap.org/2012/10/02/apple-maps/) . No idea what
their current involvement is though.

~~~
Doctor_Fegg
Apple have people working on OSM; they're just secretive about it as they are
with most things.

------
jld
Google Maps is my pick for the coolest website on the internet. Truly a killer
app.

~~~
0003
Can maps be a killer app?

~~~
mcrady
I launched Google Maps for mobile in 2005. In 2006, Eric Schmidt was worried
that Yahoo Go was a killer app. My claim that Google Maps was the real killer
app fell on deaf ears. :)

~~~
danso
I consider myself an old tech geek but "Yahoo Go" rings absolutely no bells
for me.

What was Google Maps for mobile in 2005? Those were flip phone days for me.

~~~
mcrady
We launched on j2me flip phones and soon added support for blackberry. The
displays were small and most phones didn't have GPS.

------
peterburkimsher
tl;dr - Google Maps has buildings and Areas of Interest (streets with more
businesses) based on satellite & street view data.

"Google is creating data out of data ... It makes you wonder how long back
Google was planning all of this—and what it’s planning next"

My guess is that they weren't planning it. Somebody decided to use their 20%
time to learn TensorFlow and process the Street View imagery for fun, and that
side project got promoted into Maps.

When I downloaded 10 years of church notice sheets, I was trying to get the
lyrics of the songs in Chinese. I later realised that I could also find the
most common song names, and then focus my Chinese-learning on those songs. Big
data is all about gathering more data than you know what to do with, and
figuring it all out as you go.

~~~
puzzle
This was definitely planned, only perhaps not in this kind of detail. The Geo
organization's motto paralleled the company's (to organize the world's
information, etc. etc.), only at a geospatial level.

The data you see in Google Maps came and probably still comes from a pipeline
of pipelines that rebuild the whole planet on a regular schedule. Since we're
talking about all of Earth, random stuff here and there could cause hiccups
and delays. Information comes from all sorts of sources, including custom HW
(streetview camera, etc.), flying their own planes, owning a satellite company
for a few years, and so on.

In one shape or another, it all predates Tensorflow by years.

------
mastax
Great article, but it has me thinking: what is holding Apple back?

My ideas:

\- Apple is just a few years behind; they launched a decade later. Come back
in 3 years and they'll be close to parity.

\- Apple only needs Maps to be good enough to avoid PR disaster, since they
need a reasonable default on iOS. On the other hand Google needs to be good
enough to beat competitors since they want to make money on traffic, usage
data, and the Maps API.

\- Google's use of reCAPTCHA gives it a huge edge over competitors in mass
image classification.

~~~
iClaudiusX
Apple had a huge head start with Siri but has been surpassed quite handily by
Google and Amazon for some time now. I'm not sure we can simply rely on the
passage of time for Apple to improve these large projects.

~~~
zjaffee
I think a big part of this, at least when compared to google, is Siri's issues
with language understanding rather than converting the audio to text. Google
is much better at picking up on contextual details simply because they have
such a huge background in doing so for search.

------
callumprentice
I wonder how much of this building information comes from the LiDAR data the
StreetView cameras capture along with images. It's a couple of years old now
but I wrote something to display the 3D point data for any address and was
surprised to find just now that it still works.
[http://callumprentice.github.io/apps/street_cloud/index.html](http://callumprentice.github.io/apps/street_cloud/index.html)

I wonder if there is a more detailed data set available these days.

~~~
bob_theslob646
Does it not depend on the area? I believe that not all street view cars had
lidar capability.

Very cool app!

------
cjensen
Google Maps, Apple Maps, and Bing Maps will all try to murder you if you ask
for directions from Santa Maria, CA to Ventura, CA.

The obvious route is to follow the freeway that was built on the best route
between the two cities. Instead, all three really enjoy routing you onto a
two-lane twisty mountain road that is five minutes shorter if you are driving
a sports car and all the lights are green. Heaven help you if you are driving
an RV.

I've sent corrections to both Google and Apple about this. They both did
nothing.

~~~
anc84
Do you mean you would prefer the 101 route? That's what both Google, Bing as
well as all OSM routers I tried suggested.
[https://i.imgur.com/vIWC5ti.png](https://i.imgur.com/vIWC5ti.png)

~~~
cjensen
Yep. Normally they prefer the side route. I'm sure if traffic is bad on the
side route they will adapt and take the sensible route instead.

------
tomaskafka
Just in case anyone would ask 'why' or 'where's the money':

\- even privacy conscious people give their location data to their map app

\- google maps + google services (android) do everything they can to collect
your location data even while not using the app

\- how to monetize that data? Measuring online-to-offline conversions! Store
visits. This is what retail is after.

Anyone can take $5M for an ad campaign, but if there is a single company that
can prove that their ads deliver people to the stores, they get the money and
they make case for getting more next time.

To paraphrase Zenyep Tufekci, we're not just building dystopia to make people
click ads, we're also surveilling bilions of people to measure retail ad
conversions.

[https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dy...](https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dystopia_just_to_make_people_click_on_ads)

(oh, and there will be a lot of byproducts of course, as the article mentions.
Some of them will even be great PR, such as the self-driving cars)

~~~
bob_theslob646
>\- how to monetize that data? Measuring online-to-offline conversions! Store
visits. This is what retail is after.

