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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

I'd be extremely skeptical, as Apple has shown over time that this kind of large, data intensive software is not in their wheelhouse. I think Apple makes some great products, but if I had to make choose the shittiest products Apple makes, it would have to be Siri, Apple Maps and iCloud. These are all areas where I think the Google equivalent (Google Assistant, Google Maps and GDrive/Docs) are much better, and the these are all much more closely related to search.

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Apple Maps is now superior for me in every way. Two things at play: Apple Maps has gotten much better in the past couple of years, while Google Maps appears to be in unsupported bit rot mode.

Google maps is still better at searching for retail stores, Apple Maps is better at everything else, 10x so for driving.

I live in a major US city and I refuse to use Apple maps for navigation. In the past year, I've tried it every so often and it has taken me to the wrong place, on strange, longer routes, and tried to take me through roads that don't even exist. The traffic information is also terribly inaccurate.

So no, maybe in some cities it works, but its still a pile a garbage compared to Google maps.

Pretty subjective at the end of the day. Personally I find them roughly equivalent quality in mapping/traffic but Google has turned into a pile of sponsored content. Apple frequently has the exact locations of businesses within a building wrong or confusing but I'll take some walking around a building over a recommendation for Subway when I search for "camera store". Anyway I submit corrections to Apple Maps and they accept those corrections within a couple of days 90% of the time and when I need that thing in the future it is correct.

Apple Maps isn’t great, but in Boston, MA, Google maps has been an awful experience. I think the most egregious issue Ive experienced is that Google tries to adjust your location to the route it has planned, rather than displaying your location on a map. It’s also unable to deal with the tunnels, and re-routes because it thinks I’m on surface streets if going too slow.

Finally, it’s instructions just flat out aren’t good for dealing with the complexity of Boston’s intersections.

I’ve had more luck with Apple Maps but mostly I just navigate by pre planning my routes using a map

I mostly use navigation for cycling in London and driving in parts of South America. Google Maps does what you're describing to me more often than I care. Apple Maps has been fairly solid.

In countryside England, both can give bad directions some times but I have still found Apple's to be superior.

Apple Maps is better overall for driving in the UK too.

Apple maps is absolutely horrendous in Croatia. Missing streets, wrong street numbers, wrong directions, and let's not even get into how many POIs and retail are missing.

Bad satellite images, missing street view and 3d views are just cherry on top.

Interesting…I have had the opposite experience. Apple maps has recently been much better at providing more complete results for searches (gyms, restaurants, retail, etc.), while still lagging behind Google for driving directions and traffic. Google maps appears to be excluding relevant results from searches (which appear in Apple maps), and instead offering up promoted locations.

That might’ve been true a year ago but today apples maps is a viable replacement for google maps as well as their Siri offerings.

Apple Maps is terrible at navigation anytime you get outside of just the largest metro areas.

There's multiple roads where it will tell you constantly to take a U turn while indicating a straight line visually.

It routinely lags weeks behind road closures.

It's lane suggestions are laughable at best.

I've driven many many miles around the US and Apple maps is easily a distant third between Waze and Google

I haven't used Apple Maps much, but Siri is a total dog pile compared to Google Assistant.

It really depends on what and how you use it. I know that's not saying a lot, but Siri is genuinely good at some things, and incredibly terrible at others.

I know the same can be said about Assistant, Alexa, etc.

That may be true only in the U.S. and a few other countries. I recall Apple said several years ago (maybe around 2017?) that it would improve maps in India. It’s 2023 and it still can’t find common addresses in major cities. Considering that Apple has repeatedly stated that India is a key market, is it the competency of the maps team that ought to be questioned?

> ... it would have to be Siri, Apple Maps and iCloud

Probably. And I think a large reason for that is because they don't like to solicit feedback for how their products work and for those types of products you NEED feedback.

It's just not in their DNA. Steve Jobs famously laid out the philosophy of "the user doesn't know what they want until we tell them" and it's a core part of their formula. At any rate, they have enough money and time to get it wrong for a long time before getting it right.

+1 for Apple Maps being a lot better than Google these days, at least for navigation. Seems like Google maps is more focused on search and discovery.

I wonder if anyone is starting to think that OpenAI And it’s ilk has the ability to commoditize web search.

