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Comment by x0x0 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting work, but ultimately silly: of course google maps ranks results. No one (yes, yes, I'm sure like 3 people) want a list of all results, unordered or ordered by something useless like name, when they type in restaurant. And I cannot put into words how uneager I am to have the city or state government manage what comes up when I put indian or burrito into a map.

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Where in the post do you see the author arguing about "a list of all results"? To me, it merely draws attention to the fact that there is only one algorithm available in Google Maps, and you rely on Google to calculate "relevance" based on (to us) unknown and intransparent metrics. It draws attention to the kind of power Google has over businesses and our daily lives, without necessarily presenting alternatives. Nothing about that is "silly". It might be more relevant to me to learn about new, small, independent restaurants, but I don't have that choice. If I had access to the full data set, like e.g. OSM, I would.

Nowhere in the article is the author suggesting that local or state governments manage these algorithms, just that they be audited for fairness given the amount of power these algorithms hold in the market. Google operates something of a monopoly in Google Maps and its recommendations. You don't find an attempt to understand the efficacy of its rankings or how Google or market participants could be manipulating the rankings to benefit themselves interesting?

You clearly didn't read it. A direct quote:

> At minimum, ranking algorithms with this much economic consequence should be auditable.

"At minimum". Immediately preceded by a paragraph starting by "For policy", with sentences like "If discovery now shapes small-business survival, then competition, fairness, and urban regeneration can no longer ignore platform ranking systems" or "tools of local economic policy".

That's perhaps not an outright call for regulation, but it's certainly suggesting it's warranted.

> No one (yes, yes, I'm sure like 3 people) want a list of all results, unordered or ordered by something useless like name

That's not what the author was suggesting (or indeed, what they built). They were trying to untangle the positive feedback bias showing up first in the rankings gives.

I think there's probably a lot more to untangle, but as a first pass it's super cool!

It's the feigned surprise and sort of attitude that google is doing something malicious or it's a subterfuge. Starting with a bolded "Google Maps Is Not a Directory. It’s a Market Maker." and inishing with eg

> the most important result isn’t which neighbourhood tops the rankings - it’s the realisation that platforms now quietly structure survival in everyday urban markets.

For any service like this, _of course_ ranking is at the core of it. A more honest article could have started there, eg "since you can't display all results, and doing so is useless to everyone, the heart of these products is their ranking algorithm and choices. Let's examine Google's."

A tone of breathless wonder is now the coin of the realm. Quality research and interesting analysis gets the same treatment as everything else, because that's what gets clicks and responses. Dinging an individual article for this is arbitrary and capricious.

Don't hate the player, hate the game. I hate the game too, fwiw.

Still a lie though. If you don't know / aren't familiar with a ranker, the author is priming you through the entire article to believe google is doing something wrong or malicious by ranking the results. Rather than the same thing search engines have been doing for 30 years. Whether their ranker is good or bad (and for whom) is separate.

Including, of course, the way many popular chain restaurants got there is they make food a lot of people like.

Uhh, I want a list of all the results. I want to be able to search comprehensively within my map viewer frame.

Over small areas you can get that, but the API only returns 20 results, so you will either need a ranking signal over a large area, or a grid search over tiny areas.

What is wrong with alphabetical? It's how the yellow pages used to work.

Useless but also stupid.

A1 steak house.

AAA1 steak house.

00AAA000 steak house.

Aaaand that's clear signal to avoid those

I just looked at google maps and (I didn't realize this previously), but you can scroll the results and it will change the map when you bump against the bottom of the list.

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