2022
We’re excited to continue our Ask a Googler series with our next guest, Michael Toshiro Omoto, an engineering manager on the Google Maps team.
Many of you reached out with some great questions for Mike. Before we dive into those, we asked him a few questions we thought you’d be interested in to get to know him a bit more. As we shared in our previous post, Mike works on various Google Maps features like dedicated surfaces people like you can contribute on (like the creator zone and contribute tab) and notifications.
Read on to learn more about him.
Are you a Local Guide? Why or why not?
I only discovered the Local Guide program after joining Google, but I got right to work making contributions! It hasn’t been that long so I’m only a level 4, but my recent experience being a lower level local guide helps me focus on the needs of new users. 🙂
What’s your favorite type of information to contribute on Google Maps?
There’s a new type of post which allows you to post pictures with short captions, and I find that they seem far more informative than just a picture or even a review (a picture is worth a thousand words, so a photo update post must be worth a thousand and ten words, am I right?)
I also really love the Road Mapper experience, I’ve drawn hundreds of kilometers of roads in my spare time.
Editor’s note: Road Mapper is currently limited to those who have been invited.
If you could visit anywhere in the world, where would it be and why?
I visited Peru for a conference in 2019, and had an amaaaaazing time, and would love to go back. I’m relatively new to the travel bug, but ended up traveling to five continents that year, and we all know what happened in 2020. These days, since I haven’t seen my family since before the pandemic, I’m more keen to visit my hometown of Los Angeles.
What’s the one question your friends and family always ask you about working at Google/on Google Maps?
Almost everybody asks if they can visit me to eat at the cafeteria! Before joining Google, an ex-Googler friend of mine (who had visited Google offices in 20+ countries!) told me that the Japan cafeteria was the best one out of any Google office. Well, while I’ve been blessed to be able to work from home throughout the pandemic, there are some downsides...
Local Guides Q&A with Mike
Editor’s Note: Some questions submitted by Local Guides below have been edited for length and/or clarity.
Shola Bello from Nigeria asked: As a Local Guide yourself, do you face any challenges when contributing?
Answer: Of course! I know that many small businesses rely on their star ratings and reviews to attract customers to their shops. But sometimes, whether or not I have a good experience at a place, it’s difficult to leave an honest review. In particular, since I have a bit of an online presence, it probably wouldn’t be too hard to find out who I am or even figure out that I work for Google. This is also one of the reasons that I like to see what the experience is like on my newer account.
Shola also asked: Are our contributions/points updated automatically or manually?
Answer: The points system is a surprisingly complex machine! At Google, everything is done “at scale,” so we have to make things as automatic as possible.
Paul Pavlinovich from Australia, Connect Moderator and Guiding Star, asked: To be compliant with the rules, we're not allowed to contribute reviews or ratings to places we have a relationship with. e.g. place of work, place where we volunteer, place our sister owns, place our friend operates, etc. Has Google considered allowing Local Guides to say "never ask me about this place again" so they do not get notified to review it after nearly every visit like we do today?
Answer: We try to prevent recommendations or notifications to contribute to places that you’ve identified as somewhere you live or work (there are ways in Maps to set this, in particular for commuting purposes).
However, the world is a complex place-- if you’ve identified a shopping center as your place of work for example, you might still get recommendations for the actual shop you work inside of that store.
For what it’s worth though, you’re talking to the right person, and we’re definitely regularly on the lookout for ways to fix our recommendation and targeting systems. 🙂
Steve P from the United States, Connect Moderator, asked: For notifications where rank is mentioned (in my case, top 10% of restaurant reviewers on Google), how is this ranking determined? Does it take into consideration a certain region/city? Is it dependent on how many other Google Maps users found my restaurant reviews as helpful?
Answer: Behind the scenes, we actually keep track of the number of “user views” a particular review has. On top of that, we also categorize locations into ‘types’ such as restaurants. Using this information, we can figure out if you meet the criteria for a ‘percentage’ type notification.
Interestingly, this percentage doesn’t change very much even if we scope the contributions to a particular region; if you’re a top 10% contributor in say New York, you’re likely a top 10% contributor worldwide.
Finally, as you might have guessed, “user views” is only one of many ways we could be informing this percentage, and are open to exploring better ways to help users understand the value they’re bringing to the world.
Adam from Australia, Connect Moderator, asked: Would it be possible to add a way to showcase when edits are not applied? For example, a filter could be added on the Contributions > EDITS tab to allow us to filter on (1) EDITS NOT APPLIED, (2) EDITS APPROVED and (3) EDITS PENDING?
Answer: Currently, I think the screen does show the various statuses itself, so let me ask! My team doesn’t own this page, so don’t quote me on the implementation difficulty. 🙂 In the meantime, please share this in the Idea Exchange.
Mago di Az. from Italy, asked: How have you and your team changed the way you work recently? How have notifications changed?
Answer: The pandemic has forced me to run a very remote team, I have had reports in six or seven countries now. We’ve had to move from a very visceral and loud in-person collaboration process to a document-based mostly asynchronous process. It definitely feels like the number of meetings I attend have exploded.
The notifications have changed pretty significantly behind the scenes. Also, there have been a few minor cosmetic changes. The biggest changes though are in the AI that we use to make sure the right notifications are sent to the right person at the right time. Many of these changes are in limited release now though because we spend a lot of time making sure that any changes we make are built for everyone, and not just for some lucky percentage of the population, which takes time to get right.
Ermes Tuon from Italy, Connect Moderator, asked: Would you consider changing the search functions on the contribute tab to make it easier to find contributions? Potentially, adding the possibility to search for photos, review based on date/place name/area, as well as contribution status based if they are public or private?
Answer: It sounds like you’re interested in checking out the contributions that you’ve made before! You know what, I actually didn’t remember exactly where on the UI someone could go to check their contribution history, and after trying it out on my phone, we could probably do a better job exposing that information. I don’t know what the final product might look like, but we can definitely experiment sometime with customer experiences that feature this kind of content more prominently on the contribution surfaces.
Stay tuned to hear more about the next Googler in our series soon! Want to see other posts in our Ask a Googler series? Read previous posts below:
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