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Google's Maps search ranking doesn't seem sophisticated to me. In fact it seems unbelievably naive. Ranking is Google's core business and yet they seem to forget how to do it when a map is involved.

When I want to find something that's actually good, I use this site: https://top-rated.online. At first glance it looks like an unremarkable SEO spam site, but it's actually a great way to get properly ranked Google Maps reviews. It uses proper Bayesian ranking, so it won't show you a 5 star place with two reviews over a 4.9 star place with 2,000 reviews, as Google often will. And it has good sorting and filtering options so you can, for example, filter or sort by number of reviews.

It's always annoyed me that zooming in on a building will not reliably show the business that operates there. I understand that at low zoom levels you may need to filter what is displayed based on the high density, but when I zoom in I want to see everything that is there. Sometimes I am forced to go to street view to read the sign, then type the company name into the search box to force the business marker to show up and get clickable.

I've found Apple Maps is a little better in this regard. They show a higher density of business markers at any given zoom level.

Google maps is doing the same thing to local business success that social media algorithms are doing to political success. The algorithm controls what you perceive as the consensus of others. It is a dangerous world to have such power so highly concentrated.

I never understood why the "collaborative filtering" approach never took off with most review options. Google Maps shows you what the average person thinks is a good restaurant, meaning the rich get richer faster and tiny statistical noise converts to durable competitive advantage.

Instead, I'd love for Google to understand me well enough to show me which restaurants I would disproportionately love compared to other people based on its understanding of my taste profiles. That way, the love can be shared amongst a much wider base of restaurants and each distinctive restaurant could find its 10,000 true fans.

On top of that, it actually gives me an incentive to rate things. Right now, you only rate from some vague sense of public service instead of "this can actively improve your experience with our product".

It's not just Google Maps, Netflix used to operate on the model of deep personalization that they've slowly de-emphasized over the years. I'm still waiting for Letterboxd to introduce a feature to give me personalized film recs based on the over 1000 ratings I've given it over the years as a paying customer but they seem in no hurry to do so. Amazon used to take your purchase history into account when ordering search results but I think that's also been significantly de-emphasized.

About the only arena this is widespread is streaming music services like Spotify.

The solution is what Lauren did, she rolled her own. Once that took teams of experts and big bucks. Now a single ML expert can do it for small bucks because she "needed a restaurant recommendation" and didn't trust the available ones. Soon any mild mannered programmer will have the same capability, and then the muggles will get it, in a mass, just for the asking of their favorite chat bot.

If the progression holds, oodles of recommendation engines can bloom, and it'll be trivial to fork and customize a favorite with a prompt. As the friction of doing large analysis jobs tends toward nil, the Google moat dries up and their commanding height subsides. Too optimistic?

In Germany, businesses routinely bully reviewers into deleting negative reviews, so the scores are meaningless.

I only trust what friends recommend.

I love the idea! And I want to have it for my city :)

Is there a project on GitHub or somewhere that I could clone?? (smiling face with halo)

Not sure if it's a London thing. In my city neither I, nor the people I know rely on Google maps reviews for picking restaurants. We either know the place, follow a recommendation or try the place based on menu, price, looks, vibe, position etc.

A week ago I went to Venice and I only looked on Google maps to see what the menus and prices are, but I wasn't interested in the reviews themselves or the grade, bacause IMO, people have biases. One evening we went to one of the restaurants I spotted on Google maps but the rest of the evenings we wandered the streets, and picked what was close, if we liked the menus, the prices and the atmosphere.

One of the restaurants had only 3.4 grade on Google maps, few reviews and mostly locals ate there. The food was very good and the service was great.

I do not generally make my mind based on reviews from Google Maps, Booking, Amazon. Of course, if the overall grade is very low, I will give it some thoughts and maybe read some reviews. But generally I don't make a decision based on reviews.

Google Maps or any other aggregator has an inherent interest in market participant diversity. A lot of suppliers would mean competition, which results in ad spend, which result in higher revenue for the aggregator. Same with Google Search.

It's an interesting equilibrium point. They want local businesses to suffer enough to pay up for ads. But also not too much that they die. A good local business that does not need to advertise because it is simply good is actually a burden to the aggregator even though it is exactly what the end users want to see.

