Google Maps is terrible for hiding results. I'll use the filter to show restaurants with a 4.5+ star rating, and it hides dozens of places 4.5+ stars while instead showing results 4.0 - 4.4 stars and even some that have no reviews at all. I find the arrogance insulting. You want to see 4.5+ star Japanese food restaurants? Well, I don't think that's best for you, and I'm going to replace some of those results with 4.1 star Caribbean food restaurants that you'll like instead.
I despise Google Maps for this. I can know that a restaurant exists, zoom in on its block, search 'restaurants' -- nothing. It'll zoom out the map and show other stuff. Worse, I can max my zoom and hunt for it on the map and it will outright show a blank space. Only searching for the restaurant's actual name will bring it up.
But there's not really any alternative. Apple Maps can't show me things because it's missing the entries entirely. Yelp became useless years ago. I feel like we're going back in time because the best way to find local restaurants has become walking / driving around the neighborhood to see what's there, or getting word of mouth recommendations.
Internet search in general has severely declined in 2023. I was trying to figure out the syntax for putting a URL in slack the other day and couldn't find a proper article anywhere in the top 10 results.
I think they are trying to integrate their bard UI into search and it is killing the results.
At this point, I use google to search reddit in order to find organic results. Unfortunately, that will probably be taken over by spammers soon enough.
YouTube is also horrible these days. They made it so for any event or happening, only "official" sources show up so they can add "context" to the narrative. It's dystopian, but possibly worse: annoying. I can't find out what I nees to, when I need to. Thanks Google.
Or they outright silence smaller news organizations that broadcast popular, although controversial, figures who fall under a certain political affiliation.
I'm grateful for places like Rumble and Twitter, where real news can be found. :)
> I feel like we're going back in time because the best way to find local restaurants has become walking / driving around the neighborhood to see what's there, or getting word of mouth recommendations.
Let's face it, that never stopped being the best way. There have always been problems with internet reviews, if only the ones inherent in the 1-5 star mechanism. But, it is very inconvenient to ask around for recommendations when you're (for example) hungry and passing through an unknown town or something. So I get why we need a source that isn't completely unreliable.
Perhaps what's needed is a website that doesn't do reviews, but only lists businesses that are open to the public and categorizes them by function (pharmacy, grocery, daycare, etc). Possibly with direct links to review platforms and official websites and so on, but without actually inserting any content (reviews, ad copy) into the website itself; this can be left to other sites.
I've noticed this in the last 6 months specifically. If I search for grocery stores it only shows me some chains and not others now. If I want to see where Safeway stores are at I have to search Safeway; they won't show up under grocery stores anymore.
I have noticed this too. I wonder if those businesses haven't paid an SEO expert to set up their business properly or if they haven't paid google for their "premium" map features
Organic Maps is very good at showing where 'restaurants' are. It's just not very good at showing their hours or including links to their web site or menu.
Google maps is also terrible at showing _only_ relevant info. I searched for “coffee” in a small area earlier today (small because I wanted to walk); it zoomed out to a much larger area and showed me coffee shops along with taquerias, oil change shops, banks, etc. both in the results pane and scattered all over the map. It was such a mess as to be unusable.
Thank you, this is a huge problem with maps search results. It's showing too many results and the ranking is rubbish. Searching for coffee shows tons of low quality results including ones for Target and McDonald's.
You're being flagged but you're absolutely correct. Maps search is awful. Yes, most McDonalds might have more than 4 stars, but that's not what I want when I search 'cafe'! I avoid most chain restaurants in general which makes it much worse. I wish there was at least an option to block restaurants from showing up in your results.
on the same topic - sometimes it's so frustrating when I put some shop name in Google Maps while I'm in Paris and looking on the map of my neighborhood, for example - and whoosh - it zooms so far out to show all the places which "suit" the search in all the Europe. Why would it do that?
