Ask HN: Google Maps cuisine bias issue?
None of us are able to read the minds of Google&#x27;s engineers, but I would take a guess at a couple of reasonable explanations.<p>1) Think about the respective quantities of Malaysian vs Italian restaurants in the US. There&#x27;s probably dozens and dozens of Italian restaurants in a typical American city - you don&#x27;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&#x27;s only a handful of Malaysian restaurants in a specific area in the US.<p>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&#x27;t find a Malaysian place, I&#x27;d think that Burmese food would be a great substitute to try if there&#x27;s one in the area. It doesn&#x27;t mean that they&#x27;re necessarily the same cooking style, just that it captures the right mindset while searching. I&#x27;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&#x27;re looking for: something non-Asian from the European part of the world.