I don't see why this feature needs to be powered by generative AI. As the article itself says you can very well just "search “vintage store SF” in the regular Google Maps search bar." Google just needs to analyze place descriptions and reviews and look for synonyms of "vintage" among them. The only AI related task might be to look at street view photos and user-uploaded photos to detect whether what's depicted in the photo could reasonably be called "vintage".
From a user perspective, it's a much better experience to see a list of places rather than generative AI generating some text.
I think this is just the Maps team getting on the gen AI hype train.
It needs to be powered by generative AI because its purpose is to be powered be generative AI.
Look at the way it's phrased: not "to improve the user experience" but "to bring generative AI to Google Maps".
This is Google top brass telling everyone explicitly that their products need to incorporate generative AI, and product leads brainstorming ways to do that.
The is not trying to solve a problem that users have, but a problem that Google has.
(FWIW I say this as someone who's optimistic that there is really something there behind the AI hype. But this ain't it).
This is the problem, 100%. The fact that Google isn't optimizing, or even building Google Maps for its users anymore - but checking the GenAI box showcases the internal shift from engineering led management to KPI driven management. From an outsiders perspective it seems like Sundar is fine with telling everyone in Google: "Your objective is - take this square peg and shove it everywhere".
I don't want GenAI in all of Google's ecosystem. I've already taken broad steps to de-Google many other important things. I guess my next step is to protect myself from Google and go fully back into the alternate Android ecosystem. Thankfully I have a secondary phone that I've been running Graphene on for the last year. Maybe Google's misdirected "everything GenAI" master plan is enough of a catalyst to push folks that have been dabbling on the edge to completely abandon Google.
The piece that really pisses me off, however is to see the head first dive into the shallow end with all of this garbage in Google's AI for the Education space [0]. Kids do not need to be subject to this impending trainwreck.
A map, ostensibly representing real geography, is the last place I want some AI confabulation. It's bad enough when Google sends people down side roads to gauge traffic on them, now it'll just fantasize routes and locations.
> You've finally found a day the whole crew can hang out. The problem? Everyone has different preferences: one friend's vegan, another won't venture uptown, and one has a dog that never leaves their side. With so much to consider, you’re going to need help figuring out the perfect place to go.
I imagine searching "place to hangout downtown that is vegan and dog friendly" is not going to return the results you're hoping for.
Presumably this is for people who don't like that idea. Hopefully Google doesn't force everyone to use this, even if they preferred to just meet somewhere and walk together to look for a place.
I was going to disagree, but after experimentation it seems like the non-LLM search in google maps already does a pretty good job of handling vague searches more complicated than keyword matching
IMO it does provide a better user experience. It gets to the end goal quickly by giving you a list of places directly in the Maps app. You can see how far each place is and if you really wanna go to that part of the town from a bird's eye view. Sure, I can Google the same query. But that'd require me multiple clicks and scrolling through possibly long-winded blogs to finally get a list of addresses.
Naw when it comes to gen ai Google teams dont have that much will power to say what train they're getting on. It's pretty much a directive at Google at this point for everyone to get on the gen AI train.
Their example is horrible, but I kind of see what they're (hopefully) trying to get at: more natural ways to "search" for places, specifically for people that didn't grow up implicitly learning _how_ to search [0][1]. We know to search "vintage store SF" because it'll give exactly the results we want, but there are still large populations out there searching with wildly inefficient queries e.g. full sentences, natural language, unrelated info, etc.
And a lot of these queries are valid questions/searches, but don't produce the answer the searcher is looking for. Depending on how this Maps system works, it might work better for those people -- and also provide a new kind of searching for everyone else.
Here's a great example from a different domain: a while back I built a book search powered by LLMs that helps you find books that you remember random details of but can't remember much else ("that one where the woman climbs the mountain and gets stuck in a cave for a week", "that one where two cities on opposite mountains communicate by reflecting light", "that one where the main character finds a dragon egg in his grandpa's garage"). Without indexing the contents, reviews, analyses, etc of each book, an LLM was a great solution for finding the right answer to this kind of query which, anecdotally, almost always fell flat in traditional search engines (google, goodreads, amazon, etc). In Maps, I could see this kind of search working well for locations with queries like "that restaurant in KC with the giant painting of a woman spilling soup out of her mouth", "that museum with the open-air room in the middle", "that coffee shop that only hires women", etc).
