New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Google Maps cuisine bias issue?

Ask HN: Google Maps cuisine bias issue?
2 by asiachick | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Today I was searching for "Malaysian restaurant" in Fremont California with Google Maps. I saw it listed Burmese restaurants as well. In my experience, Burmese food is more different from Malaysian food than French to German or Italian so I was a little dismayed that Google was thinking if I asked for "Malaysian restaurant" that it was ok to suggest "Burmese restaurants". 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?

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