The crazy thing is that I do not believe they have started monetizing maps
yet. (Sundar Pichai Implies Google Maps Will Be Monetized With Ads April 28,
2017 - Written By Dominik
Bosnjak)[[https://www.androidheadlines.com/2017/04/sundar-pichai-
impli...](https://www.androidheadlines.com/2017/04/sundar-pichai-implies-
google-maps-will-monetized-ads.html)]

------
exikyut
I doubt anybody will see this comment, but I'll leave it here anyway just in
case.

While using Maps the other day to get bus directions I got pulled up short and
had a very big laugh after Maps gave me a route that would have required _I
walk through my neighbor 's living room and backyard, and then jump my back
fence_ in order to get home. :D

Maps apparently thinks that the internal roads in the townhouse complex next
to mine will provide access to my house. This most definitely is not the case
:D

I'd like to forward this to someone internal, both for the fun of sharing it
with an actual human being and also because I don't share _exactly_ where I
live (town, okay; house and street, not so much).

On the same note, I wouldn't mind making friends with random people in various
teams - Search, Maps, etc - because I often see glitches and have nobody I can
tell.

My email's in my profile, FWIW, and I have no problem with anybody forwarding
it on and/or random incoming emails from engineers if that happens to work :)

~~~
dannyw
You can actually edit it yourself and make a correction. A local guide
community member will review it.

~~~
mafro
I've done a few similar minor-edits to maps and they're always approved. This
ultra-localised data needs to be crowd-sourced.

~~~
exikyut
Interesting.

------
nealmueller
City data is improving. Wilderness data is poor. Ocean data is worst.
Satellite view is not what we think it is. Oceanic satellite view is not
imagery, but just blue paint. If it were imagery it'd show the Arctic as
white. It's been white for 700,000 years. It's melting fast, but none of the
mapping technology shows that, which makes it hard for us to protect the
earth. fixmaps.org (my site)

------
CamperBob2
A good summary, if a bit repetitive, of how Apple has fallen behind in the
mapping department since Scott Forstall's fateful call to divorce the company
from Google Maps. But I think he buries a rather important lede farther down
in the post:

    
    
       That sounds great—but living in San Francisco, 
       it’s hard to imagine this working smoothly. That’s 
       because half the time I request a ride, I have to 
       text/call the (Uber) driver to coordinate my pickup spot.
    

The company that _really_ needs to fire its entire cartography department and
rebuild or license a new one from scratch is Uber. The deficiencies in their
maps add a ton of unnecessary friction to the customer experience, and not
just in crowded urban areas. I can only imagine the frustration their drivers
must feel, especially since quite a few of them aren't native English
speakers.

If I were Uber's new CEO, I'd treat mapping and location services as a class-
one emergency, up there with any others that people commonly criticize the
company for.

~~~
Tempest1981
From 2016: (what is the latest?)

[https://www.quora.com/What-map-API-technology-did-Uber-
use-t...](https://www.quora.com/What-map-API-technology-did-Uber-use-to-add-
the-map-functionality-to-its-app)

~~~
CamperBob2
It varies. I can always tell when they change the map provider and/or data in
my area, because my Uber Eats drivers start getting lost at different
intersections.

If I look up my home address on Google Maps, it puts the pin in the correct
location, at the actual residence. But as of a few days ago, the Uber Eats
drivers aren't making it past the mailboxes at the end of my (long) driveway.
They no longer appear to be showing the drivers my GPS location at all, just
the location associated with the address of the residential mailbox. Very
annoying in a first-world problem kind of way.

------
ClassyJacket
It's surprising to me that Apple has 3D building data from Flyover already,
but doesn't use it. They have reasonably good 3D scans of cities, with
textures, and it doesn't seem that much of a stretch for them to differentiate
between trees, cars etc. and turn that into building shapes - even if it
requires human sorting, Apple does have billions of dollars. They could end up
with more detailed buildings on their 2D view than Google.

That being said, they probably simply don't care. Maps is a means to an end
for Apple, and likely not itself a direct money maker. People use it because
Apple has a captive audience - you can't set your default Maps app on the
iPhone to anything else. I don't get the feeling anybody actually likes it,
altho I do enjoy using Flyover to see those 3d scans from time to time.

Minor criticism of this great article: a side-by-side view of the images would
be better for comparison and more comfortable to the user than an
automatically changing gif.

~~~
saagarjha
> They have reasonably good 3D scans of cities, with textures, and it doesn't
> seem that much of a stretch for them to differentiate between trees, cars
> etc. and turn that into building shapes

Are they not? The area around me has somewhat decent outlines of stuff like
trees that I'd _assume_ is coming from the satellite data, since it looks too
odd for a human to do manually…

> I don't get the feeling anybody actually likes it

I enjoy using it. It's well integrated with iOS (and IMHO looks prettier than
Google Maps as well).

------
zippergz
I just wish that they would combine Waze and Google Maps. The Google Maps UI
is SO MUCH NICER than Waze. It truly pains me to use Waze because it's so
ugly. But at least in my area, it's much more effective at routing me around
traffic (sometimes too aggressive, but I'd rather err on that side), and its
warnings for things like accidents and objects on the road are incredibly
useful. I use Waze every single day for my commute to and from work, and it's
really indispensable. Every once in a while I decide to give Google Maps
another shot because the interface is so much nicer, but I always miss the
data quality from Waze. I don't understand why they can't have the best of
both in a single app at this point.