[0] Tangential anecdote from the far end of the spectrum: one of my grandma's first google searches was "Hello there, I'm not sure who I'm writing to but I'm hoping you can help me. Years ago, my friend {Alice} told me about a restaurant she went to in Des Moines that had amazing meatballs. I've looked all over and tried {list of places} but I can't find it. She lived near the YMCA near Main..." More than half of the query was ignored (max 32 words on Google) and not a single result was relevant so she just closed my laptop (and rarely used technology ever again); however, I bet an LLM probably would have given a much better result.
[1] There's also an argument to be made that people who didn't grow up around technology are a dying breed, but I think we'll soon find that technology moves fast enough that we don't quite grok all the latest tech -- and in that lens, we might eventually be the ones still using "that legacy way to XYZ" instead of whatever's next.
I've been struggling to use Google Maps's search lately. I zoom into Orlando, search "Euro Deli", and it suddenly takes me to a place called Euro Deli in Quebec. If I go back to Orlando and then click "Search this area" it finally shows me euro deli stores in Orlando. Sometimes it doesn't even show me all of the results when I click "Search this area" and leaves some areas blank, making me think that city/town doesn't have e.g. a Burger King when it in fact does if I just pan around a bit and re-do the search
It's even worse in Chinese language entry when you search for a dish that also happens to be the name of a place, e.g. Chongqing xiaomian (noodle) and then it shows you noodle places in Chongqing. But then Yangzhou fried rice does show you places locally that do it. You never know till after you search what's going to happen.
It seems so simple to fix too. Favor close results over distant ones, and if no results are found within a couple of unzoom levels, pop a suggestion. And in particular if a string of searches is happening for different dishes, there should be a "this user is looking for something to eat right now" flag that engages to prevent serving results on the other side of the planet.
Also I can zoom in to some strip mall and ask to see all the restaurants and I'll only be presented with a subset that Google decided were worth highlighting. No easy way to see the others.
Agreed -- slightly getting the name wrong does a national/international search! Searching for coffee shops often leaves out obvious results such as some Starbucks. Even more frustratingly it doesn't show particular businesses even when I zoom in, forcing me to manually search for the business name.
Google maps is an amazing tool. Twice a year I go to the United States to a company meet up. I always stay a little bit longer than my co-workers to get the most of the trip (since I spend almost 20 hours to get there). I always use maps constantly not just to know where am I but also to know where to go and possible good locations to visit. A cool trick is to use the "busy areas" to identify cool places. Can't wait to see the new features.
I got my current job (3 years so far) here on Hacker news on a "who wants to be hired" topic. Don't really know why they hired me but I'm glad they did.
Everything Alphabet has hit with their sugar-stick of AI has turned to a foetid garbage pile in just as much time. search on the google product is less than useless in most cases, its outright harmful to the pursuit of knowledge itself and the security posture of the system accessing the links provided.
Once alphabet tires of the AI hype train im sure whatever adjunct features and functions get added to maps will fester like a withering carbunkle until suddenly maps is replaced with maps(new_name) where the next product is just a reskinned rollback.
The examples provided are poor. Here's one: I recently asked Bard for "a good place to go with a colleague to lunch in Mountain View," and then asked it to refine to places "upscale and favored by locals." Wound up finding Cucina Venti, which I'm not sure a regular search would have yielded.
That said, it's a neat to see feature. Not a must have, certainly nothing compelling.
> the advantage for AI is finding “favored by locals”
And winnowing the list. Yelp's results in the Bay Area are strongly skewed by people who go to a fine-dining establishment, have a terrific meal, and then leave one star because it's priced as fine dining.
Still dreaming of the day they use AI to enhance the street view experience. Being able to walk through a photorealistic simulation of any place on earth would be amazing, but the UX and image quality doesn’t seem to have changed in years.
This with the 3rd or 4th gen of Apple Vision Pro where all the issues are hammered out would be unreal.
