Tumgik
#google maps
almaville · 1 month
Text
Tumblr media
tokyo google maps
edit I’m going to try to find the exact location somehow since everyone likes this picture haha
edit: i actually found it— it’s 5-chōme-4 Higashiōi in Shinagawa City, Tokyo
24K notes · View notes
robotblues · 1 month
Text
Tumblr media
21K notes · View notes
Text
Google Maps is worse than useless - actively harmful
Tumblr media
Hard to overstate how enshittified and botshitted Google Maps has become. Went looking for my local locksmith on Gmaps. Maps shows 20+ fake locksmith referral scam outlets and doesn't even register the real locksmith, despite it being fully visible in Street View.
Tumblr media
Instead, a red pin on the shop identifies it as a fake locksmith scammer. The real locksmith - which has been there SINCE 1942 (!!) and is a verified merchant - doesn't even show up.
Google has been promising to clean up locksmith scams since the early 2010s, and has completely failed. A company that can't figure this out - but still has $80b for a stock buyback! - does not deserve the 90% market share in search it spends $26b/year to maintain.
13K notes · View notes
389 · 1 month
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
Nine Eyes of Google Street View Jon Rafman
5K notes · View notes
animentality · 1 year
Text
Tumblr media
26K notes · View notes
melthedumdum · 1 year
Photo
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
Google maps new baltimore glitch that happened in 2013
22K notes · View notes
zegalba · 1 year
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
Google Maps Glitched New Baltimore Renders (2013)
13K notes · View notes
one-time-i-dreamt · 4 months
Text
The entire west of France didn’t show up on Google Maps anymore.
555 notes · View notes
spectrometrie · 3 months
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
329 notes · View notes
arcadebroke · 20 days
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
261 notes · View notes
0x-x8x-x0 · 19 days
Text
Tumblr media
東京都
203 notes · View notes
todays-xkcd · 7 months
Text
Tumblr media
"The police told me I can't be a doctor, but whenever they show up I just go into the Google Maps settings page I found and change the house to 'Police Headquarters' and then they have to do what I say."
Doctor's Office [Explained]
Transcript Under the Cut
[Beret Guy is sitting at a desk, wearing a lab coat. Cueball is walking in from the right.] Beret Guy: Welcome to the doctor! Beret Guy: We're like librarians, but for your bones and blood.
[Beret Guy is holding a thermometer attached to a device in Cueball's mouth and a bottle.] Beret Guy: Uh-oh! This beeper says you're too hot. Beret Guy: You should eat some of these little snacks that make you colder.
[Beret Guy is holding a pen, and Cueball is holding a clipboard with a crossword on it.] Beret Guy: We can make holes in you, but you have to fill out this form first. Cueball: This is a New York Times crossword. Beret Guy: Don't worry, it's a Monday, so it's not too hard.
[Beret Guy is now dragging in machine labeled "MRI" on a dolly.] Cueball: This is a doctor's office, right? Beret Guy: Yeah! It used to be my house, but I found the setting on Google Maps to change it. Beret Guy: Hey, wanna help find out what this box does? I bet it's loud!
485 notes · View notes
makingimages · 14 days
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
109 notes · View notes
Text
You can’t shop your way out of a monopoly
Tumblr media
I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TUCSON (Mar 9-10), then SAN FRANCISCO (Mar 13), Anaheim, and more!
Tumblr media
If you're running a business, you can either invest at being good at your business, or good at Google SEO. Choose the former and your customers will love you – but they won't be able to find you, thanks to the people who choose the latter. And if you're going to invest in top-notch SEO, why bother investing in quality at all?
