How Google Maps allocates survival across London's restaurants
166 comments
·December 9, 2025doctoboggan
wlesieutre
A few days ago I was trying to see if a anything new had taken over a vacant restaurant space yet, previous occupant had closed in July.
When I zoomed in, it would still only show me the Permanently Closed business listing for the old restaurant.
Searching by address, they do have a listing for its replacement. But they were prioritizing the dead restaurant on the map because why would I want to know current info from a map when they can be useless instead?
And it's not like this is a restaurant in the first floor of a tower with a bunch of businesses stacked on top of it competing for map space. It's a single floor, there's only one occupant.
pmdr
> It's always annoyed me that zooming in on a building will not reliably show the business that operates there.
8-10 years ago it was way more reliable. The decline started with them adding the option to promote a business. Frustrating.
zdc1
Yes, I've noticed their results are definitely becoming more opaque and driven by what they want to show you. (This is even when there isn't a sponsored option on the map.)
iso1631
advertising ruins everything, users don't want to change to other services, news at 11.
nicoburns
OpenStreetMap-based maps tend to be much better in this regard. Although this is counterbalanced by the fact that they tend to have less data on businesses in general.
szszrk
Which is not surprising, as those two have very different priorities.
- OSM want's a detailed and reliable map.
- Google maps tries to either sell your data to clients, or make you buy from them.
Their business data is their priority for maps. You can see that clearly when you look at location history changes over past decade or so. It used to be actual user location history and it was glorious. Now it's "near what businesses you were more or less, help us rate them".
It's a great moment to again remind about existence of low-friction tools that you can use to add business data (among others) to OSM, like StreetComplete app, available on F-droid and Google Play :)
https://streetcomplete.app/?lang=en
In my region OSM business data starts to be on par with google, better (more up to date) sometimes.
eisa01
If you just want to add POI data, then Every Door is a good choice that also works on iOS
CoMaps would be a good map app, and it will also display when POIs and opening hours were last confirmed (the only OSM app to do so AFAIK)
kccqzy
A lot of these place names are user-created and I’ve definitely seen completely wrong and bogus place names on Google Maps. It seems that they hide a lot of these when the business owner doesn’t actively take control of the business page. I suppose it’s partly for accuracy, partly to encourage businesses to verify the listing on their maps.
bschne
information density of online maps is, in general, quite low compared to old paper maps: https://x.com/patrickc/status/1738646361128792402
I guess there's various reasons, ranging from "it's hard to make auto-layout algos produce stuff as dense as painstakingly handcrafted maps" to "let's make it harder to scrape/copy data"
tokai
Back then it was dedicated map makers that created maps. Now it's mainly programmers. So its not surprising that quality tanks when you go from disciplinary expert staff to IT day laborers.
DANmode
Click on the building, it populates “businesses at this address” - at least, when I’ve tried.
pests
Just tested - slightly different UI but still works the same. Also useful for taller buildings with a lot of tenants.
jdycbsj
Its not possible to be better because its not possible for even Google or Apple to verify anything anyone claims which is not static btw. The info keeps changing all the time with biz disputes/divorces/inheritence wars etc etc.
potato3732842
Nobody is asking for the data to be perfect at the margin. Just for it to be readily visible at all.
ginko
The most annoying thing is when you search for instance for "Chinese restaurants" and Google maps shows me Japanese restaurants while hiding actual Chinese restaurants.
shalmanese
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.
B-Con
I have a theory: They realized the right approach is to focus purely on the yes/no of what you choose to consume, rather than trying to optimize the consumption experience itself.
Remember how YouTube and Netflix used to let you rate things on 1-5 stars? That disappeared in favor of a simple up/down vote.
Most services are driven by two metrics: consumption time and paid subscriptions. How much you enjoy consuming something does not directly impact those metrics. The providers realized the real goal is to find the minimum possibly thing you will consume and then serve you everything above that line.
Trying to find the closest match possible was actually the wrong goal, it pushed you to rank things and set standards for yourself. The best thing for them was for you to focus on simple binary decisions rather than curating the best experience.
They are better off having you begrudgingly consume 3 things rather than excited consuming 2.