I realize that some Waze data is surfaced in Google Maps, but it's not the
same as "there's an object on the road in 500 feet" or "we're re-routing you
because traffic changed ahead." Maybe Google Maps does do those things, but I
have never witnessed it, and Waze does it all the time.

~~~
aembleton
I guess it's a matter of preference. I prefer the Waze UI when I'm driving. I
find it easier to see the route to follow.

------
cooper12
Hmm, this really does make me worried for OpenStreetMap. If the competition is
so powerful and has a moat protecting it that will only grow larger, how can
it ever hope to catch up? This isn't a case like Wikipedia where it entered a
market that was barely there (e.g. online/software encyclopedias). Instead,
you have to face off against giants with enormous resources and the money for
any type of data. Amateur volunteers working on their own areas won't really
be able to keep up. And it'll be even harder to recruit more workers because
the competition is so entrenched/good while OSM can be subpar in some aspects.
Oh, and these volunteers will instead give their time to Google because it's
something they already know and use (I have a friend who does things like
answer questions, take pictures of places, for points).

~~~
maxerickson
Niantic switched Pokémon Go and Ingress over to using OpenStreetMap as the
base map last week.

That's one way OSM can compete with Google, it is available for the low price
of attribution. Pokémon players have quite some interest in improving OSM.

OSM can also end up with data for things that Google doesn't find interesting.
Google doesn't have the nice walking path/bike trail in a local park that I
added to OSM several years ago.

~~~
rmc
> _is available for the low price of attribution_

That depends. The OSM licence requirements depends on what you do. If you
don't produce a geo database, then there's only an attribution requirement,
otherwise you have to attribute and release changes to the data you made,
along with any other data that you mixed in.

It's like BSD for some uses, and GPL for others.

------
interfixus
I rely on OpenStreetMap these days. Except for an initial incident where the
OsmAnd app directed me to drive 50 kilometers out into the Baltic Sea (but
only because I had accidentally downloaded a Polish map instead of a
Scandinavian one), it has so far gotten me exactly where I wanted to go, every
single time.

This in some contrast to the Google Maps navigator, which I have seen throwing
some really weird surprises, including faulty info on the placement and nature
of a major motorway exit.

------
freshyill
I come from a small town with a very large ZIP code that encompasses several
other very small towns. Sure, they have the shapes of buildings, but business
locations from eight miles away are shown in the wrong town because they’re
both on Main Street in the same ZIP code. It’s the same on both Google and
Apple Maps. Neither has been responsive to my corrections through the
appropriate channels.

Who cares about the shapes of buildings if their directions send you to the
wrong town?

------
chaostheory
I'm still wondering why Waze doesn't incorporate Google Maps data and Google
Maps doesn't incorporate Waze traffic data? Or does this already happen since
Google has owned Waze for a while now? If not, I find it strange for the two
to continue to be silo'd.

~~~
stefanpie
I've heard stories, guesses, and claims that the current traffic data shown on
google maps is potentially aggregated from smartphone GPS and accelerometer
readings on android phones or though their Google apps. It's crazy and amazing
to just think about it.

~~~
on_and_off
I always thought this was officially a feature of maps ?

I worked for a couple of years in a valley with only 2 access points.

Quite often, when it is time to go back home, the trafic would be jammed.

I activated Google Now (or at least I think it was already called that way ?)
and without fail it would warn me that there is no point in leaving the
building right now since everything was jammed.

The same info was visible on maps.

~~~
SEJeff
And no doubt they pull from obviously free public sources such as sigalert as
well. More data to feed to their hungry compute engine.

------
MrMid
Our local map server, Mapy.cz, has also mapped almost every building in Czech
Republic (or at least it seems from my usage of the map)[1], with, presumably,
waayy smaller budget. They have also the best tourist ang cycling navigation
for our country. [1] [https://mapy.cz/s/2gTui](https://mapy.cz/s/2gTui)

------
an_account
I've been finding that Google Maps has better getting worse in the last year
or so at giving simple directions. Their turn-by-turn interface and algorithms
have lead to many frustrating situations that it just didn't do before.

For example I often find it recalculating my route to a side road, exit, or
different freeway even though I was driving on the highlighted path. If I
don't watch carefully, and don't notice it happening, I'll follow it off on
some crazy recalculated route.

I've switched to Apple Maps when not routing to a complex building, like a
giant mall. Apple Maps' routing and turn-by-turn has really improved in the
last couple years.

------
Dayshine
The City of Leicester in England has full 3D textured modelling of everything
down to trees and the cars that happened to be out at the time.

[https://goo.gl/maps/dm8zVDGf5TP2](https://goo.gl/maps/dm8zVDGf5TP2)

