Google Maps

“All the drop-offs, like, we can see where people are actually dropping off the package. [1950] Stanley Tang: Yeah, where did the human Dasher drop it off historically, and that is, [1954] Stanley Tang: You know, like, again, it's that first and last hundred …”

“I remember services, you know, Google food ordering launched in, I forget, 2015 or 16, and they allowed you to order delivery, for example from various Google services, you know, Google Maps, Google Search, et cetera, and while on the one hand it was low frict…”

“Everyone a year from now is going to start asking much more detailed questions of Google Maps rather than saying, Restaurant Thai New York, you're going to start saying like, oh, I'm looking for the best pad Thai within a mile from me, and that's going to be p…”

“I just went straight to outscraper. I don't think. There's nothing new here. I went over this in the last pod, but Altscraper is still the cheapest option for me. I've used Appify and other kind of alternatives, but just keep it simple. I think Altscraper is a…”

“Waste Management uses Clay, actually, and they use Play because they, and this is a very custom, unique data point. They want to know who their customers are, so they use Google Maps to get satellite images, AI to analyze the images, to determine, like, what c…”

“Somebody said that TikTok is the best local search engine, and I think that's right. My kids have discovered crazy when you go traveling, crazy restaurants on TikTok that Google Maps would not really show or Yelp doesn't show, etc.”

“There's fifty billion products in the Google shopping graph, for instance, they're updated two billion times an hour by merchants with live prices, right? You have two and fifty million places in maps.”

“So imagine, you know, you can go and find a niche that has, you know, hundreds of reviews every month, but customers are generally not happy. To me, that sounds like Opportunity or arbitrage, right?”

“And we're not going to talk about this today, but put a pin in for the next episode is one of the most incredibly strategically valuable data assets for the AI era and specifically for self-driving cars.”

“They don't break out revenue, but estimates are that Maps does well over five billion in revenue, maybe even ten billion in revenue.”

“Google is maintaining I kid you not, 350 different versions of Google Maps for mobile for all the just sea of phones out there.”

“There are two apps that launch in the very first version of the iPhone. Remember, it didn't have an app store. It was not open to third-party developers. There is a YouTube app and a Maps app, both of which are Google services. Now, the apps are written by App…”

“It was the first Android device launched with Google Maps turn-by-turn navigation.”

“When we launched Google maps, we got about ten million people using on the first day, which at that scale of the internet at the time was huge.”

“In August of 22,005. We integrated satellite imagery from a recent acquisition called Keyhole, which became Google Earth, and we got ninety million people using it on the same day.”

“And I think that by having the goalposts so far down the field, because they had just started with this Windows app, which was sort of a quirk of Lars and Jens, just like technical choices, we made much bolder technical bets than we would have otherwise. I thi…”

“We went from a Bundle size of 200 K to a bundle size of 20 K and it was a lot faster and better.”

“There's something fundamentally wrong with Google maps and how they're routing. Like their ETAs are off dramatically. The routing is off dramatically all over the Bay area.”

“Pretty unhelpful, yet people are going to websites like this, and it just shows you that Google Maps is not satisfying everyone's needs.”

“The on GZIP bundle size for all of Google maps. When I rewrote it was 20 K GZIP, it was like much smaller for the entire application. It went down by like 10 X.”

“That one integration basically helped us win the business of those, like, 50 or 60 companies that we would methodically go through.”

“One of my favorite interview questions is to ask, tell me about a product that you recently discovered that you were super passionate about. You say, I worked for Google, but it's an instant failure. You say Google Maps or Gmail or Facebook. It just tells me y…”

“And after a certain amount of time, you can pay for places like that, four dollars for a thousand places, which is very cheap.”

“Google Maps probably did more for self-driving than literal self-driving. Like, you know, a billion people have like the ability to have like maps and navigation just like taken care of for you autonomously.”

“Reviews are way lower than people think. It's honestly shocking. Especially in like smaller geographies, it really, what's matters is like, is this an exact match for whatever this person is searching?”

“Like we've seen it in like a week and a half go from like, it's not in that snack pack to it's in that snack pack.”

“Google spends billions of dollars a year on maps.”

“Cause like this will replace Yelp. Like nobody trusts Yelp and nobody trusts Google maps.”

“Hive Mapper has mapped over 10% of the world's roads in one year, and Hive Mapper is now, they have signed multiple customers who are buying this mapping data. They have not publicly disclosed who those customers are, but like, Hive Mapper has built a mapping …”

“This was the world's first aluminum frame, bolted aluminum frame on a scooter in production. This was the first scooter anywhere in the world to deploy a touchscreen dashboard, and the first one to have Google Maps.”

“Humans will trust it anyway. They trust Google Maps. They trust all these things. And so it's good enough for humans to trust right now.”

“Using chat GPT to write an email on your behalf, and not saying it is probably closer to the her end of the spectrum than the Google Maps end of the spectrum.”

“And we built an API. We were working directly with Google, and if you ever looked up, like, vaccine locations on Google Maps, that was us feeding that to them, which was really cool.”

“So Lambda two, the most recent incarnation of the system, it really is Every Google AI all plugged into each other. The chatbot system is just the language center for a much, much larger AI. It has access to every Google AI system as a back end. So Lambda is G…”

“So we supply data to Google for their maps. They do huge numbers of requests to us.”

“So one of the things that we have done was to break down the entire Western world, every single city of the world into 300 times, 300 meter hexagons. And we have developed our own iteration of a Google Maps type of tool”

“Google maps, which is maybe the closest that the West has to a super app.”

“The shift in design that we've seen recently, and this is only very recently, is where you type in the address now. So I'm thinking in terms of Google Maps and Waze certainly, and perhaps others, is that you type in the address and then up pops a map, which gi…”

“Turns out with Google, having Android and Google Maps, they can just ask every single person on earth how the restaurant was that they went to last night, because they know that they'd visited it via Google Maps, and suddenly Google Maps has better data and bl…”

“And I think this will always be the case. They will try to always fix this, but it will always be the case that Google will be amazing at services because ads requires a service business model, and Apple will be amazing at kind of user experience and hardware.…”

“Rather than having to build, like, mapping and logistic services, they're integrating with Google Maps. Rather than building out, like, a push notification or phone verification system, they're using Twilio. Rather than having to build their own payment servic…”

“But if you actually dive deeper, maps today, including the digital maps, are actually built for human consumption only.”

“Only a quarter of the base have installed it.”

“That Apple Maps has three and a half times more users than Google Maps on iOS.”

“There's probably four hundred million iPhones in use, a bit over four hundred million iPhones on use. Only a quarter of those have installed Google Maps.”

“Very briefly, it seems like the Maps and the App Store are crucial. None of the other services matter very much.”

“What's the distance between your home and work? This used to be offline and self-reported. Now, Waze, Google Maps, any number of apps probably know it even better than you do.”

“Bret is someone that I knew from Google... He rewrote the entire JavaScript front end over a weekend, made it, A third the size and 10 times as fast as what an entire team of developers had been working on for a long time.”

“But even as amazing as that is, it's not quite enough for a car that wants to drive itself to navigate the world.”

“If you use Uber and you say, like, I, you know, please pick me up at the, you know, Regency Cinema in Tribeca and take me to the Starbucks on 27th street, rather than typing addresses, That's all powered by Foursquare's global data set and they moved off Googl…”

“If the human genome was quote unquote mapped in 2000, I think there's kind of one still needs to make the Google Maps of that, and then one after that we would need to make the ways, ah, of the human genome, where you actually have feedback, where you know som…”