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Comment by pxtail | Hacker News Reader

"In Maps, ads will now appear in recommended search queries, on routing pages and during navigation"

Ugh, this is sad and clever at same time - during navigation screen is on all the time and one usually glances at route from time to time even if it is just "straight ahead" for couple of kilometers. Moreover ad will be potentially visible to all passengers as well.

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My thought was always that they were going to start using businesses as landmarks, aka:

"At Monument Dr. - just past the Starbucks where if you stop now you can get a piping hot Venti coffee for only $1.50 - make a right"

They already do this; it's roughly in the form of: "take a left at sunset boulevard, right past the jack in the box".

I suspected it was a paid ad, but never knew for sure

I believe they've stated these are not ads, but are strictly for navigation.

That makes it an unpaid ad.

Cynically, yes, but this is how humans follow directions anyway. Are your friends giving you an unpaid ad when they say "head down main st, past the Burger King"?

Plausable deniability is the name of the game. If an unusually well informed group has trouble telling, are they free to do either?

That's how you navigate if you had absolutely nothing to follow but word of mouth and need to remember every step, vs. a highlighted line on a map you just chug along without having to think more than a turn ahead, which you are reminded of anyway.

That's a terrible practice for me. The way my brain works, street names are far more useful than landmarks, particularly if those landmarks are businesses.

They already do this heavily in India. Mostly due to a lack of good road signage. Landmarks are what defined navigation. Where I live (Bangalore), we have junctions named after KFC and Sony, cos those stores have been there for so long.

"How much to route traffic off the interstate past my business?"

on a serious note - the Telsa in-car mapping app uses google map tiles, and they are choosng what businesses show up with icons when you look at the map.

Does Tesla's system already show ads in place discovery/search results? I would imagine they have a "no ads" contract with Google.

define "ads"? If something doesn't have "special offer" popups or a slogan, yet bubbles to the top of search results...

It's pretty telling when you search "bar" or something in a given area and the most commercial places pop up with icons and names, obscuring a sea of minor red dots that are also in fact bars. And moving the map tiles doesn't automatically research either. Unless you thoroughly scrubbed an area, searching and researching for "bar" every half dozen blocks, you are only going to gleam a small % of the places in that area.

At least they haven't brought this corporatism to google earth desktop yet. I can pull up on the map every single bar and restaurant in Los Angeles in one search if I wanted to.

Anyone who buys ad slots in Google Maps is basically trying to kill their customers.

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