It's absolutely incredible.

~~~
anc84
Nokia and others had/have the same, just with less coverage. It is mostly a
matter of having money to acquire all the data. The technology to turn imagery
and laserscans (or similar) to 3D surfaces is booming for more than a decade.

------
kuon
Here in switzerland, we've had building shapes for decades (if not hundred of
years).

Here it what it looks like:

[https://map.geo.admin.ch/?topic=ech&lang=en&bgLayer=ch.swiss...](https://map.geo.admin.ch/?topic=ech&lang=en&bgLayer=ch.swisstopo.pixelkarte-
farbe&layers=ch.swisstopo.zeitreihen,ch.bfs.gebaeude_wohnungs_register,ch.bav.haltestellen-
oev,ch.swisstopo.swisstlm3d-wanderwege&layers_visibility=false,false,false,false&layers_timestamp=18641231,,,&E=2537136.13&N=1152194.47&zoom=10)

I've always found that kind of map way superior to the original "google like"
maps. It's great to see that google is catching up, but I am really surprised
that a database of building footprint is not something public like it is here
in switzerland.

Edit: Just discovered the time travel function, here in 1860:

[https://map.geo.admin.ch/?topic=ech&lang=en&bgLayer=ch.swiss...](https://map.geo.admin.ch/?topic=ech&lang=en&bgLayer=ch.swisstopo.pixelkarte-
farbe&layers=ch.swisstopo.zeitreihen,ch.bfs.gebaeude_wohnungs_register,ch.bav.haltestellen-
oev,ch.swisstopo.swisstlm3d-wanderwege&layers_visibility=true,false,false,false&layers_timestamp=18601231,,,&E=2538102.48&N=1152776.83&zoom=8)

------
matt_s
When can we get a flight simulator using Google Maps data? It doesn't need the
fidelity of data for names of streets, places, etc. just the imagery.

If they can extrapolate building details like bay windows, then they should be
able to model entire areas from enough heights and angles to represent it much
better than what I've seen in flight simulators for personal use (at least
last I looked).

~~~
flyinghamster
There's already a flight simulator in the Google Earth desktop app, under the
Tools menu.

------
dwyerm
The end of the article talking about where the actual doors are reminds me a
problem that we had to solve in a previous job: finding your way ON to the
road network.

Take this address, for instance: "9901 Grant St, Thornton, CO 80229" It is a
gigantic Walmart parking lot. When you ask a navigation system to get you back
on the northbound interstate highway from here, it first needs to get you out
of the parking lot and connected back to the road network. A naive system
would just find the nearest road and tell you to drive in that direction. In
this case, it would happily tell you to simply drive west a couple hundred
meters to I-25 and take a right. It doesn't understand that there's a
greenbelt and a retaining wall there. It doesn't understand that the correct
answer is actually to go the opposite way -- east to Grant and around to an
entrance ramp.

Google, by connecting parking lots to the road network has -- perhaps
unintentionally -- made this problem go away.

------
rconti
2 funny things here:

1\. None of the images loaded the first time I opened the page.

2\. I was actually just griping about how bad _google maps_ is the other day.
I was searching for a business, and (at least on iOS) the surrounding
businesses are all unlabeled. Apple Maps did a vastly better job of providing
CONTEXT for what was around the business I was looking for. I was actually 99%
sure I knew where the business was, but at a glance it was very difficult to
tell on Google Maps, where on Apple Maps it was far easier -- the emphasis on
structures rather than labels hurt them quite a bit in usability in this
context.

Ordinarily I'd agree, Google maps is "better" but I use Apple Maps most of the
time because it's the default on iOS and wrks well enough.

------
AlphaWeaver
One thing I thought was interesting was the fact that this article made
liberal use of GIFs, but they were great! I have seen many an article using
them comedicly and it detract from the message, but here they all conveyed
important data! Excellent work!

------
scooter_de
The problem of "under addressed" places in the world is addressed (no pun
intended) by several companies. Eg. What3Words (w3w.co) has created a grit of
3mx3m squares which cover the entire planet. Each of this squares is
identified by three words. Post/Mail organizations in several countries
already accept those addresses. Google also has the OLC (Open Location Code)
to address an area of adjustable size on earth. I find w3w very convinient to
communicate a place over a voice connection (radio) or by writing it down on
paper. Nothing you couldn't do by sending latitude and longitude, but more
convinient.

~~~
saagarjha
While the concept is interesting, the issue I have with What3Words is that
they force you to use their service to figure out what _an address actually
means_. In other words, you can't use it at all without being bound to their
whims. Kind of a big deal when working with something as open and public and
universal as addresses.

~~~
scooter_de
I don't understand your "what it means" statement. Can you elaborate a little
bit plz?

~~~
maxerickson
Say I successfully convey to you a 3 word address from my proprietary location
database: Beep boop blort.

Without access to my database, you don't have much information.

------
jgh
Honestly I _hate_ Google Maps, but it seems like the best thing available. I
wish they'd spend less time on building outlines and more time on making the
UI not totally suck. Someone should make a maps startup that isn't awful

(note: these examples are from the web app, which I prefer, because the mobile
app is infuriating to use except for driving directions)

For example if I google an address and click the link to Maps, there's no
street view button. If I search for "food", the "current location" button
disappears...so I have to manually scroll to wherever I am. If I search for a
store or whatever in Google and then click the map, there's no current
location OR street view!

Typing "{whatever} near {address}" works whenever it feels like working. Half
the time I get a random address on {whatever} street.

The goddamn search overlay takes up about 3/4 of the screen if you
accidentally click on something (and they make sure you do).

On to the app:

The audio driving directions have gotten better...so I give them credit there.
I never drive with the display on, so audio directions are crucial.

If I'm walking around somewhere and I search for restaurants that's fine..but
if I make the mistake of clicking on a restaurant I get a full-screen view of
reviews and shit. The map totally disappears! I'm just trying to focus the
goddamn thing so I can see where it is!

~~~
djsumdog
I really agree with you. I've tried using Here Maps and Waze. Waze is just too
much ad/game crap and Here works nice for navigation, but tends to crash the
OS or disable mobile data randomly.