In the past, when I was a in position to build a search engine, we took the trouble of always including organically ranked results that were genuinely good, regardless of whether we got paid or not. I felt it was a long term investment into creating real value for our end users and therefore our service.

Very interesting, ive always wondered how google decides to show restaurants or other POIs if they overlap and there is a large density.

Im sure they favour the ones that use google ads, but i would not think that they are bullying places a la yelp.

Anyway its pretty crazy that nowadays your success as restaurant is so dependent on one huge platform. (… and actually, lets not forget the delivery platforms also)

Delivery apps like Grab and Uber Eats are even worse since they have even more perverse incentives (minimising delivery time and maximising 'sponsored' listings).

Other than being willing to scroll a lot, I haven't found any great ways to find new restaurants when using delivery apps, and I'm sure I use them far less because of the tedium involved. I think scraping listings and re-doing the algorithm yourself (as per post) is perhaps the best approach. E.g. Just being able to rank by user rating and filter for no less than 200 reviews and within 5km would be an outstanding improvement on the status quo, which is always the 50 closest restaurants to the delivery address - what a coincidence! - with a few 'sponsored' listings thrown in.

Someone chose to ignore Google Maps terms and publicly blog about it

I often think it would be cool if there was a widely understood hand sign for asking people in a restaurant how they rate it. You stand outside the window and make the "Is it good?" sign, and whoever sees it from inside would hold up 1 to 5 fingers to give their star rating.

Very interesting. But I wonder how much Google (and other) Maps can actually shape the scene. For tourist hotspots with a lot of visitors, it IS clearly the driving force. But for locals, I don’t think it has an overwhelming effect. Locals know their restaurants and they visit them based on their own rating. They could explore total strange and new ones, but then they will form their own rating and memory immediately and will not get fooled/guided by algorithm (the next time)

Google Maps stopped being a reliable way to find good restaurants a long time ago. Any time in my city when I see a place with a high rating and suspiciously large number of reviews, searching for "five stars" in the reviews inevitably finds customers helpfully mentioning that they got free food in exchange. I've even seen places advertise the bribe openly on Maps. It would be trivial to detect this and punish offenders, but Google chooses not to.

I've been mulling over starting a boutique social network focused on location reviews with real life friends exclusively.

+1 to "We audit financial markets. We should audit attention markets too"

Nicely done. I think from a product perspective it is interesting that:

- Humans really value authentic experiences. And more so IRL experiences. People's words about a restaurant matter more than the star rating to me.

- There is only one reason to go somewhere: 4.5 star reason. But there are 10 different reasons to not go: Too far, not my cuisine, too expensive for my taste. So the context is what really matters.

- Small is better. Product wise, scale always is a problem, because the needs of the product will end up discriminating against a large minority. You need it to be decentralized and organic, with communities that are quirky.

All this is, somehow, anethma to google maps or yelp's algorithm. But I don't understand why it is _so_ bad — just try searching for 'salad' — and be amazed how it will recommend a white table cloth restaurant in the same breath as chipotle.

There are many millions that want to use the product _more_ if it was personalized. Yet somehow its not.

I'll go against the grain slightly and say that usually Google ratings are quite reliable for me. At times I notice they're exaggerated and it usually coincides with someone coming to ask me to rate them at the end of the meal.

> One practical problem I ran into early on is that Google Maps is surprisingly bad at categorising cuisines. A huge share of restaurants are labelled vaguely (“restaurant”, “cafe”, “meal takeaway”)

It's not only that; cuisines are also difficult to label as certain countries simple do not exist for Google when it comes to that.

I recall last year I wanted to change the type of "Alin Gaza Kitchen", my ex (closed now, unfortunately) fav. falafel place in Berlin from the non-descript "Middle-Eastern" to "Palaestinian" category.

I assumed this was available for any country/cuisine, like "German", "Italian" or "Israeli". But "Paleastinian" didn't exist as a category.

