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justinobeirne.com
Personal blog · justinobeirne.comdesigndata
justinobeirne.com is a personal blog at justinobeirne.com about design and data. Since 2016, 104 different Hacker News readers have linked it 154 times, most often “Google Maps' Moat”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Often recommended · 16 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for detailed analysis of Google Maps and Apple Maps, including Google's building data, 3D imagery, cartography and comparisons of map services.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Google Maps' Moat22 people · 22 mentions · first linked 2017-12-19
- /10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2019-07-16
- A Year of Google and Apple Maps8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2017-05-27
- Apple's New Map7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2018-11-01
- Google Maps’s Moat: How Far Ahead of Apple Maps Is Google Maps?6 people · 21 mentions · first linked 2018-01-02
- Apple’s New Map, Expansion #7: Final Parts of the Continental U.S.5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-01-30
- Apple’s New Map, Expansion #5: Northeast U.S.3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-09-30
- /what-happened-to-google-maps3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-12-14
- Cartography Comparison: Google Maps and Apple Maps3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-01-12
- What happened to Google Maps?2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-12-20
What Hacker News says?
I was thinking the same thing of "who cares." I take the train and walk a lot more than I drive. I need street names, and GMaps have made them harder and harder to see for years: https://www.justinobeirne.com/what-happened-to-google-maps/ I gotta pinch zoom all the way in, jiggle the map around a bunch, just to see street names. It's annoying as fuck since it's the most important thing on the map when walking in a c…
Comment linking /what-happened-to-google-maps/
on “Google Maps' Moat”Submitted Google Maps' Moat as a story · 1960 points
HN discussionI really agree with you. I've tried using Here Maps and Waze. Waze is just too much ad/game crap and Here works nice for navigation, but tends to crash the OS or disable mobile data randomly. With most of this article I was like "So what?" So what if Google has intelligent building vectors. It's UI is shit. You can't go back and fourth between different routes easily. You can't easily add waypoints. You can't do a l…
Comment linking /what-happened-to-google-maps/
on “Google Maps' Moat”Submitted Apple's New Map as a story · 1250 points
HN discussionThere's a small Polish startup that helps people find nearest pharmacies with given drugs. They did pretty nice analysis and found out their whole infrastructure costs $1300 a month and they would have to pay additional $5000 for Google Maps alone (right now GM costs them nothing). Looks like GM will be ~10x more expensive to them than Mapbox or MapTiler, here's the original article (in Polish) translated by Google…
Comment linking /google-maps-moat
on “Farewell, Google Maps”Submitted What Happened to Google Maps? as a story · 464 points
HN discussionIndeed, his criticism might be the reason for the major revamp in the first place, according to other news stories. Quote from paywall: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2018/09/07/eddy-cue-the-in... Complaining gets results. I'm a total believer in negativity. You could say I'm positive about it. What I mean by "relentless" is that this article in the OP covers the changes in detail for the first half, but the seco…
Comment linking /a-year-of-google-maps-and-apple-maps
on “Apple's New Map”Submitted A Year of Google and Apple Maps as a story · 449 points
HN discussionHe's written multiple articles about maps, even before that one: https://www.justinobeirne.com . He's very good at spotting details in maps–IIRC he worked on Apple's maps team before, so this isn't particularly surprising.
Comment linking /
on “Apple's New Map”Submitted Cartography Comparison: Google Maps and Apple Maps as a story · 209 points
HN discussionAnother great article from this blog! Last year's article from the same author [1] about Goggle Maps' use of photogrammetry and other building scanning techiques was, in my opinion, one of the most interesting HN submissions ever (its comment section[2] is also worth a read). [1] https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15965653
Comment linking /google-maps-moat
on “Apple's New Map”Submitted Apple Maps' Acceleration (2020) as a story · 153 points
HN discussionEven Apple the most valuable company in the world with hundreds of billions of dollars of cash on hand is way behind Google in terms of mapping. https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat/ If Apple has trouble keeping feature parity with Google Maps, there is no way that an endeavor like Open Street Maps has any real chance of making something with the breadth, features, and usability of Google Maps.
Comment linking /google-maps-moat/
on “OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble”Submitted Apple's New Map: Midwest and Western U.S. as a story · 153 points
HN discussionJustin's theory is that the design focuses on a clean (empty?) look for mobile users. And on POIs, not streets. https://www.justinobeirne.com/what-happened-to-google-maps
Comment linking /what-happened-to-google-maps
on “Why Nukemap Isn't on Google Maps Anymore”Submitted Apple’s New Map, Expansion #7: Final Parts of the Continental U.S. as a story · 119 points
HN discussion> I really think Google Maps will die. It's just unlikely that for the rest of history, no one will improve OpenStreetMaps to the point that it is competitive. From reading the analyses at https://www.justinobeirne.com/ , plus just generally following the tech industry, I'm convinced Google Maps will never die, at least not in any timeframe relevant to this discussion. Between autonomous vehicles at Waymo and Google…
Comment linking /
on “Why Nukemap Isn't on Google Maps Anymore”Submitted Why doesn’t “Look Around” cover more areas? as a story · 89 points
HN discussionArticle linked in the discussion - https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat
Comment linking /google-maps-moat
on “Apple is rebuilding Maps from the ground up”Submitted Apple’s New Map, Expansion #5: Northeast U.S. as a story · 81 points
HN discussionFor those interested, this site gives good thorough comparisons between different map services (mostly Google & Apple): https://www.justinobeirne.com/ Latest entry in Dec 2017: How far ahead of Apple Maps is Google Maps? https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat
Comment linking /google-maps-moat
on “Apple is rebuilding Maps from the ground up”Submitted Cartography Comparison: Google Maps and Apple Maps as a story · 78 points
HN discussionRecommend taking a look at this blog post: https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat the author has updated a couple times. The changes are subtle and are amazing for your benefit. Not seeing the change is them getting better at easing you into the new functionality, not them stagnating.
Comment linking /google-maps-moat
on “GitHub Actions now supports CI/CD, free for public repositories”Submitted A YEAR OF GOOGLE and APPLE MAPS as a story · 18 points
HN discussion>> I have a suspicion that gmaps infers roads from photographs, and some of the roads are not roads at all. > There's something called the TIGER database. [1] Of course, that needs to be populated and updated somehow and Google probably applies various corrections. That's for the US though, it wouldn't cover Canada (though Canada probably has an equivalent). IIRC, Google actually has a fairly large team of cartograp…
Comment linking /
on “There is currently no way to drive between Vancouver and the rest of Canada”Submitted Cartography Comparison: Google Maps and Apple Maps as a story · 7 points
HN discussionThese street maps are becoming insanely precise, probably helped by the competition. I see that Google Maps is now testing "detailed street maps" in some cities: https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-testing-detailed-street... Just a thought: maybe they are scanning cities for their self-driving cars and are also using this data for Maps?
Comment linking /google-testing-detailed-street-maps
on “Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating”Submitted Why doesn't “Look Around” cover more areas? as a story · 5 points
HN discussionAnecdotally, a potential counterpoint: https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat And the discussion that came with it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15965653
Comment linking /google-maps-moat
on “Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating”Submitted Google adds traffic light icons to U.S. maps as a story · 5 points
HN discussion
