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A comment on Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating. Parent comment

Re:Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating by marbu on Tuesday December 29, 2020 @09:08AM (#25569815)
Mapy.cz covers most of other use cases as well, including business info, public transport and other details. I personally find mapy.cz more tailored to pedestrian/public transport navigation within european city. The only feature which I go to google maps is the mentioned estimation of how crowded a place is (as this comes from android data, and google has an clear edge there).
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Re:Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating by morsch on Tuesday December 29, 2020 @09:45AM (#25570154)
The software supports the use cases but the data isn't there. Certainly for where I'm living. Most of the information is missing -- eg apparently there are no pediatricians in my city, many opening times are missing, in my area there are no photos, no reviews; other stuff is wrong. It's more comprehensive in Prague, though from a brief look Google still has more of everything.

I'm not saying that OSM (and other projects, but particularly OSM) can't catch up, especially when it comes to factual information. It has already shown that crowdsourcing can do better than Google at pure mapping.

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Re:Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating by jdmichal on Tuesday December 29, 2020 @11:43AM (#25571635)
Does OSM support address-based resolution of places? AFAIK, Google is getting things like store hours when it crawls websites. Which, of course, it's doing anyway for indexing. As long as it can figure out the address and the store hours from the website, it can put them on the map.

In the meantime, OSM generally doesn't even have place addresses in my experience. If I could resolve addresses to places in OSM, then I could easily write some scrappers to help out with filling in other data.

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Re:Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating by pwg on Tuesday December 29, 2020 @03:18PM (#25574332)
> In the meantime, OSM generally doesn't even have place addresses in my experience.

As @matkoniecz pointed out, OSM is quite capable of having place addresses mapped to a specific spot. If your experience has been that they are missing, then that is most likely because no one has added them to OSM for the area's in which you have looked.

But the good part about OSM is that anyone, including you, can add those details, and they appear in the main map within seconds to minutes of someone adding them. So you could help rectify the missing situation by adding some of that missing data.

If you don't want to learn all the OSM details, and provided some background details are present (generally building outlines for address data questions) one easier way to help add the data is via StreetComplete (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/StreetComplete). It asks simple questions, you enter the answer, and the app handles the low-level OSM tagging changes based upon the answer given.

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Re:Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating by jdmichal on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @08:39AM (#25581554)
I do contribute in my local area. But I'm talking about entire suburban cities with no addresses on any of the houses. It would take me months to verify all the addresses and enter them manually. My county property appraiser does offer some data files, but I haven't yet written any tests to see whether it's enough to reliably populate addresses into OSM.
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Re:Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating by matkoniecz on Tuesday December 29, 2020 @01:34PM (#25573115)
Addresses and exact shop locations can be added to OSM.

See https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/50.07298/19.93528 where it is mapped at least in a small part.

> then I could easily write some scrappers to help out with filling in other data.

Note that it may not possible due to copyright issues

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Re:Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating by jdmichal on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @10:01AM (#25582223)
I'm not talking about adding addresses to OSM. I'm talking about resolving features based on address. "Give me the building at address (____), because I know that's a business and I can fill in additional information."
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Re:Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating by morsch on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @04:41PM (#25586491)
I quickly found this: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nominatim

E.g.: https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/ui/search.html?q=pilking...

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Re:Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating by Pamar on Tuesday December 29, 2020 @11:20AM (#25571288)
Just tested for Germany (where I am living currently) and it is not very good: at the map level it shows the correct street number but it seems unable to use it for actual route planning (i.e. if you are in a street with numbers from 1 to 200 it seems to always calculate your arrival point at #1 even if you specificy that you are looking for "72/b").

Also, is it available as an app on iPhone?

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Re:Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating by Daniel_sk on Tuesday December 29, 2020 @11:23AM (#25571348)
Yes, it's available on iPhone. The company is based in Czech republic and originally they were focused on Czech and Slovak market, but they cover the whole world. I haven't tried the navigation, I only use it mostly for navigation outside of cities for hiking - I can have the whole tourist map in my pocket and offline at any time.
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