The algorithmic suggestion model is to find the cutoff line of what you're willing to consume and then surface everything above that line ranked on how likely you are to actually push the consume button, rather than on how much you'll enjoy it. The majority of which (due to the nature of a bell curve) is barely above that line.
ozbonus
I think Netflix realized that reducing ratings to a simple thumbs up/down was a bad idea after all. A while back they introduced the ability to give double thumbs up which, if you can treat non-rating as a kind of rating, means they're using a four point scale: thumbs down, no rating, thumbs up, double thumbs up.
xnorswap
Netflix are right that 5-stars is too many, it translates to a 6 point scale when you include non-rating, and I don't think there is a consistent view on what "3 stars" means, and how it's different to either 4 stars or 2 stars ( depending on the person ).
For some people 3 stars is an acceptable rating, closer to 4 stars than 2 stars. For others, 3 stars is a bad rating, closer to 2 stars than 5 stars. And for others still, it doesn't give signal beyond what a non-rating would be, it's "I don't have a strong opinion about this".
Effectively chopping out the 3-star rating, leaves it with a better a scale of:
- Excellent, I want to put effort into seeking out similar content
- Fine, I'd be happy to watch more like it
- Bad, I didn't enjoy this
- Terrible, I want to put effort into avoiding this
- I have no opinion on this
These are comparable to a 5 point Likert scale:
"I enjoy this content"
- Strongly agree
- Agree
- Neither Agree nor Disagree
- Disagree
- Strongly Disagree
It would be interesting to conduct social science with a similar scale with merged Disagree and Strongly disagree to see if that gave it any better consistency.
Spooky23
Yes! It started changing when the shifted from DVD which are sold based on the physical asset to the contract deal for content.
Their objective shifted to occupying your time, and TV you’ll accept vs. movies you’ll love is a cheap way to do that.
_petronius
I mean, if you read about how current industry-standard recommendation systems work, this is pretty bang on, I think? (I am not a data scientist/ML person, as a disclaimer.)
If e.g. retention correlates to watch time (or some other metric like "diversity of content enageged with"), then you will optimize for the short list of metrics that show high correlation. The incentive to have a top-tier experience that gets the customer what they want and then back off the platform is not aligned with the goal of maintaining subscription revenue.
You want them to watch the next thing, not the best thing.
encom
YouTube doesn't have ratings any more, because people disliked the wrong things which made Susan very sad.
I stopped rating things on Netflix, because after doing so for a long time, Netflix still thinks I'd enjoy Adam Sandler movies, so what's the point?
stubish
I think Spotify and other streaming services have a problem very similar to the restaurants. Take an artist with a 40 year career and a dozen acclaimed albums and bags of songs almost everyone loves, and when that artist comes up it is always the same one or two songs. The most played songs, causing feedback and making the problem worse. In my mind, one of the core reasons for asking for recommendations is to discover something different, which means ignoring or maybe even penalizing popularity, because you are likely already familiar with the popular by definition.
magicalhippo
I found Spotify surprisingly good at recommending new music. Not amazing, but considering how low the bar is thanks to other services like Netflix I'veveen pleasantly surprised.
For example it recommended a band with just a hundred monthly plays which I loved. Almost all bands it recommends has less than 10k monthly plays, so not huge "safe bets", and most are quite decent.
locofocos
I have horrible news for you. Google had it, then they killed it
https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleMaps/comments/1737ft9/google_...
samlinnfer
From the comments it seemed that it didn't work well for everyone?
RobotToaster
If the service actually shows you things you want to see, then you're less likely to click on ads (or "sponsored results") which you also don't want to see.
Perhaps more importantly, if such organic growth is possible, it lowers the incentive for businesses to buy ads.
splonk
I was part of the team that built exactly this. It launched in 2010. Some Googlers of that era are probably still annoyed at all the internal advertising we did to get people to seed the data. This is one of the launch announcements: https://maps.googleblog.com/2010/11/discover-yours-local-rec...
