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Comment by dpryden | Hacker News Reader

I recall from my time in Google Geo years ago that the idea of integrating Search and Maps was a big part of the "New Maps" release that happened around 2014. The rumor I heard was that someone (possibly even Larry himself) wanted to be able to have interactive maps directly on the search results page, so that the navigation from a search query to a map wouldn't involve even a page reload. So the big Maps frontend rewrite actually ended up merging MFE into GWS, the web search frontend server. I recall seeing maps hosted at google.com/maps around that time, but I don't know if that was ever launched fully or if it was just an experiment.

In any case, though, my understanding is that the technical capacity for this has existed for nearly 10 years now, just behind a configuration setting. So it's possible that this change is just a code cleanup. It's also possible that someone is trying to increase the percentage of searches that have location information, that doesn't seem terribly far-fetched either, and I can imagine lots of ways people could try to rationalize it as actually benefiting users. (Whether it actually does benefit users is of course debatable.)

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It is absolutely bizarre to me how half-assed Google is with integrating its products.

I have a week of events coming up in Google Calendar each with a different event location. Why can't I see a map of all those event locations alongside the calendar with all the same event details listed? Why can't I associate a Google Calendar event with a specific album or set of photos in Google Photos and see those in the map and calendar as well?

This is why I'm building https://visible.page with my brother. We have all these capabilities of visualizing data on the web, yet no one has actually put them together in a convenient and consumer friendly way to visualize any type of information together in one place.

All these big tech companies seem to just give up on any kind of significant innovation as soon as they reach a certain level of monopoly on their market. Twitter, Spotify, Facebook, Google, etc. I can think of a dozen significant feature experiments they could try that would make my daily life better using those tools yet they don't.

> It is absolutely bizarre to me how half-assed Google is with integrating its products

The answer can be summed up in one word: "privacy".

There are two forces at play here. One side wants privacy. When they give data to Google Calendar, they don't want Google Maps or Ads know about it. The other side (your opinion above) wants more integration between services.

In this political climate, the privacy side has an edge. This means if Google Photos want to access data on Google Calendar to provide the integration you asked above, they will have to jump through multiple quarters of privacy reviews, with a very high odd of being shutdown.

> All these big tech companies seem to just give up on any kind of significant innovation as soon as they reach a certain level of monopoly on their market

After I see how the sausages are made, I think claims like these are naive. It's worth learning more about the factors at play before criticizing something. More often than not, the agents are acting pretty rationally based on the situation.

> privacy

Do Not Give google credit for privacy.

first, showing maps for a location it is already showing on the screen... the data is already all there. it is pure and simple calendar team didn't want to bother using maps team's api. nothing else. nobody had a meeting and decided against it because of user privacy.

second, no matter the product, the only integration all of them MUST have is to both advertising and profile. those two internal apis respectively serve ads against your profile (ssp) and add events to your profile to later target ads.

so no, absolutely nothing on google deserve the privacy argument.

The privacy argument doesn’t make sense to me. The addresses are already in Google Calendar. They don’t need to be saved into a different service to be viewed anonymously in Google Maps. You can already do it in Google Calendar for one event/address at a time.

Yes there are business/internal-politics reasons why some obvious features or experimentation doesn’t happen, but those aren’t necessarily good reasons beyond short term benefit to specific individuals at a company.

But I do think some of it can generally be blamed on large companies losing their ability to be nimble due to the inherent friction of the politics and logistics that build up as an organization grows.

FWIW, I worked on the integration with calendar and maps - the GP comment is exactly right, it was due to privacy concerns. The terms of service for Workspace say that user data can never be used for anything not related to Workspace, so moving any user data from Workspace to another service has to be done very carefully.

In the example of this integration, allowing it to open in the sidebar was okay because it was a user action, and there is some data anonymization that happens (I don't recall the details, this was a few years ago).

But we couldn't share a list of your appointments with maps ahead of time to allow them to generate the view you describe, because there wasn't a way that guaranteed that the data wouldn't be associated back with the original user.

I don't think privacy has anything to do with it. Google Maps doesn't need to capture any user data to implement OP's suggestion. Google Calendar just needs to render a map with a set of locations marked on it using Google Maps. It doesn't need to tell Google Maps what or who the locations are for. This is something Google Calendar should already be able to accomplish using a public API. All other aspects of the feature could be implemented as part of the Google Calendar service without any further integration with Google Maps.

Further, I don't think users are generally against services using the information - which the user has presumably already provided intentionally - to better serve them. The problem is when that information is shared with third parties or used for purposes which are not obviously in the users' best interests. IMO, any user data stored externally should be subject to an opt-in permissions system which strictly defines how the data can be used. That doesn't stop companies like Google from being able to offer me useful services that I might actually be interested in. The notion that privacy discourages innovation is just silly.

