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.
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.