> Google Maps shows you what the average person thinks is a good restaurant
I'm fairly sure this isn't true. At least, I still get (notably better) results searching while signed in. Couldn't tell you what the mechanism for that is these days, though. But at least back in 2010, the personalization layer was wired into ranking. You can see in the screenshots how we surfaced justifications for the rankings as well.
Pretty much immediately after launch, Google+ took over the company, the entire social network we had was made obsolete because it didn't require Real Names(tm), and a number of people who objected (including me) took down all our pseudonymous reviews. Most of the team got split off into various other projects, many in support of Google+. As best as I can tell the product was almost immediately put into maintenance mode, or at least headcount for it plummeted like 90%. Half of my local team ended up founding Niantic, later much better known for making Pokemon Go.
As for why collaborative filtering didn't take off, I can offer a few reasons. One is that honestly, the vast majority of people don't rate enough things to be able to get a lot of signal out of it. Internally we had great coverage in SF, London, New York, Tokyo, and Zurich since Geo had teams in all those places and we pushed hard to get people to rate everything, but it dropped off in a hurry elsewhere. The data eventually fills up, but it takes a while. I'm told we had 3x the volume of new reviews that Yelp had at the time, but Yelp mostly only covered the US, while Google Maps was worldwide, so density was quite low for a long time. It was probably 5-10 years before I started hearing business owners consistently talk about their Google reviews before their Yelp reviews.
Another thing is that people are really bad at using the whole rating scale. On a 1-5 scale, you'll probably find that 80% of the reviews are either 1 or 5 stars. Even more so in a real life situation where you meet the humans involved. While you can math your away around that a bit, at that point you're not getting a ton more signal than just thumbs up/down (anecdotally I've heard that's why Netflix moved away from 5 stars). And then at that point, you might be getting better signal from "were you motivated enough to rate this at all?", which is why there's the emphasis on review counts. Many people just won't review things badly unless things have gone terribly wrong. I sat in on a few UX interviews, and it was really enlightening to hear users talk about their motivations for rating things, many of which were way different than mine.
Stratoscope
Interesting reading, thanks!
BTW I'm familiar with linkrot, but I just discovered link poisoning.
I was reading the blog post on my Android phone and saw the Maps links to Firefly and Home Restaurant. So I tapped the Home Restaurant link and it took me to the Google Maps app in my normal home position with my home in the center. I thought for a moment that maybe it confused Home restaurant with my home.
So I tapped the Back button and nothing happened. Tapped it several more times with no luck. Finally I used the ||| button and swiped Maps up to kill it.
Then I tried the Firefly link, with the same results.
On the web, both links work fine, but someone forgot to test that these old links still work on Android.
Turns out that Home Restaurant is closed, but Firefly is alive and well. Their menu looks tasty, and the FAQ is something to behold:
https://www.fireflysf.com/faqs
If anyone here ever wants to write an FAQ with charm and grace and humor, read this one and learn. It is the gold standard!
gennarro
Thanks for the insights. Nice to hear the facts of a situation in addition to all the guesses and assumptions (which can be interesting too of course)
jwr
The reason is money. Google (in spite of what they would have you believe) does not show you what is "good" for you, it shows you what it gets paid to show you (paid in various, sometimes very complicated ways).
I am sad that Google services are so popular, because it makes the world a little bit worse for everyone. This includes not only Google Maps, but also Gmail (did you know that Google is quite active at censoring your E-mail and you will never see certain E-mails?).
I would really like to see more competition, ideally without the ever-present enshittification (I'm pretty sure Apple Maps will go down the drain, too, because KPIs and money).
davedx
> 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.
I mean... this sounds like the perfect use case for a third party app like "My taste restaurant finder"? There are undoubtedly apps out there like this.
I don't think Google Maps (a general purpose maps app) should try to be everything for everyone. It's good enough for what it is.
arvindh-manian
Beli is a pretty popular app with this functionality
modeless
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.
xandrius
Maps's search as a whole is terrible even from a UX perspective: search something with some filters, realise that you want to change a letter in the search? Byebye filters.
Some filters are available with a specific subset of words but not with another.
Zoom in a location, look for a common word? There are good chances it will zoom out and send you to the other side of the globe instead. Then pan back, hit "Search in this area" and bam it works.