What I'm really looking forward to is describing what you want midjourney prompt style then being teleported to a hyper realistic world you can explore with quests and journey.
I think Google is generally going down a self-destructive path with their AI approach, which works with their generally self-destructive approach to user interfaces.
I see ads for Google phones where they brag about how rather than taking actual pictures, they have their AI hallucinate better pictures, and I wonder who exactly these ads are supposed to appeal to?
Already Google Maps is something of a nightmare to use -- searching for something will often refocus the current view in wild and useless ways. This is doubly true when you're trying to do a multi-part search (e.g. "I'm going to be at this store, I wonder if there's a good Thai restaurant nearby" will zoom out and show you Thai restaurants thirty miles away, and you've lost the pin from the first search). And the "explore" option just seems kind of useless and intrusive -- it is literally never what I am using Google Maps for. And the near-extortive labelling -- "in order to get your restaurant labelled as 'LGBTQ friendly' you have to create a Google account and claim the restaurant" is mind-boggling.
Adding AI to Google Maps could conceivably help with keyword labelling (like when a search for "pharmacy" fails to show up a given pharmacy because it's marked as a "drug store" or something). Maybe if I search for a good "salad place" it'll find restaurants that serve good salads but don't have them in the restaurant name. But I'm terrified of the kind of generalized hallucinations that it will provide. Might be interesting to do a "vibe"-based search from time to time ("find me a clean, well-lit, quiet bar" or a "bar with a pool table") but I suspect this will get old after a couple of false positives.
> I see ads for Google phones where they brag about how rather than taking actual pictures, they have their AI hallucinate better pictures, and I wonder who exactly these ads are supposed to appeal to?
Everyone that takes pictures where: someone closed their eyes, wasn’t looking, something annoying in the background, unflattering pose, etc
Most peoples pictures are not a statement of record - we just want to remember the good times with loved ones
> Most peoples pictures are not a statement of record - we just want to remember the good times with loved ones
But on that note, having a flawed high fidelity record is no worse for remembering the good times. The hallucinations are mostly harmless, until the AI changes your eye color or adds extra teeth or all of a sudden there's an elephant in the background, even though you told the AI that you specifically wanted a picture without an elephant.
Or, more whimsically, your friend who memorably never smiles in pictures is smiling in all of the pictures with your new phone.
> Most peoples pictures are not a statement of record - we just want to remember the good times with loved ones
Maybe so, but personally if I'm taking a picture, I want that picture to be of real things. I don't want it to be altered or to have artificial things added. That just adds an additional layer of separation between my and reality.
If I want a picture to be artificially enhanced, I'd be using photoshop or similar.
But I understand that's just me. One of the things I worry about with how generative AI seems to be going is that it's being used for things that further blur what is real from what is not, and we already have far too much of that as it is.
But what is a "real thing"? I would argue that photography is a medium for understanding a deeper underlying reality - just like our own brains and sense-perceptions are, but with different mechanics. The angle with which you take a photo, or the optics which the camera uses, or the post-processing that camera software applies are just as much a mechanism for interpreting the "thing itself" as the vagaries of our own sense-perceptions when we "see" something. In addition, these multiple representations (our senses and the images we create) interact - for example, we sometimes think a photo is "bad" because it doesn't match the representation in our brain, and sometimes we find that "hyperreal" photos (to use Baudrillard's term) override our perceptions. So I think it's silly to worry that Generative AI might make photos less representative of "objective" reality. Perhaps it's even a good thing if more folks accept the inherent subjectivity of any media.
That's true. I remember when I switched from the iPhone 6s to the iPhone 13 and tried taking a selfie in low light. I was so dissatisfied because the image became brighter than it appeared on the camera preview during shooting. Good shots with minimal phone editing now only happen in good lighting. But if a photo is taken in low light, the face gets heavily smoothed to remove noise in the photo, but in my opinion, it only makes everything look worse.
It's always interesting to me to see people get excited by ideas like this. While the idea is clearly useful, I think it suffers from the same limited market as directions. Unless you're a nomad, most people eventually settle into a routine and know what is in the area and how to get there. What continues changing are live event schedules and traffic conditions, neither of which requires AI to serve. What is needed is what Google already has, a large-scale sensor network that gives you the location and velocity of many people and the computing infrastructure to process it in real time and serve it back to the same devices the data is collected from.