With most of this article I was like "So what?" So what if Google has
intelligent building vectors. It's UI is shit. You can't go back and fourth
between different routes easily. You can't easily add waypoints. You can't do
a lot of the stuff you could do with traditional maps.

And the worst thing, half the time you can't even see the names of streets:

[https://www.justinobeirne.com/what-happened-to-google-
maps/](https://www.justinobeirne.com/what-happened-to-google-maps/)

This is especially difficult if you're walking around and just want the name
of a god damn street. You gotta zoom in, jiggle things around. Fuck aerial
views of buildings. When I'm walking I need to match up actual street signs to
find my way around.

Open Street Maps is actually pretty nice, although the views are extremely
busy. It can be a bit of an overload.

------
ctz
The cartography is pretty good. But I'm convinced nobody who works for Google
does actually _use_ Google Maps. The quality of the software and the user
experience is terrible and notably worse than ten years ago.

Example 1: I had a saved route map from a long while ago. Google Maps can no
longer load that map -- it is quietly truncated to the first 10 stops. Given
the lack of support, Google apparently doesn't care about losing your data.

Example 2: The move from 'old maps' (tile based) to 'new maps' (webgl based)
was a shambles. It still doesn't work as smoothly as old maps, and old maps
had _working features removed_ like the ability to edit routes. New maps still
performs terribly compared to old maps -- it's slower, less responsive, and
about a quarter of the time clicks do nothing.

I now use Bing maps day-to-day, which is worse than 2010-era Google Maps, but
immensely better than 2017-era Google Maps.

~~~
bob_roboto
There is so many more examples. Also hardly any of the links in the web
version have an URL behind them, so you can't just open them in a new tab when
researching something. Arguably one of the core use cases of a map
application.

------
Aloha
I've been an apple maps user since day 0 - and other than a sometime annoying
inability to FIND an address - its been remarkably reliable for me - even
driving to places in the middle of nowhere - YMMV though - if you live in a
different place, your luck may vary significantly.

I'm also not someone who gets lost easy either however, and learned how to
navigate pre-GPS - so again, YMMV.

------
staticelf
Google Maps is also unbelievable when finding trains and such in other
countries with a strange language. When I was in Japan I heavily used Google
Maps because I could search using the latin (?) alphabet and get the correct
kanji in return.

Without Google Maps, I would have been lost a lot more. With Google Maps I
easily could find bus rides and stuff that otherwise would have been
impossible.

~~~
pouetpouet
I used Hyperdia.com while in Japan

------
encoderer
I recently switched to Apple maps primary for car play after 10+ years. I
haven’t looked back.

Building outlines are not much of a moat for me.

~~~
Viper007Bond
Do you ever manage to get where you're actually trying to go though? ;)

In all seriousness, I've found Apple Maps search to be absolutely horrendous,
either missing places or having them in the wrong spot.

~~~
encoderer
Let me give the experiment more time, it’s only been a few thousand miles, but
so far I’ve found it in SF Bay Area to be equally as good. And I prefer it’s
design to google maps or waze.

Did you try recently or in the 2011 debut debacle era? Honestly for the
longest time it was in my junk folder due to bad early experiences.

~~~
Viper007Bond
I'll admit it has been a while but it was more recently than 2011.

------
fagnerbrack
I searched for the word "scary" in the comments and found 0 occurrences. Are
you serious???!!!

------
DanBC
One thing I really struggle with when using Google maps is that I have to zoom
in very close to get bus stops to show up.

The use case is that I get on a bus at place A, travel by bus to place F going
through places B, C, D, and E. I've never been to F before. I use Google Maps
to plan a journey, and chose the public transport option. When I'm on the bus
I need to know when to get off, and I can only do this by zooming into the map
really close.

Also, the marked bus route often doesn't follow roads, which means the planner
can sometimes tell you to get off at the wrong stop.

Here's an image of a bus route that doesn't follow the roads:
[https://imgur.com/a/TPIph](https://imgur.com/a/TPIph)

------
cycrutchfield
I wonder if they are using a technique similar to pix2pix
([https://github.com/phillipi/pix2pix](https://github.com/phillipi/pix2pix))
under the hood to turn satellite images into structure depth maps.

------
dsfyu404ed
Now if only they'd cross reference location history, elevation maps and apply
some rules like "don't send someone who usually searches for directions to
stuff in SV down a steep dirt road with hairpins in Vermont in December when
an alternate route that's 1min slower exists" or give me a checkbox that says
"don't add extra steps to a route if the net gain from the step isn't large
enough"

Edit: Now that I think about it "in $distance turn $direction onto $street
just before/after the $business_located_there" or would be great because
street signs are much harder read and identify at long distance or high speed
would solve my most common problem with google maps.

------
bigbugbag
I was surprised that there was no building in OpenStreetMap as I'm used to OSM
having detailed buildings everywhere (in my part of Europe they added cadaster
maps).

So I tried to locate the place shown in the article on OpenStreetMap and sure
enough, if the buildings were missing when the article was writtent, they're
not anymore.

[http://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/126762#map=17/41.33998...](http://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/126762#map=17/41.33998/-89.12703)
[https://framapic.org/04W5qV0AS3t1/8j6obUnCNf1H.png](https://framapic.org/04W5qV0AS3t1/8j6obUnCNf1H.png)

------
wdr1
Is the author (Justin O'Beirne) really Apple's Head of Cartography?

[https://www.crunchbase.com/person/justin-o-
beirne](https://www.crunchbase.com/person/justin-o-beirne)

~~~
on_and_off
That's him.