Some devices can make reviews and some can't (tested on different devices, even Google ones).
Search for a specific word which might be in a review (say, "decaf") and you get even stuff which doesn't even remotely contain the word (I'd expect an empty result if no place has mentioned my keyword).
And many more.
It's just insane how a huge company just seem focused in making a "good enough" experience instead of being the leader. Maybe it's for the best but if they went 1 sprint/quarter into "let's fix glaring BS UX issues in our products", they would probably destroy so many alternatives out there.
Maybe it's on purpose to avoid some anti-trust kind of response? We'll never know.
shalmanese
I've said for decades that Google is terrible at search in every area except Google Search. Youtube search? Terrible! Chrome history search? Abysmal! Gmail search? Atrocious! Google Maps Search? At some point, standing in a middle of a mall searching for "coffee" returned only 3 SERPs despite me standing in front of a coffeeshop that I could not get to show up.
dieortin
SERP = Search Engine Results Page. I’m pretty sure what you mean is simply “3 results”, and not “3 search engine result pages”
modeless
I find YouTube search to be serviceable. At least it has decent filtering and sorting options. Gmail search is just OK, but I haven't found anything much better. Chrome history search, though, is completely worthless. Especially since it got merged into that myactivity thing that is utter garbage, completely non-functional for any purpose. There's so much potential in searching a complete history of everything you've ever personally seen online, and it would make Chrome more sticky. Incredible fumble by Google here.
shalmanese
Youtube search does a baffling thing where it shows you 5 SERPs, then a bunch of unrelated things it thinks you like, then another 5 SERPs. It used to only show you the top 5 SERPs before switching to "suggested videos" for the rest of the scroll. Truly a terrible product when that was the design.
DeathArrow
>I've said for decades that Google is terrible at search in every area except Google Search.
From my point of view Google Search is terrible, too. Is hard to find relevant results, you mostly get results optimized to make money, or junk. You have to explore tens or hundreds of results to find the needle in the haystack.
shellfishgene
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.
WOTERMEON
Point twice to them. Point to the space in front of your lap. Point to your face and mimic sad face and later happy face, while pointing your thumb down then up, à la Roman emperor.
delichon
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?
andai
There's a couple different threads here.
Can we make a decentralized search engine. Which breaks down into two questions, is it technically feasible and is it socially feasible?
(Maybe the word search would be a bit more broad than retrieving web pages. It could be for everything right.)
I don't know but I'm inclined to say that the difficulty will be more on the social side than on the technical side.
The web was very decentralized 20 years ago, and we had all manner of peer to peer systems already. There just doesn't seem to be much appetite for that kind of thing, at least in the mainstream.
Although there might be something to it, with the AI part of the equation.
Like we had self hostable services for a long time, most people just don't want to be a sysadmin.
Well, I gave Claude root on my $3 VPS. Claude is my sysadmin now. I don't have to configure anything anymore. Life is good :)
gleenn
The data is the key though. How did they effectively scrape the data? Does every restaurant have a website? I bet half rely on Google Maps. So IMHO you are too optimistic because regularly and effectively getting the data is the hard part, not the model.
TrackerFF
This right here. Every time I see these types of articles, I jump straight to the chapter regarding data, and it usually a single line of "I scraped the data", sometimes with explanation, most times not.
In this case it seems like she used their API to get the data. But as she notes, scraping can quickly mean having to spend money. And that's where the scraping dream ends for many people - if they have to spend money in any way, shape, or form, it's a non-starter.
DeathArrow
>then the muggles will get it, in a mass, just for the asking of their favorite chat bot
I guess you can do it right now if you tell a llm your preferences.
null
dzdt
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.
tkel
Perhaps such things should be controlled democratically instead of by a single person or a small group of people whose companies are organized as dictatorships.
Ferret7446
It is controlled democratically. The people have democratically ceded their knowledge gathering to large companies. Because people are above all else lazy
tkel
That's not what democracy is. The algorithm is developed in an organization that is structured as a dictatorship.
websiteapi
How exactly would you fix this? Seems no different than any arbitrary person or groups ranking.
cons0le
First off, let me see ALL the restaurants in my city, not just the 10 recommended ones.