You end up in this situation where the app is adding features useful to visitors, but the vast majority of users just want a drive time estimate.
>What continues changing are live event schedules and traffic conditions, neither of which requires AI to serve
Finding the optimal route given the current and historical traffic conditions along with information of what is happening that day (e.g. A festival or sporting event) is an AI problem.
Actually, its a quantitative problem that people normally use operations research algorithms to resolve.
Can AI be trained to solve it? Sure, but it's a weird and perhaps un-needed use case when there are several better understood and more efficient algorithms that approach lower bounds.
I work in the AI space, love the challenges it presents and the use cases it enables. We have to be careful to not hype into AI -- applying it to places where it isn't necessary or could never work -- because it will absolutely continue to technically improve but may be overly scrutinized from a regulatory perspective.
Perhaps you misunderstand my term. Quant problems are broader the AI. A more appropriate term would have been constrained optimization problem. While this space has overlap with some AI methods, AI and OR have some daylight.
I'm hoping their example is just the surface level and the technology is much richer. I'm very interested to see how they're adding:
- real-time data to LLM retrieval
- validation of recommendations (hallucination reduction)
- enriched metadata for recommendations
Searching for a place can be done with the help of AI classifiers, but in the end, you just get a point on a map, nothing generative here. Other things that Maps can do, like pathfinding is most likely better served using traditional algorithms.
I am not sure how generative models would help here, but sometime I just want to put a multiple constraints on the map query and this is not feasible even though they already have all the necessary information because their UI doesn't support it. Something like "burger shops/cafes near the downtown that I've been there before and gave a good rating or in my favorite list, reservation open for tomorrow lunch". Probably too complicated for dedicated UI, wonder if a chat style UX could fit to this kind of needs.
I wonder - does saying "<thing> - but now with AI!" actually work? Like do normies buy this stuff? I don't know any normies, but I'm very curious to hear from those that do. Do they fall for this "<thing> plus AI!" that I hear in every single advert now?
A year ago a normie wedding planner was scouting locations for a couple that had a list of specific needs, nothing weird, just rooms for the night, sea view, allowed catering and had a garden space, but even if the requirements were pretty standard it's not something you can get at glance from maps or Google searches.
So it was taking significant time to open each location web site and validate them because one has to be sure and often locations doesn't explicitly have a list of features, you'd have to see photos or find the right snippet of text in whichever subsection it could have been, and the hit rate was petty low
So I tried asking gpt and quickly had 20 matches for her ready. Some were hallucinated, some we couldn't confirm the features, but more than two thirds where legit candidates, which saved a lot of busy work.
So in the end the planner opened an account and never used gpt ever again because it was weird and alien and couldn't figure out prompting.
Am I going to one day miss the era when I could just type "pizza" and get adequate results? I don't see what benefit more language processing is going to give me.
I think you're missing the bigger picture. When you search for "pizza", is pizza really what you want? Maybe you actually want a recurring service from one of google's outstanding partner companies! Google Maps Assistant could help you find that!
When I type in "pizza", I get everything from dollar slices to Italian fine dining. That's not very helpful -- at no point am I ever trying to decide between a $1 slice and a $29 pizza for one.
Language processing gets me an immediate answer to, "hey, I'm looking for a cute date spot with pizza, high quality pizza but where you still eat it as slices".
> hey, I'm looking for a cute date spot with pizza, high quality pizza but where you still eat it as slices
that's still so many words, though, and i'm a lazy person. i want to just type "pizza" and, if it's a really fancy app, hit a single button to filter by "casual" "takeout" "formal" etc
When I type "pizza" I am given a filter that allows me to choose between "$, $$, $$$". That's a little vague but generally I would MUCH rather interact with software with good filtering, grouping and sorting controls than any of this natural language bullshit.
But a lot of the time you're looking for things like "cute date spot", "trendy", "chill atmopshere", "cozy", "good for a large birthday group", and so forth.
There aren't filters for these. That's my whole point.