IIRC he left Apple in 2015 and only after that he resumed publicly talking
about mapping products.

------
jakubp
To the author of this writeup: thank you, this is a phenomenal story with
compelling visuals. Oftentimes I prefer HN comment thread to the original, but
in this case I am impressed by high quality analysis of the original :)

------
m3kw9
The direction capabilities is what makes me use google maps more, it’s just
more reliable in general and gives better routes. Sometimes Apple would give
these really dumb routes. I would say ‘why would you do that?’

------
rasz
>building footprints: Google seems to have them all

Curiously I noticed about a year ago corner of my building vanished from
Google map, it was there 5 years ago. Even more interesting just checked right
now and ANOTHER corner of same building vanished :). Both are still there on
sat photo, both are modeled in 3D view, just not on the flat map.

What appears to be happening is those building outlines are not coming from 3D
map, but from official city documents, and those can be a total mess. I
checked some recent (5 year old) buildings, and they are also missing their
flat outlines.

------
daveheq
Google Maps downloading building structure and parked truck boxes is WAY too
much to download, especially over my limited cell data plan... That's pretty
ridiculous, I have almost no need for that.

------
oh-kumudo
Creating data out of data is literally the job of any machine learning model
to be honest. And even though it is speculation from my side, but should be
not far from the reality because this problem is literally everywhere, that
Google spent some really big bucks to do the manual quality control of their
data by hiring thousands if not 10s of thousands qualified people. And such
quality control itself is quite an art to master, and have to be done on
ongoing basis.

With good data, then model can better do the tricks, but data is the real gold
here.

------
carapace
> But you can’t call a self-driving car and say “oh, I live in the white
> building and the door is around the corner”.

Not until twenty minutes from now...

(By the time these cars need it, it will be easy to implement, is my point.)

------
uptown
I'm surprised Apple hasn't scooped up Foursquare. They seem to have a great
database of location information that seems like it'd complement Apple's
location services nicely.

------
jonlucc
Maybe it's naive of me, but I would assume it won't take 6 years for Apple to
redo the work that Google is ahead on. For one thing, they now know a specific
feature to work toward, which cuts some time out. Then, they can likely throw
more cycles at this problem than Google could 6 years ago, again reducing
Google's lead. Lastly, they probably have a lot of stored raw data (satellite
images specifically) that Google didn't have at the start and took time to
collect multiple angles over time.

~~~
ryen
I think you're confusing ideas/features with execution. Apple knew very well
at the onset what to build. But they executed poorly and underestimated the
amount of non-trivial human involvement in correcting mistakes and combining
many layers of information into a cohesive and [mostly] robust experience.

These kinds of applications aren't Apple's strong suit, and Google is years
ahead on technical abilities on the data correction and feedback front as well
as custom satellite hardware and software design. Although Apple may be moving
on that [1].

[1] [https://9to5mac.com/2017/04/21/apple-satellite-hardware-
proj...](https://9to5mac.com/2017/04/21/apple-satellite-hardware-project-
google-execs-maps-ar/)

------
upofadown
> In downtown Los Angeles, Google’s buildings are so detailed that you can
> sometimes see the blades inside the rooftop fans.

Doesn't that mean that in that case we are just seeing image processing with
no real meaning? I am not sure how this represents the first step in the
creation of data from data. If we just want to see the buildings we can switch
to "satellite" view.

Contrast this with something like Open Street Map where you end up with an
explicit description of the area that a building covers with no extraneous
detail.

~~~
maxerickson
The discussion of building details is just a side trip.

The data from data is more about how they have decent building representations
and POIs even in pretty remote areas and so have really wide coverage on their
areas of interest.

------
wnevets
Google maps is probably the only service I couldn't live without. I could get
a new email address or visit some other video site but maps is just too good
and important.

------
gbbr
This is a very interesting read. But it’s so frustratingly long. It’s like
“where are you going with this”. It’s as frustrating as interesting it is.
What a unique combo.

------
nkkollaw
Google is amazing.

They are the best in using AI and CS in general to make my life easier.

I now use 80% Google products for email, phone, photos, maps, etc.

I just hope I never lose access to my account :-\

------
nielsbot
Point taken, however I appreciate using a mapping service that doesn't show
ads. I also prefer Apple Maps aesthetically... minor point.

------
acd
One should compare Openstreet map vs Google Maps.

~~~
lucb1e
I'm a big fan of OpenStreetMap and a regular contributor, but that's just not
a fair comparison. Using a billion dollars a year, of course Google has street
view, satellite view, 3d buildings, live traffic info... all of which I see as
nigh impossible for OpenStreetMap.

But I still use OSM daily. My main mapping needs are _basic needs_ like
everyone else's: where is this thing and how do I get there? OSM is very good
at that in every place I've been (most of western Europe). It's also something
I believe should be free data (as in freedom), but Google keeps it all locked
in. Other basic data about our physical world, like where railways or forests
are, is also very accurately in there.

When I need advanced stuff like live traffic, or want to see something on
satellite, I'll have to resort to other services. And I think that's
reasonable: they're costly to setup and maintain, so paying someone for that
makes sense.

If we make such a comparison, I'd rather see Google Maps starting with a large
negative score for keeping it locked-in, and then comparing whether they're
actually, functionally better for different common uses, rather than "oh look
at this gimmick, they even have the air ducts mapped on the roof over there"
as this article seems to do.

------
darkhorn
Satellite imagery for close zoom levels aren't loaded for Turkey! Thete is no
problem with Yandex Maps, Apple Maps and Microsoft Maps.
[https://support.google.com/maps/forum/AAAAQuUrST8Ixm4C6hviZQ...](https://support.google.com/maps/forum/AAAAQuUrST8Ixm4C6hviZQ/?hl=en)

------
xuesj
I prefer to use google maps when I am in USA. In China, I have to use Gaode
maps with iPhone, China even banned Appple's maps.

