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Comment by plibither8 | Hacker News Reader

One of my biggest irks with Google Maps is how aggressively it shows pins for hotels, bars and restaurants, even on their search results map. Do users really feel the need for this constant in-your-face advertisement?

But as I type this, I realized Google is primarily an ad business and whatever will drive that revenue will get pushed further. Oh well.

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Yes, there are many possible conflicts of interest in mapping. This is why I'm excited to see the improving usability of Open Street Maps through apps like Organic Maps, and big commercial investments in open mapping data from the Overture Maps Foundation.

In many cases OSM has much more detail than google maps, with business listings and addresses being the biggest exceptions I have encountered. Fortunately, business listings are one of the main things added to the first data release from Overture Maps. For the curious, you can interact with the POI data [here.](https://bdon.github.io/overture-tiles/places.html)

If you really just want a map, go use OSM. I love it as well and even contributed. But Google Maps is much more than OSM. The biggest difference and most important feature is its real-time traffic. OSM is just a totally different product seen through the car navigation lens.

Absolutely true. OSM, conversely, is an infinitely better dataset for pedestrian and bike navigation.

Yup, have been using it through Komoot for many years for biking and hiking.

For me the killer Google Maps feature is using it as a search engine. The POI data on OSM has low coverage, is often out-of-date, and lacks reviews, so while it's quite good for (non-car) navigation, it's not very useful at all for finding places meeting certain criteria.

The non-starter with OSM for me is lack* of high-DPI ("retina") support, making it like rubbing my eyes with scratchy wool when I try to read it

* well, there's https://osm.rrze.fau.de/testhd.html , but that has no search.

What irks me more is that I'll see pins for hotels, restaurants, etc.. but a search won't surface/highlight the pins I'm looking directly at!

Also attempting to search for a property that happens to have "hotel" or "apartment" in their name automatically switches to the stupid hotel finder interface, which only shows hotels that are bookable from online.

Google maps can't be a cheap service to run. If this is the trade-off then ok.

There's always OSM

Google telephones most businesses in the world multiple times per year to confirm opening hours and ask what their hours will be at Christmas/other holidays.

Let that sink in. They have an actual human put actual minutes into speaking with every single business in their database. Think how much that alone must cost.

And they put all that money in simply so users can be a little more certain that the opening hours shown are correct.

Most businesses in the world? I'd like some proof.

Unless, of course, you and I have different ideas of what "the world" is

I own a business in Denmark, I never received a call as described. I received lots of email reminders though, because this is something you can update yourself.

Snarky, but I expect that to be a kind-of circle with a small radius, around their offices and the favorite places their employees in SF visit.

Never heard of this happening, and not something I'd expect google to do. I'd expect them to send emails at most, with a link to some page that is broken for anyone not using Chrome, then no support available.

Maybe my business is a corner case which avoids the automation - I am open usually 9-5ish, but can be open anytime if a customer rings the well and waits for someone to get out of bed.

Google has an actual human call every 2-3 months, who usually just asks the opening hours, confirms one other detail (usually the website) and then says goodbye.

> Google has an actual human call

I guess congrats to google on passing the turing test

A local restaurant near me in Australia said they had a Google employee ring asking to confirm their opening times.

> They have an actual human put actual minutes into speaking with every single business in their database. Think how much that alone must cost.

They may have done this in years past. I have worked in fast food for the last decades and I get Google's calls. They are all automated and the robot on the other end never understands me because the hours of the places I manage aren't simple enough to explain to Google's AI.

Of course OSM can't be updated with up-to-the-minute opening hours at all.

> Of course OSM can't be updated with up-to-the-minute opening hours at all.

What do you mean by this? The spec seems to allow it https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:opening_hours/specif...

The spec is very detailed and allows a lot of granularity. Unfortunately, real businesses often don't have set holiday schedules but rather play it by ear each year. OSM has no way to add "this business will be closed on these holidays this year, next year might be different". When lots of businesses introduced modified hours during the Covid lockdowns, there was no concept of temporary opening hours so a "opening_hours:covid19" was introduced. Older data consumers simply ignored that tag. More generally OSM is only for data that is (mostly) permanent. Adding "this business will be closed for Christmas this year" is not OSM data. "This business is closed on Christmas" can be added on OSM. But many businesses don't plan that far ahead as to have set announced holiday hours that can be written in the OSM opening_hours syntax.

> Of course OSM can't be updated with up-to-the-minute opening hours at all.

Of course it can. I regularly add opening hours of businesses I frequent on OSM, including special cases like public holidays.

But nothing on OSM is "up-to-the-minute". Many OSM data consumers are months behind OSM discourages putting anything temporary on the map. While I do add OSM business hours including public holidays a lot, this isn't always possible when businesses don't have pre-planned holiday schedules.

These calls should be automated in most cases [1]. Still an impressive feat, but there is no way they are paying a large number of people to phone through all businesses in the world.

[1] https://support.google.com/business/answer/7690269?hl=en

Yes, absolutely. They seem to be imprinted on the tiles, too, you can't filter them out with an ad-block rule.

The API doesn't show all this in satellite (aerial view) mode, so sometimes it's tempting to use a service that relies on the maps API.

But even with the API it seems that now the maps view has all those pins for places; I seem to remember it wasn't always the case, but I'm not sure.

yeah nobody cares about the "Latest in <location>" menu that takes up a third of your phone's screen when you use the Maps app.

Does anyone know how to turn it off forever?

a year ago at least (when I dexompiled the app) it was explicitely not possible.

I'm probably one of the few who really likes this feature, though I do wish it was something I navigated to, rather than it being so obtrusive.

I moved somewhere new in the past few years, and it's pretty great when you're exploring a new neighborhood you know nothing about.

This feature has surfaced locations that I never would have known about. I don't mind it.

I'm pretty sure only the square pins are ads. So the deluge of hotel pins showing in the map near my house isn't even making them money, it's just an out of control algorithm or terrible product choice.

But Google makes commissions on hotel bookings through maps.

Many people use hotels, bars, and restaurants as landmarks.

If you know an area, it’s easier to remember something is near so and so resturaunt than to remember street names (if in fact your streets actually have names).

Honestly yes, I usually am looking for restaurants etc nearby.

Interesting. I have an inherent distrust with reviews and descriptions on Google Maps, at least for where I live (India). I usually resort to other services to look for good restaurant/hotel recommendations.

Restaurants, to each their own. A dozen hotels marked within a five mile radius of my home, which Google knows very well about, at all times? That’s just stupid.

You can exclude targeting people on Google Maps ads when they're near their home. If the hotels want to pay for more impressions and not target their ads appropriately, Google is happy to take their money.

This is really more the hotel marketing team's fault than Google's.

If I do I just search for restaurants though.

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