Re: Known Issue: Photo View Counts Not Updating on Google Maps
This morning, there was finally the hoped-for update. The difference was luckily as expected.
Now I ask @BruceDM according to the mission statement of the development team. They have now a lot of experience in that issue during the last impacts in the last month.
What have they done and learned and changed in their "development process"? - or - Is this the last action of this kind, or will it happen again in four weeks?
Thank you again for your patience with this matter. I am unable to provide details on the investigation on the Connect boards but every issue is a learning process and items like these should be resolved with more immediacy in the future.
It has come to our attention that some Local Guides are not seeing their total photo view counts update. If, however, you view an individual image, you will see the correct photo view count for that individual image.
If you have been impacted, we ask for your patience at this time as the team is looking into this and will resolve the issue as quickly as possible.
All updates on this issue will be posted in this thread. Thank you again!
UPDATE 9/25/17 - The issue with photo counts has been resolved and your total photo view counts should be accurately reflected. Thank you all for your patience.
The last update took 50h (and not 24h as told month ago by Google moderators and expected by the community) and was only the half of the normal increase.
Thus: Please take care about that issue and keep on fixing it.
The counts should be up to date at this time. I'd like to remind you that the individual photo view counts update immediately while the overall view counts update typically within 24 hours.
I'd like to share an update with you and all users who enjoy monitoring their View counts. As i've mentioned before, the Overall View counts do not update daily but the Overall View count will update only when your photo views reach a milestone threshold.
So that could take a day or it could take many days, depending on the how many views your photos receive daily and also the total amount of views you have aggregated in total. As an example, a Local Guide with only 10 photo views total is likely to see their Overall View count change a lot faster than someone like yourself with 68 Million (amazing!) views. The days it takes to reach a new milestone count is relative to the volume of views you already have and the amount of Google Maps viewers that are actually viewing your photos daily.
Looking at the overall context leads me to the fact that the "Total View Count" obviously is not updated in-time (like the individual photo counts), but by triggers.
The recurring problems of the last few months are obviously related to this trigger, which is not triggered reliably.
The reasoning of Bruce leads me to the assumption that the current algorithm for triggering the calculation depends on an "Amount". Regardless of whether this Amount is an absolute or relative difference, you have to wait for an unforeseeable time.
That is why I now come to the better alternatives for the problem:
Basically you need a trigger to calculate. Clear. The calculation itself takes milliseconds.
However, this trigger should not be triggered at the same time on all LGs as this would lead to a load peak. Clear.
So how do you distribute the 400k LG so evenly that the load is not too large?
The three possible solutions would be: 1) Every LG is updated every day. So every 24h. In order for this to be distributed equally, all updates are distributed evenly to one day (24h). That would be 4 updates per second. A quite feasible quantity for everyone - not just Google.
2) The update is triggered by newly added photos of an LG. Not immediately, but there is an update within 24h after. The trigger would thus be a special extension of solution 1, since it is coupled to a flag. If the flag is missing, since the LG does not add any photos, Plan B could be updated every three days. This would result in fewer updates than Solution 1, but the question is why Google has such small data issues.
3) You build an update button in Google Maps - for the sake of pull-down-2-refresh in the display of the photos (moble device). Then the LG would always have the current status if he wants it. Certainly, there are some dobbies that make it more common. But most do not. In this way, this would also be a reduction in the number of updates - which in solution 1 should already be feasible for Google.
But now again to the current solution. Why is this the worst possible?
If the amount of the increase triggers the update, then this amount must be recorded in-time. This is only possible via the updates of the individual photos. In any case, there are more DB operations and more load than the three solutions above.
The golden solution would of course be an in-time update of the Total View Counts - this should actually be possible for Google's Big Data specialists. For clarification. These are normal data volumes, which are incurred at any time at any exchange. This is not a big data!
I remain with deep disappointment about so little involvement of the users - the behavior of the troop is old-economy-style of the 80s: Just do not explain - just do not ask - make it easy not interested in the happiness of the users.
Keep up the "good" work - treat your high performers like little children and kick ass!
2022