Second, stop moving the map when I search for things. Why does google maps on both mobile and desktop, change your search area. I put the map in one place because I want to search there.
Third, stop scrubbing bad reviews. When every restaurant is 5 stars, theres no point
stavros
> stop moving the map when I search for things
Are you saying that if I want to find, for example, where Athens, Georgia is, I need to basically find it manually in the world map?
michaelt
> Second, stop moving the map when I search for things.
When I search for 'chicago' I like having the map move to Chicago, even if there's a Chicago Grill, Chicago Pizza and Chicago Trading Company closer.
tylervigen
> 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."
nicbou
In Germany, businesses routinely bully reviewers into deleting negative reviews, so the scores are meaningless.
I only trust what friends recommend.
tailsdog
I've had this happen to me, posted a factual restaurant review 12 months later threatened with defamation and it's auto removed by Google. It seems there are agencies that use legal framework to do bulk removal requests to Google for any low reviews no matter the content. The in-authentic Korean restaurant in Cologne went from a 1.9 to a 4.6. It's impossible to trust reviews in Germany due to these corrupt bully tactics.
alpineman
Yeah, reviews are useless in Germany as a result. If anyone from Google is reading this, PLEASE add a tag to establishments that remove reviews by legal means!
patrickmay
Serious question: How do they bully online reviewers?
bay_baobab_ii
This happened to me a few times for my reviews in Germany. My 1-star reviews were flagged by the business as "defamation" although it contained only facts and personal opinions. I provided additional proof like screenshot of their documents (one of them was a language school), but they deleted my review at the end. I was so frustrated, I even considered deleting all of my two hundred something reviews from Google Maps.
vintermann
I already deleted all my reviews from Google Maps. Spent all that money and effort installing a wheelchair elevator in a listed building, then when updating the info to say basically, "it's still not exactly wheelchair-friendly as a 120 year old building, but there is a wheelchair elevator and a HC toilet now", Google algorithmically accused me of lying.
chamomeal
I’ve almost moved on from online reviews. So many are fake, so many these days are slop. Half the time a 3.5 place is rated so low because people pick the most random ass reasons to slap it with 1 star.
Also I’ve decided I don’t want to live my life by following what Google says I should do as a default. Sometimes I go to a place that sucks. But that happened when I checked Google reviews anyway!!
wat10000
I mostly ignore the ratings and spot-check some reviews with good and bad ratings. If the good reviews actually describe something concrete and the bad reviews are nonsense, I take both of those as a good sign. If the good reviews are vague and the bad reviews are actually justified, then the place is probably not so good.
Similar with online shopping. If all the one-star reviews are complaining about the shipment being lost in the mail or other irrelevant nonsense, the product is probably pretty good.
pixl97
About the only reviews worth reading are 4-2 stars out of 5. 5s are overblown or fake. 1s quite often are about something dumb. A 3 for for example is apt to at least be thoughtful
qweiopqweiop
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.
sunnyam
I don't think this is saying that the ratings are unreliable, but rather that searching by rating isn't a guarantee that a high-rated restaurant will show up due to the other factors at play.
You don't get a sorted list from highest rated to lowest rated, but rather, momentum of reviews, number of reviews, changes in rating etc.
My suspicion is that there probably is also a noticeable difference between companies that advertise on Google vs. those that don't. Anecdotally, the gym closest to me has higher ratings than all the other gyms in my area, but when I moved to the area it never showed up on Google Maps for me. It was only by walking by it that I decided to look it up on Google Maps specifically by name that it showed up for me.
dazc
There are good businesses out there that don't get a lot of reviews because they don't ask for them. Relying upon customers to do this without a prompt is not something I'd recommend.
ozbonus
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.
entuno
I've seen several places that have a note printed on their menus offering a discount for a positive review.
Bowes-Lyon
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)
_ink_
Looks like she might publish it: https://laurenleek.substack.com/p/how-google-maps-quietly-al...
HanShotFirst
Same!
dddw
Same here!
fersarr
+1 to "We audit financial markets. We should audit attention markets too"
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.