For more than a decade, Google has promised that it would do something about "lead gens" – services that spoof Google into thinking that they are local businesses, pushing down legit firms on both regular search and Google Maps (these downranked businesses invested in quality, not SEO, remember). Search for a roofer, a plumber, an electrician, or a locksmith (especially a locksmith), and most or all of the results will be lead-gens. They'll take your call, pretend to be a local business, and then call up some half-qualified bozo to come out and charge you four times the going rate for substandard work:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/business/fake-online-locksmiths-may-be-out-to-pick-your-pocket-too.html
Some of them just take your money and they "go back to the shop for a tool" and never return:
https://www.riverfronttimes.com/news/when-a-fake-business-used-a-real-st-louis-address-things-got-weird-32087998
Google has been promising to fix this since the late aughts, and to be fair, it's a little better. There was once a time when a map of Manhattan showed more locksmiths than taxis:
https://blumenthals.com/blog/2009/02/18/google-maps-proves-more-locksmiths-in-nyc-than-cabs/
But GMaps is trapped in the enshittification squeeze. On the one hand, the company wants to provide a good and reliable map. On the other hand, the company makes money selling "ads" that are actually payola, where a business can pay to get to the top of the listings or get displayed on the map itself. Zoom out of Google's map of central London and the highlighted landmarks are a hilarious mix of "organic" and paid listings: the British Museum, Buckingham Palace, the Barbican, the London Eye…and a random oral and maxillofacial clinic in the financial district:
https://twitter.com/dylanbeattie/status/1764711667663831455
Hell of a job "organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful," Big G. Doubtless the average Londoner finds the presence of this clinic super helpful in orienting themselves relative to the map on their phone screens, and it's a real service to tourists hoping to hit all the major landmarks.
It's not just Maps users who'd noticed the rampant enshittification. Even the original design team is so horrified they're moved to speak out about the moral injury they experience seeing the product they worked so hard on turned into a giant pile of shit:
https://twitter.com/elizlaraki/status/1727351922254852182
Now, when it comes to locksmiths, I'm lucky. My neighborhood in Burbank includes the wonderful Golden State Lock and Safe, which has been in business since 1942:
https://www.goldenstatelock.com/
But you wouldn't know it from searching GMaps for a locksmith near me. That search turns up a long list of scams:
https://www.google.com/maps/search/locksmith/@34.1750451,-118.369948,14z/data=!3m1!4b1?entry=ttu
It also turns up plenty of Keyme machines – these are private-equity backed, self-serve key-cutting machines placed in grocery stores. Despite Keyme calling itself a "locksmith," it's just a badly secured, overcaptilized, enshittification-bound system for collecting and retaining shapefiles for the keys to millions of homes, cross-referenced with billing information that will make it easy for the eventual hackers to mass-produce keys for all those poor suckers' houses.
(Hilariously, Keyme claims to be an "AI" company):
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200114005194/en/KeyMe-Raises-35-Million-to-Further-Its-Mission-of-Building-the-Premier-Locksmith-Services-Company-in-the-Nation
But despite the fact that you can literally see the Golden State storefront from Google Streetview, Google Maps claims to have no knowledge of it. Instead, Streetview labels Golden State "Keyme" – and displays a preview showing a locksmith using a tool to break into a jeep (I'd dearly love to know how the gadget next to the Slurpee machine at the 7-Eleven will drive itself to your jeep and unlock the door for you when you lose your keys):
https://www.google.com/maps/place/KeyMe+Locksmiths/@34.1752624,-118.3487531,3a,75y,350.19h,90.21t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1ssHrtqjqvgFir3NBauMy13Q!2e0!7i16384!8i8192!4m15!1m8!3m7!1s0x80c2959cd65dbb1b:0x4b3744cf87492a71!2sBurbank+Blvd+%26+N+Hollywood+Way,+Burbank,+CA+91505!3b1!8m2!3d34.1750025!4d-118.3493484!16s%2Fg%2F11f37_3lq8!3m5!1s0x80c2951cedbf4d39:0xe8ff9fd5872e66e9!8m2!3d34.1755176!4d-118.349!16s%2Fg%2F11mw7nr4fx?entry=ttu
It's pretty clear to me what's going on here. Keyme has hired some SEO creeps and/or paid off Google, flooding the zone with listings for its machines. Meanwhile, Golden State, being merely good at locksmithing, has lost the SEO wars. Perhaps Golden State could shift some of its emphasis from being good at locksmithing in order to get better at SEO, but this is a race that will always be won by the firm that puts the most into SEO, which will always be the firm that puts the least into quality.