The other commenter thought the work was silly, but I think it's brilliant. Keep at this!! You're making me hungry :)

This reminds me of a post earlier this year, “Looksmapping” [0], where the author ranked restaurants by the attractiveness of the reviewers according to their profile photos.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44461015

So if you had an online business, you had to do SEO and optimize for search engines. Now, if you have a brick and mortar business you still have to keep the algorithms happy? Sounds like life becomes harder for some business owners.

I don’t think the effect Instagram and TikTok has on this attention market can be ignored. Living in a big Asian city I will check those first.

At least in central London, the "underrated gems" feature does not seem to be very good at finding underrated gems.

That might just be a feature of the area though.

>Because once you start looking at London’s restaurant scene through data, you stop seeing all those cute independents and hot new openings. You start seeing an algorithmic market - one where visibility compounds, demand snowballs, and who gets to survive is increasingly decided by code.

Seems a bit weird. That would mean most people in London would chose the restaurant based on Google maps reviews.

Nearest hidden gem to me is a Domino's Pizza...

> Google Maps Is Not a Directory. It’s a Market Maker.

I understand the author's meaning, but this isn't what the term "market maker" means. To "make a market" is to stand ready to buy and sell, usually a security, in order to create liquidity in a market. Usually this resolves the issue of timing, because it is unlikely that someone wants to buy at the exact moment someone else wants to sell.

So to "make a market" in London restaurants, Google could buy food during the day and sell it at night when the shops are closed but people are hungry. (This would be silly.)

Perhaps a more precise term is "algorithmic gatekeeper."

Post could benefit from a terser writing that has not gone through AI.

It took me extra effort to distil useful information from all the noise of what otherwise would be a great post.

It's a little funny that no one is a human face of (interface to) Google Maps, or any platform with longevity these days. Talk to the faceless pretend person if you have a problem, maybe you'll feel better.

I have gotten so sick of Google Maps that I've done the unthinkable, and have started walking around the city trying establishments at random.

It has yielded quite good results basically immediately. People (myself included) have gotten too used to living In The Box. Putting aside the time to just go for a walk around and pop into random shops and pubs has been wonderful.

Google Maps is just advertising now. Not sure why anyone chooses to use it over better alternatives.

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.

super interesting project. I would love to generate a similar list for my own neighbourhood

Google develops all kind of bullshit because it is funnier than working

pretty cool, i'll check some of these out thanks!

Google Maps is up for the dethroning to the first competitor that has the same information and shows it all at the closest zoom level.

> Google Maps is not just indexing demand - it is actively organising it through a ranking system built on

This is where I stopped reading.

> This disproportionately rewards chains and already-central venues. Chains benefit from cross-location brand recognition. High-footfall areas generate reviews faster....

I think this is very likely false if you mean compared to the status quo ante. Before Maps, a well-loved but hard-to-find venue just wouldn't ever be seen by most people, and the absence of reviews made branding more important because it was all you had to go on. I'd be very doubtful if the proportion of independent cafes and restaurants decreases when Google Maps enters an area. (Couldn't find any causal research designs though....)

The more general point that the algorithm is not neutral (and probably never could be) must be right.

(I asked ChatGPT but it ended up with: "We have almost no clean exogenous variation in Maps rankings or feature rollouts at fine geographic scales that would let you estimate impacts on entry, survival, or market structure in a neat DiD/IV way.")

This is incredible, thank you for putting in the time to create it.

What's google maps? I use OSM

Can anyone recommend an alternative to GMaps for searching for restaurants, services, or general "discovery" near a location?

Dataset seems imperfect, a good local fish and chip shop shown on Google Maps isn't listed.

Interesting points tho.

Google Maps is the mind killer. We all worry about social media controlling the way we think, feel, vote etc. but Google Maps literally manipulates where people physically go in real life, what they do on holiday, where they hang out, what they eat etc. I got so sick of feeling like a four point five star Google Maps automaton I had to mostly stop with it. In addition to OSM, personal recommendations etc. the best substitute for me for a 4.5 star review is my nose, eyes and ears

"rating to low by 1.3" for a restaurant rated 5/5.

WTF? One and zero are not probabilities, and 6 out of 5 is not a rating.

Pretty sure this whole post is generated by AI