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Comment by xethos | Hacker News Reader

I cannot describe [0] my pleasure and satisfaction when, visiting Germany, we found an icecream shop closed. We'd stopped by with the assumption Google Maps would have the correct hours; they did not, and we carried on without icecream. OSM, on the other hand, correctly showed the shop as closed for the day.

[0] I can't, but my fiancee used the words "impossibly smug"

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When a huge highway bridge collapsed in Genoa, I checked OSM a few hours later, and someone had already updated the road segment as permanently closed

Video has clips of the bridge falling and aftermath: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53628580

Google cheats here, though. They were able to show a recently completed bridge as completed simply by the fact that traffic was passing over it. OSM still had it within half an hour of opening, though.

The other way around is where OpenStreetMap is faster though. With Google a road which is closed (or gone) for a longer while means someone has to report it and Google employees verify it. Doing this automatically based on traffic dropping to zero is not really possible, because the algorithm doesn't know why traffic is rerouted or for how long. This can take a while depending on the number of people reporting it to Google. OpenStreetMap mappers can act autonomously much faster (errors are sometimes made, but often picked up and reverted just as fast for high profile stuff).

Google actually fucks up royally when a road below the level of a motorway/freeway is closed and formally withdrawn from public use, but still sees some traffic (by people illegally using it and people with legitimate goals like construction workers). There is a road near me where this is the case. Google will happily route cars over a road where one of the two lanes is in use as a soil depot for the nearby housing developments, and gates on both sides block the road. Those gates are shoved aside or bypassed by driving through the grass by a handful of simpletons. A bit of observation during a walk there showed me two cars passing there illegally; a postal worker and a power utility guy. Two types of road users who likely use Google Maps quite a lot, and drive up the virtual traffic there.

On OpenStreetMap this road is simply closed and limited to private use (i.e., the construction workers hauling soil), and has been for a number of years now.

Google took about 6 months to accept my edit to an incorrectly named park near me. I took pictures of the signs as proof of course I could not submit them as evidence but a thought someone else would report it. In OSM I could change it in a few minutes and I am not very familiar with the tool.

I personally know someone with a similar story (small pedestrian path that existed in real life but missing from Google maps). He made the effort to flag it, provide proof etc etc.

What I told him was you guys be nuts to be spending your time to improve Google's product.

Google has the private road of a local landfill labelled as a bike path. They label little paths in cemeteries as bike paths. Its a little embarrassing how much they rely on automatic data vs, you know, a cities own published bike network maps.

That contribution was initially done by me :-)

It's the business owners responsibility to publish their opening hours on Google Maps, Apple Maps and on the web. Most don't give a damn about their own business, at most putting their hours on Google Maps if they remember.

Google has been atrocious all across Europe ever since Covid. They used to have (maybe still do?) this local guide thingy, but this empathetic contribution doesn’t feel good for a for profit company.

At one point Google developed a spam problem with map contributions, IIRC.

Some assholes worked out it was pretty profitable to (for example) create a '24 hour emergency locksmith' pins all over the country, with no real physical presence, then pass the business on to a real locksmith a few towns over, while taking a cut.

Once people find it's profitable to provide fake user contributions and you have to start policing them, I imagine the value of user contributions drops significantly...

I mean, both rely on community contributions for this sort of thing, so it feels weird to be smug about this... It just depends on who decided to put the correct hours in.

"Smug" was mostly tongue in cheek. More than anything, it was a breath of fresh air seeing OSM, a product so heavily reliant on it's community, beating out one of the most well-funded corporations on our planet.

Google has satellite views, they run their own network of vehicles to gather streetview data at a planetary scale, they follow every Android user (with Google Services installed) to know popular locations, new and closed businesses, likely opening hours, travel times, and more. They (at one point) pushed users to update store information, and then (from everything I've heard) charge out the ass for embedding a Google Map view.

I am ecstatic that we have a free-as-in-beer, donation and corporate sponsorship funded, open-for-all map that not only can go blow-for-blow with this absolute behenoth, but in this case actually won.

So while "smug" may be overselling it, "thrilled" would not be

Is OSM not free-as-in-freedom?

AFAIK it is, but I thought I'd stick to claims I was all but certain of when posting from mobile and (because of that) not fact-checking

Bit of an ironic one to leave out though, considering my preferences with most of the software I use and enjoy.

"Smug" is what I would give the Google Maps response that I submitted when we came across a store closed due to wrong hours (in Seattle). I sent a picture of the hours plate and the response was "nah, we think Google Maps is correct here". I stopped submitting error corrections to Google after that.

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