
The value of Google Maps directions logs - joshfraser
http://glinden.blogspot.com/2011/05/value-of-google-maps-directions-logs.html
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thaumaturgy
Well, I guess I'm fucked for the future.

I'm extremely skeptical of the value of the "wisdom of crowds". On social
sites, I find myself often finding value in overlooked comments or articles
and, worse yet, often finding little value in the most popular comments and
articles.

On technical sites, popularity again has little to do with helpfulness,
although this has become probably the single greatest ranking metric in search
results. For one self-promoting example, a year and a half ago I posted a fix
for an annoying osCommerce 3.0 bug (<http://robsheldon.com/oscommerce3fix>);
it never showed up in search results for queries like "oscommerce
HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR". That doesn't really bother me, except that every single
time I'm banging my head against some obscure problem, in the back of my mind
I'm wondering how many little blogs there are out there that have posted _the
exact solution I'm looking for_ , except I just couldn't find them if my life
depended on it because they aren't ... popular.

As an avid hiker and former climber, the _last_ thing I want to do if I'm in
unfamiliar territory is be directed to _wherever everyone else goes_. Hell, I
don't even usually want that if I'm doing the tourist thing in some city.

Ugh. I'm starting to develop this really powerful sick-to-my-stomach loathing
for "crowdsourcing".

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defrost
So you're saying you've a keen interest in the inverse of this data set then?

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thaumaturgy
No. Saying that I don't see value in a particular thing does not mean I see
value in its opposite.

If we must measure and rank the value of everything, I'd prefer it to be done
on some metric unrelated to popularity.

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chrismealy
The places I most want to go to I don't need directions for.

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ZoFreX
That seems to be the biggest flaw for me. There are shops that I go to every
week, and I never type them into Google (Maps or otherwise), and I'd certainly
never need directions. If I need directions to "B", the only thing it's a good
indicator of is that I probably haven't been to "B" from "A" before. Value
could only be determined if I went there more than once, but in that case, I
wouldn't "tell" a search engine.

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ChuckMcM
This is a good example of a meta-data injection. Not clear yet what the
outcome will be on the overall system. Kind of like auto-complete for places.

The scary thing will be creating need feedback loops. So club A tries various
marketing strategies and compares that with its rise (or fall) in the
'destination intent' index. These then trigger more specific marketing but
then carves out a population which is responding to the messaging.

Combined with groupon style offers its going to be an interesting couple of
years.

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boscomutunga
Yes,i think that kind of data is very valuable. Another application of this
kind of data is in transport and movement statistics of a population.