There's a ton of information that can be gleaned from people's reviews and photos, but that simply aren't exposed in anything filterable. And keyword search often isn't available but also doesn't often work -- e.g. searching for "budget" gives you lots of reviews that say "definitely not budget". But AI is perfect for this.
> There's a ton of information that can be gleaned from people's reviews
Extremely unreliable information. Isn't that made worse if what you're looking for is subjective descriptors like "cozy", "chill", "cute", etc? Those are the kinds of things that there won't be a lot of agreement on.
Not my experience at all. An individual review isn't much, but when you see the same ideas getting repeated across reviews, it's always accurate in my experience.
There's enough common agreement on what cozy or chill mean. There's plenty of signal in the noise of reviews.
Interesting. Our experiences about the reviews are very different.
> There's enough common agreement on what cozy or chill mean.
Maybe? I don't know. I do know that I often see people using the same subjective descriptors in ways that are contradictory to each other. What one person thinks is "cozy", another person thinks it "claustrophobic", for instance. Unless you know the mindset of the person using those sorts of words, it's hard to know how to interpret them.
I recently searched "vegan brunch" in an unfamiliar city. Several results looked reasonable — the kind of decor and branding I'd expect from a vegan restaurant.
After the long walk to the third restaurant, I looked closely through the results to see why Google was giving me useless results. It was reviews! It had matched variations on "Great food but no vegan options."
I'm sure Google Maps used to have a "Cuisine" filter, which isn't really correct in this case but is a lot closer than what they're doing now.
You probably already know about this, but if you're looking for vegan stuff specifically, Happy Cow is a pretty good site to point you in the direction of decent options.
I just sort by food type and 4+ stars. That usually filters list down to something where algos can't inject too much weirdness. Or at least I assume it doesn't. I think my medium density city has not enough options that a filtered list won't return almost everything, confirmed by me being familiar with my neighbourhood and what is returned. But I imagine in denser cities it would be PIA (how much results return for 4 start sushi in middle of Tokyo). All of which is to say, unlike other Google services, so far I can't tell if default Google Maps is getting better or worse over time and I use it all the time.
The problem for years now has been that google will hide results that don't meet their standards, much of which boils down to how much advertising the restaurant has paid for.
This sounds like a feature that could be really nice, being able to search for something in a new city where you have no frame of reference on what to search for and getting good results sounds really nice!
That said, I expect the worst from this update. My expectation is that it will serve recommendations based on AdWords or other advertising tech. And this will then transform Google Maps into even worse of a product that will be even more covered in ads than it already is.
I hope this beats my expectations, but I’m not optimistic.
Decade? I disagree. A lot of the changes to highlight places with more commercial activity to give a high level overview of places to visit, the reviews and ratings system, the highlighting of landmarks, transit directions with live train/bus updates, local guides and so on were immensely helpful features that make trip planning these days so much easier and I think most of these were post 2014 and they made substantial and positive changes during 2014 to 2019 at least
I'd agree in the last 4-5 years the changes have been worse. Post-COVID they seem to have focused on making a lot of negative changes by stuffing it with too many ads, worse color schemes and a lot of "features" that are half baked to try and capture users and send them to paying businesses on the platform
> A lot of the changes to highlight places with more commercial activity to give a high level overview of places to visit, the reviews and ratings system, the highlighting of landmarks, transit directions with live train/bus updates, local guides and so on
Interestingly, that list is mostly what I had in mind when I said that maps was getting worse.
I suppose that it entirely depends on what you want out of a map application. For me, all that stuff just gets in my way. That you think those things are great tells me that maps is no longer aiming to solve the problems that I want solved, and is addressing other problems instead.
That's not saying Google Maps is bad or wrong, just that it's a different product now, and one that isn't going to provide what I want.
So I should just pipe down. I'm not the target demographic anymore. I just need to move on to a different application and be done with it.
