Google Maps allocates survival across London's restaurants

Posted by justincormack 1 day ago

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Comments

Comment by dzdt 33 seconds ago

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.

Comment by sinuhe69 15 minutes ago

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)

Comment by Bowes-Lyon 3 hours ago

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)

Comment by conartist6 14 hours ago

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

Comment by zem 13 hours ago

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

Comment by digitalPhonix 4 hours ago

Yeah!

> "I scraped every single restaurant in Greater London"

How hard is that now? I assumed that Google is very protective of that data

Comment by x0x0 16 hours ago

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.

Comment by rendx 13 hours ago

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.

Comment by digitalPhonix 4 hours ago

> 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!