~~~
client4
I've resorted to Baidu at the moment. Google maps in China is garbage. Hot
steaming garbage.

------
saagarjha
> Google had distinct locations for each; but Apple plotted them all at the
> same location

I use Apple Maps almost 95% of the time, and this is one of its major
annoyances. If I'm trying to find a location by eyeballing it from the map, it
can sometimes be impossible to do so because there's another label on top of
it.

------
tripzilch
The problem is that all of this data isn't _open_. It's Google's. I understand
the immense effort required to create maps of this detail, which is why they
are protected by copyright (and database rights, a special subsection of
that).

However, on the one hand these maps are owned by a single company that has the
singular unique infrastructure, on the whole planet, to even begin to attempt
to create maps like this, that no other company (not even Apple) could start
to try and get close. Google's machine learning and data-crunching abilities
have no match, and there won't be a competitor that ever will.

And on the other hand, the only way I can access this data is through an app
that wants to track me and spy on me _so badly_ it refuses to even remember my
recent search queries if I disable Google's Location History. I mean get this,
remembering recent search queries used to be a feature that made people
consider a program to be "clever" or "smart".

I can use ALL this machine learning and fuzzy queries, sound alike typo
corrections, super smart Google tech and search with vague hints of queries
like that restaurant near the thingy or whatever, and it will give me relevant
results!

But it refuses to remember my recent queries, a most basic feature that today
is just considered basic UX instead of "clever programming", unless I allow it
to spy on me.

This is _literally_ the tradeoff it's asking me to make:

Do you want to be able to use the single most advanced and detailed map of the
entire planet available to the public with basic User Experience niceties?

Or do you want to keep your privacy and not broadcast your location to a
corporation in a foreign country, specifically the one with the biggest, most
out-of-control spying agency, that's --just to name one thing why I think the
US/NSA and whoever lives there wanting a bite of my privacy can piss right
off-- been hacking people in my home country's personal computers and devices,
left and right just because anyone who is a sysadmin is considered a
"strategic target" even though our countries are "allies" on paper, that
apparently doesn't mean shit when attacking citizens' property.

Sorry yeah it looks great, just like with cathedrals. Was a bit shit with some
caveats/blood/death for the common people during the time they were built, but
in a few hundred years we'll probably look at this with awe and wonder.

------
blunte
Unless I missed it, the essay doesn't include mobile phone location tracking
or location search information in the speculation of how Google is doing this
rich mapping.

I'm sure there's a lot of AoI value in these two sources, so I would expect it
to be part of the big equation.

------
gideon_b
You wouldn't believe how helpful "areas of interest" were for wandering around
foreign cities. I was wandering around a city I didn't know, unable to speak
the language, and yet I could easily connect corridors of interesting shops
and restaurants.

------
mherrmann
Now I know why Google's reCAPTCHA is asking me to identify store fronts.
Identifying cars, street signs etc is obvious for self-driving cars. But my
hunch is that store fronts are to better make sense of Street View imagery.

------
amelius
Aren't building-footprints easy to add using complementary data, such as
satellite view and/or street addresses?

Perhaps it could be a nice ML project: turning map data + satellite data into
fuller looking map data.

~~~
bob_theslob646
>Perhaps it could be a nice ML project: turning map data + satellite data into
fuller looking map data.

Yeah, fun ML project. This is how much data there was in 2012... >Combining
satellite, aerial and street level imagery, Google Maps has over 20 petabytes
of data, which is equal to approximately 21 million gigabytes, or around
20,500 terabytes.Aug 22, 2012([http://mashable.com/2012/08/22/google-maps-
facts/#yf0lqw7FlZ...](http://mashable.com/2012/08/22/google-maps-
facts/#yf0lqw7FlZq3))

------
baybal2
Quite sophisticated are their ways. Chinese and Russian companies are simply
relying on armies of human surveyor. Chinese went event further by hiring 3d
artists to manually model and texture each building.

------
gontard
I think google also use geolocalized data collected from android users.

------
qubex
“Moat”... isn’t that just a description of “competitive advantage”.

------
blauditore
If I'm not mistaken, Bing maps had 3D building information years ago already,
before Google Maps. The author seems completely unaware of that.

------
allpratik
What a beautifully detailed post is this! Incredible!

Also, I do agree with generated AOI's, Google can leverage it for Waymo and
their other products as well.

~~~
lucb1e
To be honest, at least when looking on my phone, I found it to be a little too
detailed. A thousand examples of what we already know. In my head I was
playing dramatized commentary: "Gee, the POIs are round but the areas are not,
they're square. And they have been adding buildings. Oh boy, could they
really? Yes indeed, they seem to be following building contours. My gosh, that
is so smart! And look, here as well! And _(gasp)_ another example here!"