I still have no idea what problems you want solved
The problems most people have are finding places and ways to get to those places. All the changes I outlined, including continuing improvements to their directions, served that purpose for quite a while. Reviews, the commercial areas highlighting and local guides helps find shopping and food spots and I used this extensively during multiple trips with great success. Same with the transit directions and landmarks highlighting and I fail to see any reason how these made maps worse. I cannot possibly think of why adding bus and rail timings made maps worse. They are incredible features. Things I didn't originally include are also traffic conditions and suggesting routes based on that by factoring in timing which is somewhat hit or miss but still leaning towards hit in my experience
I can point specifically to things like their new Business Messaging, the ramped up difficulty to contributions and reducing them primarily to photos and reviews, and the new experimental color schemes as decidedly worse changes
> I still have no idea what problems you want solved
My problem is very basic: I want to see an uncluttered map, to be able to search for a particular address or street and be shown it on that map, and to get driving directions.
The driving directions are OK, but the uncluttered map isn't a thing anymore. Now, the map is obscured with with quick-search buttons, that pull-up thing showing "places of interest" at the bottom, and is populated with irrelevant (to me) pins showing random businesses.
It all just makes actually using the thing as a map more difficult.
> The problems most people have are finding places
Fair enough. That's why I say that Google Maps is not aiming at people like me. I want basic navigation, in a way that is as friction-free as possible. I also have zero interest in things like reviews, local guides, and that kind of thing.
Again, I'm not saying that what you want isn't important, or even that what you want isn't what most people want. It's just not what I want, and the presence of those things makes using the app for my use case more difficult.
So I just need a different product that is aimed more at my needs.
I've been using OsmAnd for years now, and it's fantastic. Much more complicated to set up the way you like, but you can set it up exactly the way you like. No ads, search results are what I'd call "sterile", and you can have as many or as few features as you'd like. If you pay a $2 monthly subscription, you can download large tiles of highly detailed information from their servers, so you can use it completely offline.
Traffic integration with Waze has made a big improvement.
And, of course, Android Auto.
But for discovery? When I look around my neighborhood, I see Circle K, Walgreens, and Wendy's, all with their colorful logos. I don't know for sure, but now it feels like a yellow pages of advertised businesses where it used to be a map.
When I use OSM or Google Earth, I see the parks and street names. I can search for Wendy's if I want that, but it's not promoted info.
Yeah, given how bad the SEO problem already is I’m setting my expectations low. It seems like it will be a big problem dealing with fake reviews if the LLM makes it harder to see the source and how trustworthy it looks.
This is an incredibly hard problem since businesses have such strong incentives to game the system, so it’s hardly new but I think AI is going to make it even harder to spot fake accounts.
The best choice might be to avoid the places recommend by Google as everyone will be there. The current AI is not clever enough to handle crowd control.
AI's main value to companies is to launder bad behavior.
"We fed it into this black box, and this is what we got, we don't know how it works". Of course the training data will probably be a weighted output of who pays google, rather than what will make the user happiest.
It's pretext to violate reviewing systems without looking obviously corrupt.
I just want to see the top 10 most rated things per category, then I want to see the top 10 things over a given threshold of reviews. I don't want googles mangling of the data, I just want to be able to query the review data.
If whatever google displays isn't better than the top 10 results in a given area sorted by number of reviews, it's clear there is a reason why. Whether it's devs creating unnecessary complexity to justify their employment, or a system designed to weight results in favor of who pays google, or the need to inject 'randomness' in order to be able to inject paid advertisements without them being 100% ignored, or to provide a reason to keep scrolling allowing more ads to be displayed, it's all anti-user behavior. This will just be another tool to manipulate a user rather than help them.
>I just want to see the top 10 most rated things per category
That is the problem. You do not want a web search engine that gives you a WEB PAGE for your query. You want an answer AI.
Google can not find a page nobody has written, and if several people write about a topic, there is just no way Google can figure out which one should be the first result correctly.
When Google talks about finding relevant results, they just mean if you type "hacker news" on Google the first result will probably be this website instead of news about hackers who hacked a bank or something. That is what "relevancy" means. When there is a single, canonical, unambiguous web page that matches a query exactly.
Everything else is just expecting more from Google than it can feasibly provide and then getting angry when it tacks AI on everything because it can't do magic.
As a separate service distinct from web search, sure. But I also want to be able to search the web and get lists of pages.
> That is what "relevancy" means. When there is a single, canonical, unambiguous web page that matches a query exactly.
