It is a directory of tills
Restaurants, shops, petrol stations, hotels, hairdressers, takeaways. Opening hours, menus, photos of the toilets, a busy-times graph for a chipper.
Everything with a till gets a pin, a photo and a review. Everything without one gets a faint grey label, if it is lucky.
Some of the pins are paid for
Look closely and some of them say Sponsored. Businesses pay Google to put themselves in front of you on the map.
Nobody sponsors a holy well. So the holy well loses.
Layers, lenses and flyovers
Immersive View. Lens. Explore. Layers. Satellite, terrain, traffic, transit, Street View, air quality, wildfires. A button to share your location with somebody who did not ask.
An enormous machine, beautifully built, for getting you to a business.
The Explore tab explores the high street
Tap Explore and it suggests coffee, restaurants, petrol and groceries. Things to buy, near you, now.
It does not suggest the souterrain under the next field, because nobody can sell you a ticket to a hole in the ground.
Reviews of everything except the past
Thousands of reviews of a car park. Star ratings for a public toilet.
Not a word about the twelve-hundred-year-old cross on the corner. It cannot reply to a review, so it does not count.
What we do instead
Touch the map. See what is there. That is it. That is the whole product.
Over a million places across Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales. Forts, wells, crosses, castles, caves, plaques, wrecks, battles, stories. Not one of them paid to be there.
The difference in one line
Google Maps shows you where to spend money. Discover Alone shows you what is worth seeing, and it is usually free.
Check access before you go.
About the writer
Rickie DohertyFounder of Discover Alone. Owner of ContactCentre.ie since 2014, founder of Dagmor. The real one.
Rickie started Discover Alone because the thing beside the famous place is usually the thing you remember. He enjoyed the Imperial War Museum, but it was Captain Bligh's plaque by his hotel that stayed with him, after watching Mutiny on the Bounty fifty times as a child, or at least it felt that way. He runs the map, hires the writers, and argues with all of them.
Story 23 of 24 from Rickie.← Rickie's last story: Viator is a money-hungry ticket booth for walks you could take for freeRickie's next story: Tripadvisor is a money-hungry hotel advert pretending to be a travel guide →Everything by Rickie Doherty
