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.

> 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!

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

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?

Yeah!

> "I scraped every single restaurant in Greater London"

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

Same here!

Same!

The writer is in London where even locals often eat outside their immediate neighborhood.

Depends if you live in a big city with a lot of restaurant turnover or not.

This is actually a big frustration for me how I can search food and get totally different results over the same area in the frame. I seem to remember in the old days of google maps you'd see, you know, everything in the area. Like pins on pins on overlapping pins. And you'd click through them or zoom in as appropriate. You found everything. It all worked.

Then someone had the brilliant idea that this was all too busy, and you should have pins omitted until you have sometimes zoomed so far in you are filling your map viewer frame with the doorstep of that business...

I wouldn't be surprised to learn businesses get charged to appear first. Seems like it tends to be things like fast food or national chains over new locally owned restaurants that pop up more often on google maps.

Yeah, can’t comment about London, as I’ve only been a tourist there, but assuming it works like in Tokyo. In a big city, with basically unlimited amount of dining options, a lot of people will try different places. In the past year, I don’t think I’ve repeated a single dinner spot more than 3 time, and I basically eat out every day. This is always a discovery problem, and word of mouth/google maps/tabelog/etc. is a major sales driver here.

Now, if I think about the time I lived in Vancouver, it was the opposite. You don’t have that many options, after a while you basically make a list of your favourites and rotate.

Unless, as a local looking for new spots to try, your first step is going to Google Map and searching "restaurants". I'm certainly guilty of this sometimes.

I think it's less about tourist vs local, and more about the breadth of restuarants you have available. I live outside of a major metropolitan area in South Europe, there are restuarants going out of business and opening up every day in the city, no one can keep track of all them.

If you can just say "Peruvian" and it finds all restaurants around you within 2km, you might get 30 options. At that point, using the wisdom of the crowd for some initial filtering makes a lot of sense.

Personally I love going to completely unknown restaurants that has just opened and have zero reviews yet which Google Maps helps with too, but looking at how others around me use Google Maps, a lot of them basically use it for discovering new restaurants to try, and we're all locals.

I disagree, i’m always using Google to find new restaurants and places to go to in my own (fairly large) city.

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.

How exactly would you fix this? Seems no different than any arbitrary person or groups ranking.

Someone hasn’t tried the cheesy bread!

Serious question: How do they bully online reviewers?

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!!