This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Talk about hyperbole...
Google Maps is over!
No, the integration in the search results when searching the web might be gone, but you can still go to https://maps.google.com/ and find what you need.
This is not a significant shift with how we are interacting with Google, it is a minor change.
Calm down.
Holy shit! Top comment right there! I read the headline and thought "Geez, that's going to leave a massive hole in the maps market. There is no clear runner to fill that role. That probably means we'll see a few years of innovations as competitors try their best to come up with that new killer feature that makes their maps the best."
No.
None of that. Google.com will just act slightly different on their search pages.
A hyperbole would be to make a point, an intentional exaggeration for emphasis or generalization.
This is just a lie.
This is not a significant shift with how we are interacting with Google, it is a minor change.
Eh... Most people (Not the tech literate ones) interact with the internet nearly wholly using the Google search bar. To the point where many have NO idea where to put a URL in their phone to actually go straight to a website and often just google the url and click the first link.
For those people, this will be a significant shift.
Sell your Google stocks now. This is the nail in the coffin!
"Google maps is over ...there! It used to be here, now it's there. Go click a link or something, like we did in the old days."
I've had Google Maps added as a search option for years. Because I use Qwant for search, and the maps functionality in Qwant sucks.
I understand the why of this but this is not an improvement. I suppose search engines should ask you which maps provider you want and then show results based on that.
I suppose search engines should ask you which maps provider you want and then show results based on that.
Why would they ever enable choice. That's not very capitalism
If they allowed users to select a default, almost everyone would select Google maps and get a better experience. By not giving the user a choice everyone loses, because Google maps is still going to be the top option. I'm surprised that this functionality either doesn't exist already or isn't allowed, because capitalism.
Some people would not select google though. And google can't afford people knowing that there's competitors to Google! So better fuck everyone over by just disabling the integration.
I suppose search engines should ask you which maps provider you want and then show results based on that.
Google could have done that, but they chose to go this router to inconvenience users, so that they then could blame the EU for this.
how is it over? you just type in maps.google.com like you used to type in mapquest.con
But I still type in maps.google.com already because I don't use Google search. But I still use maps.
Google maps is the best True dat. Double true.
Is this news? The "Maps" tab has been missing from my search results for a while here in Germany.
For users, this tight integration was incredibly convenient.
In Firefox, I have had any search starting with "gm" set up to do a Google Maps search. So "gm Omaha" will go to Omaha.
That is, I create a bookmark that's aimed at:
https://maps.google.com/maps?q=%25s
and then in the Bookmark Manager, set the keyword to "gm".
Kagi -- which uses bang prefixes to do searches on external sites -- appears to have done the same thing on the service side with "!gm". So "!gm Omaha". (They normally have their own, OpenStreetMap-based map thing, but if you want to do Google Maps, that'll do it.)
EDIT: For some reason, the Lemmy Web UI seems determined to convert "%s" to "%25s" in the URL above, and I can't seem to find an escape sequence that avoids that. It's intended to just be "%s".
I use DuckDuckGo so I use !m.
%25 is the URL encoding for 0x25 (or 37 decimal), the ASCII code for the percent sign. Basically it seems to recognize that it is a URL and then URL-encode characters that are not allowed in URLs
Probably it should only do so if the link is actually being hyperlinked which doesn't happen for blockquoted text, so I guess it's probably a Lemmy bug.
EU working as intended
Yes I read this only as good news. You'd have to be pretty thick for this to be a major issue for you.
It is also a pain in the arse for a normal user. When I search for a local plumber, instead of typing my query into the address bar, I need to go to maps.google.com first, and search there. These days, half of my searches are for businesses (the other half for spelling or correct usage of a difficult word), and all those searches now need to be made directly on the map page.
For a user who never uses maps or a user who always uses maps, this has no effect.
It's for those who use both integrated, but thats pretty rare nowdays. Much easier to ask maps "restaurants near me, plumbers open near me" than having to watch gemini type something out and "rate your plumber" forums, or worse aggregated yelp links.
Nobody will be affected by this, except maybe our data to be harder to mismanage. The headline is stupid.
You can reactivate the map integration in your Google account settings. Something called "Linked Google services", check "maps".
Didn't even notice. Well done EU.
Is this a big deal? I realize I have a skewed view because I dropped Google search ages ago, but... when I need maps results I go to a maps app, I never really relied on the search bar for that, even when I did use Google search.
That explains why I
For all the things the EU does...What a stupid decision.
This may feel bad short term but this is actually good long term. It opens up the possibility for competitors for similar map services to exist. When google combined their search engine product with their maps product, everyone had to automatically use their map product. This is very monopolistic
That feature is now gone for users in the EU. Additionally, the Maps tab, once prominently displayed alongside Images and News, has also vanished.
Actually wild of the EU to force an inferior product on people. Glad I'm not there for once.
No. Google did it this way so people would blame the EU. They also could just have added more choice to the interface but they rather wanted to remove it to show their users "how bad the EU is".
Same thing with the cookie banners. EU said you should give your users the choice if they want to be tracked. And the companies build these ugly banners so everyone would blame the EU. But they could also just have stopped tracking their users.
They also could just have added more choice to the interface but they rather wanted to remove it to show their users "how bad the EU is".
Or maybe they just didn't want to actively support competing services?
Yes, but that was still Google's choice. They could have done something for the user but they did not want to
It's not about enforcing an inferior product - it's about enforcing the freedom of choice. The way google was forcing its services down everybodies throat led to a market where people didn't even know that something besides gMaps exists. Now competitors at least have some sort of chance.
Ii get what you mean, but for the most part this will just inconvenience most people while also not making it any more convenient to use a competiting product.
You're absolutely right, Google chose to inconvenience their users rather than make it simpler for the user to choose their service. This is what Google chose to do rather than comply with regulation to make the field fairer. Google did this. The article is a PR piece to shift blame from Google for yet another anti-user decision Google made.
Google is not the good guy.
It would be freedom of choice if google was required to put an option to select the default map service in google search
Well.. kinda the same as when Microsoft was forced to give its users the "choice" for a different browser. Took ages to implement and still, Microsoft tried to get around it. Just look how easy it is to purge Edge from Win11 or to even replace it with something else for links embedded in the o/s itself.
This is about evening the playing field, making other mapping services having a less difficult way to compete
I wonder whether alternative solutions were discussed: like Google retaining integration but breaking off Maps division into it's own entity that has to use same API's as everyone else and use the same integration points. Would've been more user-friendly thing to do.
It's been that way for months already. Maybe four or six I'd say.
I'm ok with this, I can live and love in my peasant existence without their hovering, seemingly inescapable help. If I have to do without Waze someday, that's a different story.
I give waze less than a year.
They've been putting the features into parity with maps They will eventually shut it down.
Still showing up in Australia right now.