All of these concerns could be trivially addressed by leaving them up to the user. Add the necessary controls to the user account page, pick default settings biased in favor of privacy, and allow users to change them if they prefer.

IMO you’re spot on. The catch being that between showing an ad and matching photo locations, the former has a near straight impact on the bottomline while the latter is murkier. When both are going through reviews, that’s a lot of weight difference in the arguments and we’ll see more of one that the other.

    The answer can be summed up in one word: "privacy"

I don't understand this.

Once Google has my data, how does it affect my "privacy" if Google Service A shares it with Google Service B?

I'm somewhat privacy conscious, but I don't understand the concern there. I assume that once I give them my data, they're already doing whatever with it internally.

It's amazing to me that people have already forgotten that Google had in fact already successfully done that with Google Inbox. It's not that they weren't able to do it.

It's that in their infinite wisdom they shut it down. Just like they shut down hangouts in their infinite wisdom.

what even was project inbox? at most five people used it.

hangout is now integrated in meet, which is integrated in gmail.

it's google doing a microsoft/apple and trying to be the leader in video calls/remote work/remote classes by forcing people to have it ready just by having the gmail app.

just like apple with facetime (but they have no idea how to expand on it) or Microsoft adding teams to windows status bar, you like it or not.

Both AOL and Google had, around the same time, secondary mail interfaces that provided extra features. Google's was Inbox; I've forgotten the name of AOL's. They were quite similar to each other, with each slightly better than the other in some ways. Both sites were slower* to load than AOL's and Google's standard email interfaces. Neither reached the market penetration or current-account conversion management wanted., and those of us who used them were sad to see them go.

* Google eventually added so many features to Gmail that they had to add a progress bar during page load.

An example of poor google integration that bugs me from time to time - when you search for a geographic feature, the info panel shows a great preview map with the outline of the feature. E.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=rhine+river

If you click into google maps, the outline is gone. Searching "Rhine River" just puts a marker at one point along the river.

This is not the case for me. I just now searched in mobile Chrome for "Lakeview Chicago" and the mini-map static image has a purple outline around the neighborhood. Clicking on that took me to Google maps with the neighborhood outlined in a red dotted line (which is harder to see, but obscures less of the other features/labels on the map). This was on Android, in the maps app, just now, but I've seen the same thing in a desktop browser.

Ah, you're right. It looks like the issue I'm complaining about only happens for "line" features - e.g. a river, or a road (https://www.google.com/search?q=route+66).

FWIW, OpenStreetMap can do it. I went to https://osm.org, entered "Rhine" into the search and clicked on the first result. Deeplink: https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/123924

oh wow, it's actually worse for me: there's no marker at all, just a map of western europe: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Rhine+River/@49.34645,7.87...

Innovation, oh my, sometimes it feels like the fat ones (and, by proxy, everyone else) are living in some alternate fantasy world where the mantra "you're not gonna need it" is taken to the extreme, so they're not even trying.

The pendulum should swing back to complex and more complicated interfaces sometime — but right now these are the dark times where, for example, Netflix, this huge, popular movie and show library, doesn't even have a way to find out exactly what movies with some actor or director it has available. It's hard for me to wrap my head around that.

Your project does look useful and on point though!

The rumor/theory I have heard about Netflix is that increasing discoverability too much would allow people to see two negative traits of Netflix: How often things come and go from the platform (which other apps like Criterion Collection embrace), and just how limited their library actually is at a given time.

Scroll through recommendations. It looks like they have hundreds of great movies for you to watch! And yes, technically they do. But look how many times they try suggesting the same movies in different categories, inflating the view in a way to make the library seem bigger. One movie might show up "Because you liked comedy..." then "Because you watched <comedy movie>" then "Light-hearted movies".

TLDR money and masking their poor library quality.

I wonder if AppleTV's atrocious single-line onscreen keyboard fits into this picture of making things less discoverable, or if it's just an extreme of form over function.

Definitely not, because Apple gives users the ability to type search in on an iPhone or iPad instead of using the apple TV remote. They also let you do voice-to-text, which is nice.

It is entirely possible to both provide a useable onscreen interface and the iPhone connection option.

Whatever the reason (and I can think of many) it just shows how Apple is past the point of caring for their users.

I’m about to enable the new Facetime Live Transcription feature in iOS 16 so my wife can have conversations with her father, who is rapidly losing his hearing. For this reason (and I can think of many) I strongly disagree.

Fair enough, but that’s also a cool new feature that drives sales.

I meant it more like, why wouldn’t they fix this objectively bad input mechanism? It would take tiny effort but it wouldn’t improve their sales or they might even calculate that it drives usage of iPhones and therefore good for them even though it’s bad for the users.

For the record I own both an Apple TV and an iPhone, inasmuch one can pretend to own these devices.

I had to look up this linear keyboard they created, pretty unique.

Seems like it can be changed.

