Hacker News Reader

Comment by wwalexander | Hacker News Reader

I prefer Apple Maps in absolutely every way except their business info. Many businesses are missing, listed but no longer operating, or have incorrect/outdated business hours and other metadata. I do my best to add or correct info via the in-app crowdsourcing interface, but it often takes a long time for the information to be reflected if at all.

That being said, it’s hard to compete with Google on data munging. Besides, if I’m actually looking for info on a business besides it’s location, I’d just Google it or visit its website anyways—especially post-pandemic as businesses close, open, and change hours so frequently.

View on HN

I know someone who worked at Google Maps in this area, and believe it or not the business directory problem is probably harder to solve than the rest of the app put together. You can fine tune map parsing and routes and algorithms all you like till they are good enough for every reasonable use case, but there's really no technical solution for a small restaurant that has no online presence and simply opens and closes when it feels like it. Google crunches data from a hundred different sources – looking up local directories, cold calling every restaurant in the world, mailing them postcards, measuring visitor foot traffic, analyzing data from street view, looking at community edits – and draws a somewhat reasonable picture. It's borderline impossible for anyone else to do this.

Another feature Google Maps excels at is estimation. If the app tells me I'll get to my destination at 3:24 when I start the route, I will really get there there at 3:24 no matter what. I don't know how they do it, but no one else is even close to that accurate.

There were several interesting businesses that shut down early 2020 that had an interesting approach to getting high quality business data: send actual people/dedicated staff to a neighborhood and document all the businesses!

Turns out, subject to actually having a working business overall, this gets you way higher quality location data.

They could lobby for laws that require business owners to publish their data, but I suppose then they would lose their advantage.

Re: estimation - I'm convinced it even factors in that I speed a bit beyond the posted limit! No longer can I get the satisfaction of arriving earlier than the ETA.

It definitely does that, otherwise every estimation on California highways (where driving 20 mph over the speed limit is the norm) would be inaccurate.

Not too long ago, something weird happened to Google Maps in Norway: A lot of places were just names of ordinary people like "Ole Olsen" and "Anette Andersen", scattered around in residential areas with no store front.

The simple explanation — not confirmed, but it's easy enough to deduce from the evidence — is that someone at Google imported a business directory of Norwegian businesses that also included sole proprietorships (enkeltpersonforetak).

Here [1] is a screenshot of a random area of Oslo I zoomed into.

In Norway, it's very common to establish a sole proprietorship if you are self-employed (which includes professionals like artists and authors) or have some kind of business income on the side. About 3.7% of Norway's population has a sole proprietorship.

The problem, of course, is that pretty much all of these are just people's own homes, not stores or office spaces accessible to the public. So it's nonsensical to put them all on the map. Somebody screwed up.

I've reported the issue, but of course they never replied, and the issue still exists. Now and then I'll report a business as erroneous, but there are around 216,000 of them.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/pI42FoP.jpg

It isn't just Norway, it's in the US, too. There are a shitload of obvious consultancy/sole proprietor/LLC type businesses in a lot of rural areas on Google Maps.

That's a pretty common issue - at least one maps app in Australia has shown businesses at their owner's houses, and has shown people's retirement accounts as businesses on the maps.

> Another feature Google Maps excels at is estimation. If the app tells me I'll get to my destination at 3:24 when I start the route, I will really get there there at 3:24 no matter what. I don't know how they do it, but no one else is even close to that accurate.

I remember reading this a few years ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20180221091712/https://arturrr.c.... Their conclusion is that Apple Maps gave the most accurate estimations.

For me it's almost always 10 minutes later than the estimation (Europe). I just add 10.

I think that's one of the great things they got when they bought Waze. Pre-pandemic, I had to do a cross-town trip right near the peak of rush hour once a week. I would use Google to get a sane route but their time estimates never seemed to account for increasing traffic volumes and it would take 5-10 minutes longer than estimated at the start of the trip.

Waze would send me down residential streets to save 10 seconds, assuming I was able to make a left turn without a light at the next major road. But they always nailed the arrival time. I would go with whichever app suited my mood.

As a business owner, Apple doesnt make it easy to update hours. There’s a whole approval process, so even if I wanted to update them if we decide to change day of it won’t be reflected in the App

As an app developer, I’m not aware of any API either. Google has a My Business API where I can integrate to update my business info/hours

I run into this occasionally so when knowing business hours is really important for some reason I usually call to double check. I like that the phone number is right there, and the link to open yelp.

Re: corrections, I’ve only done it once, but when I discovered Apple had a coffee shop on the map that didn’t exist I submitted a correction, and to my surprise I got a thank you reply and saw the map corrected in under 24 hours. I thought that was pretty good.

Agreed. But with google maps I can suggests changes and add info and it will be accepted, I can't to do that with Apple Maps. Maybe that's part of why Google Maps has better info.

(Or maybe I just haven't been able to figure it out how to contribute to Apple Maps, I even googled how to do it and got to a place where business owners could enter details about their own business)

Business info on Google has gotten so bad (at least where I live) that it's also all but useless, meaning the last reason I had to ever even open Google Maps is gone.

I've been using Apple Maps every day for a couple years now and it's been a breath of fresh air. Type in address, get directions. Like mapping is supposed to do, and like Google used to do before Google as a whole decided they know what the users want better than the users do, and went the HP-way of bloat-over-function.

I don't know any system that has good business hours.

I think this mostly because just about every business on the planet has changed their hours - multiple times - during the pandemic.

Business info in Apple Maps is wrong even in SF and NYC. It's really bad.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com