Ask HN: Google Maps cuisine bias issue? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Google Maps cuisine bias issue?

2 pointsasiachick5 comments

Today I was searching for "Malaysian restaurant" in Fremont California with Google Maps. I saw it listed Burmese restaurants as well. In my experience, Burmese food is more different from Malaysian food than French to German or Italian so I was a little dismayed that Google was thinking if I asked for "Malaysian restaurant" that it was ok to suggest "Burmese restaurants".

Trying some other things, I tried "French restaurant". I could find no examples of google maps recommending things other than French restaurants. Not in Fremont, or Singapore, or Taipei.

It made me wonder, how does Google maps decide what is a similar search result? Why did it show me Burmese when I asked for Mayalsian? It's certainly not "because they are geographically close" as France and Germany share a border. It made me wonder if this is an ML issue or if it's mistake where whoever programmed this put their own biases in (French, German, Italian, South East Asian) vs (French, German, Italian, Malasian, Burmese, Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian, ...)

Anyone know why it might do this? Consider if you were searching for French restaurants and it recommended Italian restaurants. That would arguably just be bad results but given it didn't give bad resutls for that search but did for Malaysian restaurants it seemed to deserve some explanation.

Are their other searches with similarly interesting results?

None of us are able to read the minds of Google's engineers, but I would take a guess at a couple of reasonable explanations.

1) Think about the respective quantities of Malaysian vs Italian restaurants in the US. There's probably dozens and dozens of Italian restaurants in a typical American city - you don't need to recommend French or any other food in the US when searching for Italian because you can find 100 different Italian results just about anywhere in the US. But I doubt that Malaysian or Burmese restaurants are nearly as common. It seems reasonable that a different type of search like Malaysian would yield a recommendation for something in the general area like Burmese if there's only a handful of Malaysian restaurants in a specific area in the US.

2) An American who is hunting for Malaysian food is open to trying something a little different than the American norm. If I was in the mood for something a little different from Asia and couldn't find a Malaysian place, I'd think that Burmese food would be a great substitute to try if there's one in the area. It doesn't mean that they're necessarily the same cooking style, just that it captures the right mindset while searching. I'd bet that searches for European foods in Asia make similar oddball recommendations in Asia. If you were randomly searching for Irish food in some random Asian area and there were very few Irish pubs in the region, it might randomly recommend Spanish or German or Italian food due to some level of geographic similarity because that captures the right mindset of what you're looking for: something non-Asian from the European part of the world.

you seem to have ignored that I searched in Taipei and Singapore, not just America. Your argument might work if I choose Thailand and it returns anything European for "French Restaurant" since that is "other". But it doesn't. It returns exactly and only "French restaurants"

Searching Chiang Mai for "French Restaurant" from google.co.th with my timezone set to thailand and my ip address as a thai IP address still has the same results. Searching for "French Restaurant" gets just french restaurants. Searching for "Malaysian Restaurant" get stuff all over the board including Indian, Japanese. Searching for "Chinese Restaurant" even gave a result that was "Thai"

> If I was in the mood for something a little different from Asia and couldn't find a Malaysian place, I'd think that Burmese food would be a great substitute to try if there's one in the area

That IMO is exactly the bias I'm talking about. Only a non-asian would think if someone asks for "Malaysian" they really mean "anything other than European". Fremont is 60% Asian. Catering to "Americans" want shouldn't even be a thing. What's an "American". AFAIK, All the Asians born in America are American and most if not all of them want what they're searching for, not some non-Asian's interpretation of what they're looking for

Regarding Google:

As we can't read minds, we can only speculate about logical reasons for search algorithms.

Let's keep in mind that Google is not perfect and completely consistent.

Your test is a good start, but who knows how they're tracking people these days? Just changing a timezone and IP address might not yield a representative Thailand search.

While Google's business practices in many respects are extremely disturbing, I think it's fair to not assume malice on their part for many of their search algorithm decisions.

> Searching for "Malaysian Restaurant" get stuff all over the board including Indian, Japanese.

Do you have a Malaysian background?

I don't want to offend as Malaysian food can be great, but it's probably not among the most well known or popular cuisines globally.

Maybe it's easier for an intelligent algorithm that knows a bit about people to recommend other foods when Malaysian food is searched for because Malaysian Cuisine isn't quite as well known as other cuisines.

Maybe searching for something like Italian food is less likely to yield alternative recommendations because basically everybody already knows what Italian food is and it would feel like the search is wrong if anything else is recommended?

Maybe searching for other less well known cuisines (I don't know maybe Kenyan, Georgian, Yemen, Bulgarian) might be more likely to yield alternative recommendations because fewer people know what those foods are all about so getting alternative recommendations for foods that aren't as well known makes sense for a search engine that tries to meet peoples' expectations?

> Only a non-asian would think if someone asks for "Malaysian" they really mean "anything other than European". Fremont is 60% Asian. Catering to "Americans" want shouldn't even be a thing. What's an "American". AFAIK, All the Asians born in America are American and most if not all of them want what they're searching for, not some non-Asian's interpretation of what they're looking for

I want to make a reasonable and polite response here, but it's difficult to understand how you're using the word Asian. Is this a geographical label or a racial one? When you say that Asians born in America are American, then treat them as a separate entity by declaring that Fremont is 60% Asian, I'm finding it hard to understand what you're really saying.

I don't think there is any biases behind it.

Google is incentivized to return you results. And there are probably not enough Malaysian restaurants in Fremont.

So I would assume they have some data that says "people who like Malaysian cuisine tend to like Burmese cuisine as well".

And so they are returning them as well.

It does the same quite often. I am French and I live in Thailand. If I look for "crepes" it will return me results about "roti" (which for any French person is a disaster)

crepes != french. My first introduction to crepes was Japan. Yes I'm guessing they got them from France but searching for "crepes" is not the same as searching for "French restaurant" just like searching for "pizza" could get you anything in almost any country.

But, as I pointed out, I searched for "French restaurant" in places that have far less French restaurants (Taipei, Singapore, just tried Panang Malaysia). Google still gave zero results that were not French restaurants.

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