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Comment by michaelbuckbee | Hacker News Reader

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"

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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.

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