Google's official blog for Google Maps, announcing features, imagery updates, map design changes and April Fools' jokes.
HN commenters use it as a primary source for when Google launched features, and as examples of past April Fools' jokes like 8-bit Maps.
I was part of the team that built exactly this. It launched in 2010. Some Googlers of that era are probably still annoyed at all the internal advertising we did to get people to seed the data. This is one of the launch announcements: https://maps.googleblog.com/2010/11/discover-yours-local-recommendations.html
> Google Maps shows you what the average person thinks is a good restaurant
I'm fairly sure this isn't true. At least, I still get (notably better) results searching while signed in. Couldn't tell you what the mechanism for that is these days, though. But at least back in 2010, the personalization layer was wired into ranking. You can see in the screenshots how we surfaced justifications for the rankings as well.
Pretty much immediately after launch, Google+ took over the company, the entire social network we had was made obsolete because it didn't require Real Names(tm), and a number of people who objected (including me) took down all our pseudonymous reviews. Most of the team got split off into various other projects, many in support of Google+. As best as I can tell the product was almost immediately put into maintenance mode, or at least headcount for it plummeted like 90%. Half of my local team ended up founding Niantic, later much better known for making Pokemon Go.
As for why collaborative filtering didn't take off, I can offer a few reasons. One is that honestly, the vast majority of people don't rate enough things to be able to get a lot of…
They do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6Douyfa7l8
At least for disaster relief, in Asia, too:
https://maps.googleblog.com/2011/03/new-imagery-of-japan-after-earthquake.html
"Today, we’ve published imagery of the Sendai region at even higher resolution, which we collected on Sunday and Monday."
Note the "we collected" and how it's called just imagery, instead of "satellite imagery" as in the previous paragraph. A thread with operational details:
https://community.apan.org/hadr/japan_earthquake/f/f629b959-b4a7-4133-b0ed-7cad7778509c/53821/google-offer-to-fly-candid-imagery-as-part-of-japan-relief-operations-similar-to-haiti-3d-udop
It's also available for resale:
http://sendai.hmdc.harvard.edu/cga_website_files/PDF_misc/Google_Imagery_Overview_2014.pdf
This was indeed a very deliberate choice by Google, and they have been blogging about it since at least 2011[0]. There are quite some blog posts by Google and others discussing the evolution in online maps from the high contrast design focused on roads and cities, to more “fluid” designs where there is a bit more room to show buildings, forests, waterways and other landmarks that are more suited for exploration rather than navigation.
[0] https://maps.googleblog.com/2011/07/evolving-look-of-google-maps-redux.html
Google's April Fools jokes were pretty benign anyway... obviously anything related to the virus would be in terribly bad taste, but I don't see why something in the same vein as https://maps.googleblog.com/2012/03/begin-your-quest-with-google-maps-8-bit.html would need to be cancelled. IF anything, we need the humor now more than ever to lift people's spirits.
I know they aren't photo spheres, but I wonder how hard it would be to patch all these locations into 360 images and plug them into a custom Google Street View.
https://maps.googleblog.com/2013/12/create-your-own-street-view.html
Extrapolating a bit further, I would really want to play the next GTA installment in 80s New York... you'se guys.
Its a standard feature on mobile, it does require the providers app installed, and there are a limited number of supported providers:
https://maps.googleblog.com/2016/03/your-car-has-arrived-more-ways-to-get.html