It's so frustrating to find the perfect restaurant by chance and find it on the map directly when it didn't show up in a very targeted search of the same map.
There's also a lot of brigading on Maps. You'll see 5 1-star reviews in a row, and realize they are either duplicate accounts or friends who are all reviewing the same experience.
Weird thing is I began comparing things like Uber Eats reviews and Google Maps reviews for local Asian restaurants, and I see things in Google Maps are reviewed substantially lower.
For example some of my favorite Asian restaurants in the city are rated 3.5ish while Uber Eats is rated like 4.7. It leads me to believe a lot of people are rating Google Maps restaurants also based on service. One in particular
This place is awesome, and personally have experienced bad service but don't really care, so I do understand the Google Maps rating, but do find the whole rating system not helpful for me as I'm interested in good food and willing to accept bad service.
One theory I have is that you're getting different rating for different experience. Some "Asian" food keeps well, so it could stand out from the competition. They don't have to deal with you being in the restaurant, complaining about the smell, the service, they hit on the waitress and she wasn't very friendly responding, ect.
You're correct. This is a problem with ratings. You really have to read into them to see what they're complaining about or praising. This is true even for individual reviews, written solo. Many are unhelpful, or stuff that doesn't concern you.
One of the best examples I can remember is a venue that had 2-3 stars. However, all the negative reviews were like: "They have massive parties going hard late into the night... but my kids go to bed at 9:30, so 1 star".
> Well, I don't think that's best for you, and I'm going to replace some of those results with 4.1 star Caribbean food restaurants that you'll like instead.
If only. Its more like "these are the businesses that have paid me. They don't match what you want, but tough cookies."
Same with the much vaunted Amazon and Netflix recommendation engines. They stopped recommending stuff that you would like a long time ago, around the time everyone was trying to copy their recommendation engines, and started recommending stuff that makes the company more money.
I hesitate to suggest that this may indicate there aren't that many 4.5+ star Japanese food restaurants. Even great resaurants in my area struggle to break the 4.5 barrier.
Changing the zoom level will typically show these missing results. For example, I just checked my neighborhood. There are 5 restaurants within a few hundred feet of each other rated 4.5+ stars. With my filters set to 4.5+ stars, when I zoom out a bit, 4 of the 5 restaurants disappear, and I instead see a handful of 4.1 and 4.3 star restaurants. One of the 4.3 star restaurants is literally next door to a 5 star and 4.5 star restaurant, which are hidden at that zoom level.
I thought maybe it's some kind of weighted rating, because it's showing me the 4.3 star restaurant with 1,100 reviews, instead of the 4.5 star restaurant with 600 reviews. So, perhaps Google thinks the additional number of reviews make up for the lower rating, and they rank it higher, even though I'm specifically asking to not see those results. However, it also shows a 4.4 star restaurant with 40 reviews, while hiding a 4.5 star restaurant with 90 reviews.
This is par for the course when it comes to modern recommendations though. Do you want to see Netflix movies released in the past 3 years? Or what about a simple list of top rated movies? Too bad, you can watch what we tell you to watch. It's a complete lack of respect for the user.
It could also be recent ratings; I think it is reasonable to weight old reviews lower than new ones given restaurants can change a lot over the months and years.
Perhaps. But then why not just say “no results found”? Because that might give the impression to the “average” user that Google is broken and isn’t solving their problem. To the more sophisticated user, Google is just meddling where they shouldn’t.
Google is proving the central limit theorem by catering to the average.
Google long ago decided that "No results found" is never an acceptable response. Same with regular Google search. It will just choose arbitrary things to show you instead.
It's one of the things that has reduced the usefulness of these tools.
At least here where I live, Foodora and similar have ruined what was left of the Google ratings for any place offering take-away, because there's ton of 1 star reviews which concerns the transport.
At least viewing the most recent comments and reading the comment that goes with it helps figuring out if it might be a decent place or not... at least sometimes.