Whenever I write about this stuff, people inevitably ask me which search engine they should use, if not Google?
And there's the rub.
Google used predatory pricing and anticompetitive mergers to acquire a 90% search market-share. The company spends more than $26b/year buying default position in every place where you might possibly encounter a new search engine. This created the "kill zone" – the VC's term of art for businesses that no one will invest in, because Google makes sure that no one will ever find out it exists:
https://www.theverge.com/23802382/search-engine-google-neeva-android
That's why the only serious competitor to Google is Bing, another Big Tech company (Bing is also the primary source of results on Duckduckgo, which is why DDG sometimes makes exceptions for Microsoft's privacy-invading tracking):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#Controversies
Google tells us that the quid-pro-quo of search monopolization is search excellence. The hundreds of billions it makes every year through monopoly control gives it the resources it needs to fight spammers and maintain search result quality. Anyone who's paid attention recently knows that this is bullshit: Google search quality is in free-fall, across all its products:
https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf
But Google doesn't seem to think it has a problem. Rather than devoting all its available resources to fighting botshit, spam and scams, the company set $80 billion dollars alight last year with a stock buyback that was swiftly followed with 12,000 layoffs, followed by multiple subsequent rounds of layoffs:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task
The scams that slip through Google's cracks are sometimes nefarious, but just as often they're decidedly amateurish, the kind of thing that Google could fix by throwing money at the problem, say, to validate that new ads for confirmed Google merchants come from the merchant's registered email addresses and go to the merchant's registered website:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security
Search is a capital intensive business, and there are real returns to scale, as the UK Competition and Market Authority's excellent 2020 study describes:
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5fe4957c8fa8f56aeff87c12/Appendix_I_-_search_quality_v.3_WEB_.pdf
But Google doesn't seem to think that its search needs that $80 billion to fight the spamwars. That's the thing about monopolists, they get complacent. As Lily Tomlin's "Ernestine the AT&T operator" used to say, "We don't care, we don't have to, we're the phone company."
That's why I'm so excited about the DOJ Antitrust Division monopolization case against Google. Trusting one company to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," was a failure:
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-google-monopolizing-digital-advertising-technologies
I understand why people want to know which search engine they should use instead of Google, and I get why, "There aren't any good search engines" is such an unsatisfactory answer. I understand why each fresh round of printer-company fuckery prompts people to ask "which printer should I get?" and I understand why "There are only six major printer companies and they're all suffering from end-stage enshittification" isn't what anyone wants to hear.
We want to be able to vote with our wallets, because it's so much faster and more convenient than voting with our ballots. But the vote-with-your-wallet election is rigged for the people with the thickest wallets. Try as hard as you'd like, you just can't shop your way out of a monopoly – that's like trying to recycle your way out of the climate emergency. Systemic problems need systemic solutions – not individual ones.
That's why the new antitrust matters so much. The answer to monopolies is to break up companies, block and unwind mergers, ban deceptive and unfair conduct. "Caveat emptor" is the scammer's motto. You shouldn't have to be an expert on lead gen scams to hire a locksmith without getting ripped off.
There are good products and services out there. Earlier this year, we decided to install a (non-networked) programmable pushbutton lock. I asked Deviant Ollam – whom I know from Defcon's Lockpicking Village – for a recommendation and he suggested the Schlage FE595:
https://www.schlage.com/en/home/products/FE595PLYFFFFLA.html
I liked it so much I bought another one for my office door. Eric from Golden State Lock and Safe installed it while I wrote this blog-post. It's great. I recommend both of 'em – 10/10, would do business again.
Tumblr media
Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.
Tumblr media
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/05/the-map-is-not-the-territory/#vapor-locksmith
Tumblr media
Image: alicia rae (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kehole_Red.jpg
CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en
--
Budhiargomiko (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wasteland.jpg
CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en
240 notes · View notes
filmap · 1 month
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
Vermines / Infested Sébastien Vanicek. 2023
Apartment Block Les Arenes de Picasso, 6 Pl. Pablo Picasso, 93160 Noisy-le-Grand, France See in map
See in imdb
88 notes · View notes
Text
Tumblr media
423 notes · View notes