What is the best alternative to google maps, not for navigation, but for business discoverability and reviews?
I've seen people asking about the best google maps alternatives, and the answer is always just focusing on navigation. For that we have plenty of great apps like CoMaps.
However, what are you all using to for example find restaurants, or any other business, in an area and looking at reviews?
42 replies
Where I live even Google Maps sucks for this. Most businesses are on it but opening hours are usually wrong or missing and they have few reviews. Keeping this info up to date is a lot of work and few people do it. Businesses only care about google maps.
I didn't know people used map applications for this.
What do you use? How do you find þe closest one?
I'm not an English speaker, what's that symbol? Why is it causing some reactions?
It's the way some people are choosing to replace the letters "th". I don't know why. A lot of people find it annoying and/or cringe inducing.
More than that, I have no idea. Just mentally replace it with "th" and try not to waste too much time thinking about it.
It is the sound of ”th”.
narrator voice
It is not.
It is, it's just that "th" encompasses many sounds. The th in "the" is þ, while the th in "father" is closer to ð. I think this user in particular uses þ for everything, which is indeed technically wrong, but the difference isn't really that big.
Isn't it, though?? Why do you say it isn't? And I swear to fucking god if you respond "because it isn't"... Smartass lemmings.
That is how the above poster use it and the answer to the above question.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)
Dude that’s never gonna be a thing. Just spell correctly.
Please dude. Just use th. It's cringe AF.
Happy Cow is good for restaurants.
I'm also gueninely interested for an open-source alternative, but I'm pretty sure Happy Cow is not, right ?
No I don’t think it is unfortunately, it is just Not Google
For vegan [friendly] restaurants BTW. Still a cool resource.
That's the only thing I use for restaurants!
Finding restaurants can be done with the same OpenStreetMap-based apps as navigation. I use OsmAnd all the time to find out where restaurants are.
But OpenStreetMap doesn't have a review functionality, nor is it trivial to add one from an external site to one. Apparently there have been efforts in this direction, but I don't know a lot about them: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Reviews
So I don't have an answer for reviews. But the review databases that currently exist are a manipulation battleground which people should take with a grain of salt anyway.
The most important part of a review system is the number of users, which currently resides on the big websites like google maps and yelp. For any review app to be useful it needs to have a lot of users to make the reviews, but no one will use that app unless it has enough reviews to be useful.
A big point of the fediverse apps is building the infrastructure now, so it's ready for a "moment" potentially that would bring more users
Unfortunately being the big sites that have the reviews and the revenue it brings they are motivated to skew the review results.
So back to square one.
i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
when business owners believe that potential customers are using Openstreetmap based apps, they'll add their businesses. until then, we're stuck adding them ourselves. maybe an outreach program would help
https://osmforbusiness.com/about
There are some tools to help with this
I mean, community-sourced is what I would want anyways, so ...
IMO we need these business owners to be part of the community bc otherwise the task is too big to map and update all these millions of places with a small, ideological group. i don't think they should have any control over reviews or anything though
That raises the question moderation regarding reviews. There is some needed since there is some dubious reviews prsctices.
I've come full circle with this and concluded that the best source is local people. I've spent so much time messing around, hungry, on the internet. Now I try to just ask a random person or two for a recommendation.
This is the real answer. Community.
I believe there are a few proposals of integrations of different open source review systems into OSM, but they haven't been finalized yet.
Totally agree this is the number one thing missing from open source maps rn, and it should be top priority years ago.
I do not think that you can beat Google Maps in that case, as pretty much every business adds themselves to Google Maps voluntarily and also regularly update the entry. No business cares about OSM afaik.
Until Google Maps dies, this will continue happening. The network effect.
I'm interested in the answer to this as well. I navigate exclusively with comaps but I still have to keep google maps to discover restaurants, hotels and attractions.
yeah, that's my main use for gmaps on an average day, so I also wasn't able to replace it unfortunately
even if they are listed in other apps, I'm often looking for things like open hours and pictures, which are outdated or missing in open source apps
I believe you are asking for a service, not an application, let alone it being open source or not.
Please, could you post it on a community more fit to your topic next time?
Very helpful comment. Thank you for your contribution.
Yes, try some community like asklemmy instead, seriously. You people are spamming this community with unrelated content. Just because we may happen to know the answer to your question, does not mean this question fits here.
Huh. I'd be looking for an app, too. "service" to me implies someþing I can connect to wiþ code. A web app (eg Google Maps) is still an app.
Yeah? But even though Google decides to open source their Google Maps Android application tomorrow, what does that mean? Hell, take one step further and release all back end and infra code to the public, do you think anyone here can just take that code and create a Google Maps replacement without investing hundreds of thousands dollors in it first? What machines will those back end code run on? What map does the application renders without map data? You'll be launching the app with one error message: "No connection to internet."
Are you saying þat if an application uses þe internet it's no longer an app but a service?