by asiachick on 9/19/22, 7:47 PM with 5 comments
Trying some other things, I tried "French restaurant". I could find no examples of google maps recommending things other than French restaurants. Not in Fremont, or Singapore, or Taipei.
It made me wonder, how does Google maps decide what is a similar search result? Why did it show me Burmese when I asked for Mayalsian? It's certainly not "because they are geographically close" as France and Germany share a border. It made me wonder if this is an ML issue or if it's mistake where whoever programmed this put their own biases in (French, German, Italian, South East Asian) vs (French, German, Italian, Malasian, Burmese, Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian, ...)
Anyone know why it might do this? Consider if you were searching for French restaurants and it recommended Italian restaurants. That would arguably just be bad results but given it didn't give bad resutls for that search but did for Malaysian restaurants it seemed to deserve some explanation.
Are their other searches with similarly interesting results?
by logicalmonster on 9/19/22, 10:13 PM
1) Think about the respective quantities of Malaysian vs Italian restaurants in the US. There's probably dozens and dozens of Italian restaurants in a typical American city - you don't need to recommend French or any other food in the US when searching for Italian because you can find 100 different Italian results just about anywhere in the US. But I doubt that Malaysian or Burmese restaurants are nearly as common. It seems reasonable that a different type of search like Malaysian would yield a recommendation for something in the general area like Burmese if there's only a handful of Malaysian restaurants in a specific area in the US.
2) An American who is hunting for Malaysian food is open to trying something a little different than the American norm. If I was in the mood for something a little different from Asia and couldn't find a Malaysian place, I'd think that Burmese food would be a great substitute to try if there's one in the area. It doesn't mean that they're necessarily the same cooking style, just that it captures the right mindset while searching. I'd bet that searches for European foods in Asia make similar oddball recommendations in Asia. If you were randomly searching for Irish food in some random Asian area and there were very few Irish pubs in the region, it might randomly recommend Spanish or German or Italian food due to some level of geographic similarity because that captures the right mindset of what you're looking for: something non-Asian from the European part of the world.
by soueuls on 9/19/22, 9:46 PM
Google is incentivized to return you results. And there are probably not enough Malaysian restaurants in Fremont.
So I would assume they have some data that says "people who like Malaysian cuisine tend to like Burmese cuisine as well".
And so they are returning them as well.
It does the same quite often. I am French and I live in Thailand. If I look for "crepes" it will return me results about "roti" (which for any French person is a disaster)