Settings > General > Keyboard, then switch from “Automatic” to “Grid”.

Wow! Thanks!

For some reason I wasn’t getting automatic updates but after a manual update I can now see and set this option.

I retract my earlier statements, thank you Apple devs!

Your app looks beautiful. This is something that I've wanted to build some time. Would love to help out if possible.

This makes perfect sense product wise, if I'm searching "bakery" on my mobile phone I probably want the ones around me and not the generic location-agnostic google search of it, just like I would if I was searching on map. Matter of fact, this is actually something I do a couple times a month, search then clic the maps tab to see localized results then from them click the website result to find their webpage.

As a techie I hate any direct change to the user-agnostic absolute search, but as a user I get it.

> if I'm searching "bakery" on my mobile phone I probably want the ones around me

And yet for me, even in google maps on my iphone, when I search for bakery, the first one is almost always one that's ~40 miles away, and the closest one is almost always the second in the list. The rest of the list is definitely not sorted descending by distance. If I've searched for a _particular_ ABC bakery, I get other bakeries commingled in the list even if I know damn well there are other ABC bakeries closer than those.

The first one is the one that put the most coins into the AdWords slot, I'd guess.

I live in the UK. I recently searched for “pizza” and the top result was in Thailand.

This behavior works exactly the way you would expect in Apple Maps. A search for a bakery returns relevant nearby results.

The fact that Google doesn’t see the blatantly obvious problem, or that they try to argue that the users are wrong is a textbook case of why Apple has been doing OK in the market downturn while Google’s business continues to crash. Apple prioritizes their core products and human interface design, Google prioritizes short-term (advertising) revenue, while neglecting their core products in favor of the latest shiny thing.

Somehow DuckDuckGo has taken this to absurd extremes. Almost any search that doesn’t get many natural hits shows branches of my local government toward the bottom of the first page of results.

I have seen this too, also on bing. Not just government though, sometimes it manages to find a local house for sale instead.

You do realize that duckduckgo is primarily a frontend for bing right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#Search_results

What we see is likely the attempt to squeeze even more juice from advertising over which Google virtually have a monopoly. Google is trying to continue its exponential growth while relying on selling advertisements. The market had already been saturated and optimised to crazy levels. Smart thing would be to expand to other sources of revenue, but other projects inside Google fail. As they are failing to compete internally for resources against that crazily optimised source of revenue.

It is doubtful that Google can overcome that internally. Perhaps regulators should break up the monopoly in advertisement and search.

> if I'm searching "bakery" on my mobile phone I probably want the ones around me

Only when you're using a phone? Only if you're not at home? What if you want to find out what a bakery is?

(Apologies for rapid fire, I'm not having a go at you, just curious)

> Only when you're using a phone?

No, eg when I'm at the office, and we talk about where to go eat and I type restaurant, or I need a new stapler and I type office supply, etc ...

> Only if you're not at home?

Not really, eg "movie theater" or "flower shop" come to mind for things I would request while at home

> What if you want to find out what a bakery is?

I would type what is a bakery or define bakery ?

I'm a long time tech user, I miss the days of keyword centric search as I felt I could more easily communicate to the search engine what I wanted, but let's be honest those days have passed, most people type sentence and thus the engine interpret sentences

There isn't a necessity for an "or"

One could show a map preview of local results, which can be expanded as well as generic search results below/aside/...

Or a header along the lines of

We're showing you local results. To search the internet for "bakery" click here

It'd be great if they did that for anything personalized as well while they're at it

This is achievable with geolocation based on IP address, which is how it works on, e.g. a desktop web browser.

Not in my country - unless your ISP is in the business of selling customer PII to advertisers (coughvirgincough) your IP geolocation will often be a completely different city.

Of course, personally if I wanted to search for nearby bakeries on my phone I'd have just opened the google maps app....

Less than half the population has decent geolocation by IP. Most people the IP address will only identify the country or even nothing at all.

Not much use if you want to search bakery's.

Coming from the CDN land this isnt true. We didnt put too much effort in to precision, but on the order of 99% of IP addresses get down to metro area. Cheap commerical providers like Maxmind get to the right postcode on the order of 90-95% of the time. Building your own latency and peering maps bridges that gap to 99% or better. Simply based on network topology and latency we should be able to get you down to post code or general area of a city.

Google is my ISP. My geolocated IP is accurate within a 15 mile radius. It doesn't matter if I have location services turned off or I'm using my desktop, searching "bakeries near me" finds them without issue.

I suspect that isn't all just one big coincidence.

Google has what 3 or 4 cities where they operate as an ISP, each with a pretty small footprint. It's no surprise anyone knows where you are.

A cable or telephone company has generalized coverage measured in states; some of them organize their network and customer IPs by small geographies, but sometimes all of southern california is in a single pool of IPs.