Right now the others lose because Google’s really good at it. I have to admit every time I’ve tried a different search engine I’ve been massively disappointed. Heck the same for any map besides Google (except Waze which well…)

Total spit ball here - but I wonder if the thought is more trying to get to where “the puck’s going to be” where the search Apple is working on is personalized and integrated across all your life/apps/platforms as opposed to something you do typing into a field on a website.

But also with a focus on improving productivity and user value then as a way to target ads.

I see this comment a lot recently and it perplexes me every time...

I don't see how LLMs are search tools. Am I using them wrong? I've asked them for information with sources and they've hallucinated entire answers including accurate-looking but entirely non-existant URLs as sources.

They've been great for getting some ideas, and summarizing things, but if I venture into an area that I'm not a domain expert in an LLM seems like a terrible way to get info.

But everyone seems to think they're the next search replacement... So I have to wonder if I've just got bad luck with them, or somehow haven't groked how to get them to give valid truthful info.

They're a direct replacement for most of the ad-filled search queries you might have used Google for before like "Trip ideas for Paris" or "Meal plan ideas". The best part is that you can ask follow up questions with the same interface, which you can't after clicking onto some random web page match from the search results.

Using them for something like "SQL error: <some copy/pasted error>" is much more dicey, but Google is unlikely to get much ad revenue from a query like that anyways.

Sure, the use case of "find this page" isn't going away, but I'd be quite scared if I were Google, because the use case where they make the most money is going to be handled by LLMs shortly instead of search.

Totally agree. Somewhat ironically, recently I was playing with plugins with ChatGPT 4 and was testing out some of the "trip ideas" questions. I actually got great results - interesting suggestions that were personalized to what I told it about myself that I wanted - when I used "plain" ChatGPT 4. Then when I turned on the TripAdvisor plugin, the recommendations went totally to shit. It basically just spat back the first 3 items from "Top outdoor things to do in X" from TripAdvisor. No personalization, and I had just mentioned outdoor things as one of the qualities I was looking for, but I listed a bunch of others. Also no "off the beaten path" recommmendations.

I mention this because Google essentially operates like the TripAdvisor plugin, and I always just get back "Top X" lists that more often than not seem like SEO spam. I use ChatGPT now pretty much exclusively for those types of questions where I'm not simply trying to find a page on the web.

Well.. at least for technical things, phind.com is cool, if only for the list of references it displays in the rightmost column.

Much much better than anything I get with an equivalent google search.

It depends on what kind of information you need. If i need an authoritative source then LLMs cannot really replace search currently. If they improve however it could become the replacement. For example if you say find me authoritative links the AI could run the search, check the results and give your best ones. It does not do that currently but it potentially could in the future. Now this does not really replace the need for google as a search engine. It might mean that a lot of google traffic would suddenly come from OpenAI. That would probably impact googles bottom line. If the traffic gets big enough they will block it and ask for payment. Or they might even ask OpenAI to show their Ads to the user.

If you just want a quick answer then LLM can actually suffice (if you trust the answer and dont need to check). Like for example how many eggs do i need for my cake?

Google hasn’t been really good at web search anymore for quite a while now

I disagree about apple maps, I like it more than google maps now. I wouldn’t exactly call Google Drive/Docs a perfect experience either.

Apple Maps and iCloud are excellent. Siri still does suck.

Your conception of the first two are probably due to their subpar launch. But they have improved to the point of being better and more tightly integrated than their competitors nowadays.

What's Apple doing with their crawler's data? Check your web logs for hits from AppleBot -- they're doing full crawls of the web from what I can see

i think it’s used to power results in your phone’s search box? maybe also used to siri… (just speculating)

I prefer Apple Maps to Google Maps in the San Francisco area. It looks better, the routes are on par, and it's not festooned with ads.

Apple Maps is actually really good these days. It doesn't have feature parity with Google Maps, but I don't necessarily consider that a bad thing. The core things: directions, POI and overall design are just as good, if not better than Google.

What features are missing at this point? I think their addition of offline maps this year was the last thing that they were missing. At least as far as I can tell.

iCloud's spam filters are useless and have been for a decade. Could never use iCloud as a primary email address

They could buy Kagi.

Kagi, as everyone seems to forget, is a frontend for the Google Search API with some nice filtering/custom prioritization features. The results are good because they’re Google results.

This is wrong: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...

> Kagi, as everyone seems to forget, is a frontend for the Google Search API

Do we have recent numbers for this? I find Kagi’s results hands down better on most queries than Google.

That would be a sad sad day.

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