This is what I don't want in a search engine. Unless that search engine figures out a way to read my mind, anyhow, which would bring up a whole host of other issues. Google trying to guess at what I want rather than just giving me a list of pages that match my query is the main problem that I have with Google search.
Again, it's because you are the use case that is unfeasible.
It's a SEARCH engine, not a BROWSE CATEGORY engine.
And I get it, I get frustrated at this too. Sometimes I try to search for a category of something, like free image editors, and Google just can't give me an answer I'd like.. And it's really not a hard query to answer. It just lists me a bunch of names with zero info about what platform they are for, or what features they have. It's an useless list. It's simply beyond the scope of what it is made to do.
I mean, seriously, I know Google is a blackbox, but Google is really just a single textbox. We're expecting too much from a single textbox.
> it's because you are the use case that is unfeasible.
Not at all, as evidenced by other search engines that are successful at this and the fact that Google used to be successful at this.
> It's a SEARCH engine
Precisely. I want it to search the web and return a list of sites that match my search criteria. I don't want it to to answer a specific question for me, nor to try to guess what I "really" want. That should be done by a different tool.
> We're expecting too much from a single textbox.
I'm not sure what you think that I'm expecting, but what I'm expecting is much simpler than what Google seems to be trying to do.
I suspect that I've failed to adequately explain my use case and we're talking about different things, but I'm not sure where I went wrong so don't know how to clarify.
You are arguing that google is a tool. The other person is arguing that google is more like an opinionated contractor.
"You don't want a tool, you want to remodel your bathroom" is what the other person is arguing. That's kind of true.
We're arguing that we don't want someone tell us how to remodel our bathroom, we just want a tool we can use to remodel our bathroom ourselves.
Google said that providing a tool doesn't make enough money, so they transitioned into being a contractor.
The crux of the issue is the "-" operator. As a tool, it removed any search result with the word after the "-" operator on the page in a very specific way. If you weren't getting the results you wanted, it's because you didn't think of how to use the tool in the right way. As a contractor, they try to interpret what you want to subtract and then give you what they think you want.
The person you are responding to might be too young to remember that google was actually a very good tool at one point.
I don't disagree with the point you're trying to make, but this puts an awful lot of weight and importance on "reviews", which tend to be highly problematic, in my experience at least (cf. Amazon, Yelp)
I be predict it’s going to be useful at first and then end up becoming overdone and eventually burdening the product — unless they find a way to make it essential to the UX.
Like all hype cycles, the syrup ends up everywhere. You need an actual user need to have the long-term product justification to add features.
There probably is one with maps. It just may not be this early.
I was working on an obsidian datatviewjs with ChatGPT and just not getting that I wanted so I asked Google Bard, “can you take a look at this code” and pasted the code block. It’s response, “As an AI, I do not have eyes and cannot look at anything so unfortunately I cannot help you.”
So, yeah, I am not sure Google “supercharged” AI id going to work for a product that requires a precise but fast user feedback loop.
I see a lot of negativity, but this is actually one of the first things I tried to do with ChatGPT when it got Bing integration. I was in an unfamiliar town for a wedding and I had forgotten my tie. I asked ChatGPT where I could buy one downtown. (If you're curious, it utterly failed, with two of the three suggestions not selling men's clothing at all, let alone ties.) I would love to be able to be on the highway and ask how far the next rest stop is or if there are any places coming up where I could get a sandwich. Google has that information, including menus in many cases, but it's difficult to access, especially while driving.
What do you think an LLM should be able to better than regular search results (possibly with speech-to-text input, and text-to-speech output - which is how the interface to an LLM would work anyway) for this kind of use case?
If the answer is "regular search results are crap because of irrelevant sponsored placements being put before the thing I want", that's not a function of the search engine; that's revenue-maximising choice the search engine provider makes... so why do you think that won't happen to LLM results by the company that provides it?
I was looking to buy a backgammon board locally. Using google was unsuccessful, but google maps oddly worked for me (excepting one big box store which had them online..).
From a user perspective, it's a much better experience to see a list of places rather than generative AI generating some text.
I think this is just the Maps team getting on the gen AI hype train.