"Achievable" is quite charitable from my experience. With the previous ISP I would get located in a city some 2000kms away, sometimes the scam ads would detect my location as null.

Maybe it's more effective in places like the US.

No, I’m randomly placed 2 states away. A solid day of driving.

funny how that works. I never ever allow location access to anything Google or any website for that matter, and have a muscle memory to hit deny when the browser prompts me. The other day I was searching something and then clicking my bookmarked Google News and suddenly all news were UK specific, and my search results fro "heatpumps" were are UK companies and products.. I was confused until I noticed that my work VPN chose a UK endpoint because the NL one where I am had higher latencies. So, Google heavily tailors the results based on where it thinks you're at. Also, I was delighted to know that inspire all the tracking Google probably does on me, it was easily fooled to think I was in the UK :-)

IP-based location is mostly usable for country. I've rarely found it gets the city right, often it doesn't even get the county right.

It gets really annoying when you are trying to search for some specific term in English and google keep guessing that you wanted something that sounds similar in your native tongue.

I have links to google.com/maps in my IRC logs dating back from June 2014, so this absolutely tracks.

I actually remember google.com/maps being launched at IO in 2014 -- the presentation had a broken link in it for the new version of Maps, and a few of us DoS SRE watching the livestream were able to hack together a config change in a few minutes to fix it without waiting for a urlmap push :)

> It's also possible that someone is trying to increase the percentage of searches that have location information, that doesn't seem terribly far-fetched either, and I can imagine lots of ways people could try to rationalize it as actually benefiting users.

Could you speak more to how this kind of thing figuratively plays out? With privacy on most of our (tech-focused) minds, I’m mostly curious how openly an initiative like this is/would be carried out. Would you imagine it as a buried lede or as a very transparent, explicit OKR?

It's easy to rationalize it as benefiting the users, so I'd imagine it's an explicit OKR, maybe even a few levels up in the org.

Like, one thing I've wanted on occasion is the ability to search for brick and mortar stores in a given radius who have the thing I want -- either because I want to physically inspect it before committing to a purchase or because for whatever reason the time/cost of shipping wouldn't be practical.

That sort of query is hard for Google to serve right now though for reasons including the lack of relevant location information in both the search results and the queries whose user behavior would help drive relevance rankings for those location-specific results.

Location information is a bit of a double-edged sword too though, even ignoring privacy concerns. I have to spoof my location and change my search language to get some results because of aggressive filtering happening behind the scenes. If a given query doesn't match Google's current understanding of the user then the right results existing in the corpus often won't imply that the user is able to find them with _any_ search operators.

With the document policy changes over the last 5 years, most decisions are now very opaque. Google TTLs everything except Docs and code history & reviews, at this point: emails, chats, bug reports, ...

There's probably a tech debt focused OKR for this work, but some other teams probably has OKRs that indirectly benefit from the data, and they're probably providing staffing support, tied to the tech debt OKR. OKRs are for telling people why you're great, if you're at the bottom of the pyramid, and for giving the rank-and-file some direction, if you're at the top. The top level OKRs are usually very precise and very vague at the same time.

So there's probably an OKR in search to improve the quality of the location signals. It can be vague on how. Plus, having more and better data filters into your downstream systems, so even without an OKR for the data you know it will make your models more powerful.

I remember the spiffy demo where the thumbnail in search results morphed into the full Maps UI without reloading.

But unification had started even earlier than that. Pretty much since Larry became CEO again, he pushed this mantra of "One Google", which brought the infamous Kennedy redesign across all services, as well as more of them available under the google.com host (e.g. maps as discussed here, but also flights and more). One of the ideas behind the latter was that you had to log into your Google account just once, which gradually made it all the way to YouTube(!). I vaguely recall other factors, such as compensating for the increased latency from going HTTPS everywhere, but also discussions about securing and hardening cookies.

As far as I know, google.com/maps has been around the entire time, but perhaps now it might be simply the canonical URL in a larger number of cases.

Funny, because there is a crummy form of Google maps present into he SERP, and it behaves completely differently from actual Google maps. It constantly annoys me, usually when searching for a business, that something that looks exactly like google maps, in Google, doesn't behave the same as google maps.

100%! I always ascribe it to some PM somewhere, but when I click on the "search maps" I would _love_ to be taken to the "real Google Maps".

The search maps is just a terrible experience, half implemented, doesn't do what I want, even down to little things.

My hack is to pick directions, which will get me to Google Maps, then cancel directions, this loses all state, but you're still in the location you want and can usually then just click the business you were looking for.

This reminds me of how Google integrated Maps into Calendar as a sidebar a while ago, a move that I absolutely hated. And instead of providing a preference setting to disable it, you have to “hide” the sidebar in a non-intuitive way [0]. I had to search to figure it out.

0: https://www.howtogeek.com/695504/how-to-stop-google-calendar...

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