Maybe I'm too much into openstreetmap and these things are normal to me, but
"beautifully" detailed was not my experience. More like google fanboy showing
off.

------
mooneater
I commented on this on HN 8 years ago -- I said Google Building Maker looks to
be "providing an ideal training set for training machine learning algorithms
to automatically extract 3D models from aerial photos". That may be the key to
this building detail.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=879519](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=879519)

------
EugeneOZ
But still sometimes Apple Maps can find more shops nearby than Google Maps. At
least in Barcelona.

------
dbatten
It's amazing that Google invests so many resources in making a feature like
this so awesome, but then they don't have the sense to realize that nobody
wants trees rendered as awful looking 3d blobs when they switch to satellite
view. Just show me the freaking photo. (I know, lite mode, but the default
Google has chosen is atrocious.)

------
mathattack
Is there a limit to the power of Maps when’s it’s not the default on most high
end phones?

------
ineedasername
I think it just shows the primary difference between the two companies. Google
is ad-revenue driven by mechanisms that leverage world-scale data mining &
analysis. Apple is revenue driven by hardware that leverages high-quality
product design. Oversimplifying both I'm sure, but I think most things stem
from this.

------
4684499
I can tell Google is pretty upset that they don't have real time cams
everywhere.

~~~
adrianN
That's the real reason why they invest so much in self-driving cars. It'll be
just millions and millions of eyes for them.

~~~
snowpanda
Makes me wonder what their end goal is. It's a bit unnerving.

------
Jaruzel
"Google is creating data out of data."

That's called 'Information' \- Librarians the world over having been doing
exactly this for centuries. /facepalm

As an aside, the whole article also seems to be written very simplistically,
and aimed at a younger audience.

------
cooervo
Very interesting making data out of data.

------
onatm
Great article but it may cause epilepsy. I felt really dizzy while reading it.

------
ajkjk
Things like this make me think that it's a shame humanity is duplicating all
this work instead of collaborating to do it once. One of the awkward failures
of capitalism, I guess.

At least when your product is something physical you end up with twice as many
outputs. When it's just data you just do the same work twice.

~~~
spaceflunky
This is the wrong way to think about things. Competition is good.

If it weren't for the need to compete, would Google have spent billions on
innovations like Street View, Satellite imagery, Google Earth, etc. Or would
they have just said, "MapQuest has won the internet maps game, let's just let
MapQuest do their own thing. No use in doing the same work twice,"

~~~
dljsjr
I think you slightly missed the parent comment's point, which is not that they
should have walked away but rather have said "man, we really want better maps
and imaging for navigation, MapQuest has a great head start, we should work
with them to make it even better". I'm not sure what economic model encourages
that sort of behavior, though.

~~~
Nomentatus
Agreed. Yet this sort of sharing has happened in some fields - for example,
with game engines. Which I never thought I'd see, way back when. The best of
these now tend to be opened up (for royalties.) Perhaps that needs to have
more regulatory or government encouragement; although like yourself I'm not
quite sure how to do that and still keep incentives in place. Particularly
where only one or two firms are really competitive.

------
abritinthebay
This starts with the assumption that Google Maps is better.

I don’t get it.

It’s literally worse at everything I try to use it for.

\- Directions are so bad I have to recommend Uber drivers not use it.

\- The mobile website is practically unusable with an appallingly bad UI

\- The mobile app is not much better, and continually tries to upsell to other
google apps.

The strange thing is: they own Waze which is better at basically everything.

Maybe the experience on Android is better, and their desktop site is great,
but I’ve been using Apple Maps and Waze and it’s just so much of a better
experience that I think they’ve lost me for good.

------
jacksmith21006
My biggest issue with Apple maps is lack of lane to get into when driving you
get everywhere with Google maps. I can not live without this feature is not
the greatest driver and really need this.

------
bschwindHN
Maybe all those smart engineers could put their heads together and figure out
how to not zoom into street view when I want to view a picture on a review.
And maybe return me to where I was in the review list instead of taking me
back to the top level business information. What a feat of engineering _that_
would be.

------
droopybuns
Android is a botnet that is collecting data. Google should be paying you to
use their harvesters.

~~~
k3a
I don't get why this was downwoted? By using google maps one contribute back
traffic data and route problems for free + you share your position which can
be sold to billboard advertisers for analysis...

------
EGreg
_These building footprints, complete with height detail, are algorithmically
created by taking aerial imagery and using computer vision techniques to
render the building shapes._

I could have guessed that before the punchline. And it's not that difficult to
add for a company with tens of billions in cash. What are you doing, Apple?
Fix your OS and Maps!

~~~
londons_explore
You need aerial imagery from different angles.

Thats surprisingly hard to buy from imagery providers, because most of them
only want to point their cameras directly downwards.

~~~
angch
They fly their own planes these days.

[https://blog.google/topics/inside-google/google-earths-
incre...](https://blog.google/topics/inside-google/google-earths-
incredible-3d-imagery-explained/)

Too bad it's a video. Fast forward about 2 minutes.

Or: [https://youtu.be/suo_aUTUpps?t=121](https://youtu.be/suo_aUTUpps?t=121)

Fly plane. Zig zag. 5 cameras, then photogrammetry. StreetView, from planes.

~~~
londons_explore
Not really effective for non-urban areas.

