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Comment by kulkarnic | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry I don't buy this argument: When someone searches for "sushi stockholm" on Google, they aren't saying "Show me a map with all the sushi places in Stockholm". They are saying "I want to know more about getting sushi in Stockholm. Can you show me a webpage that can show me that?"

That webpage could well be the Google Maps website; and to level the playing field, Google could use a similar blue-link to the Google Maps page that highlights sushi places (or alternatively, show a map from the author's website).

I wouldn't, however, hold my breath. On the Internet, it's NEVER going to be completely fair. If they could, simple, personal geocities-based recipe sites would prevent AllRecipes and BBC from taking over "their" expertise (some of those old homepages had seriously awesome recipes!)

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>they aren't saying "Show me a map with all the sushi places in Stockholm". They are saying "I want to know more about getting sushi in Stockholm. Can you show me a webpage that can show me that?"

[Citation needed]

Presumably if you're correct, and users aren't actually looking for the google maps interface, they'll skip it and move to the web results. Users have now come to expect this behavior from Google when they type in local search queries.

They aren't saying either of those things. They are saying "show me sushi stockholm" which google interprets as "show me sushi in stockholm" and as far as google knows (and accurately as far as I'm concerned when I use google), any sort of searches explicitly limited to a known geographic area are best answered by a map of that area with search results shown on top of it. If you search for "getting sushi in stockholm" you don't get a map. The language that triggers a map as the first result is very specific and not limited to google. Individuals may find that they don't like the map as the first result for some queries, but as a company every major search engine as decided this is the best way to present certain results. Rail against it as a website owner or user all you want, but it is absolutely a legitimate practice.

Of course it is possible to have better results for certain queries. Is it even remotely plausible for google to reliably decide that? To my knowledge, not without solving some very difficult problems, which they may or may not have any motivation to do, but they are certainly under no obligation to do it either.

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