maps.google.com now redirects to google.com/maps

https://garrit.xyz/posts/2022-11-24-smart-move-google

by garritfra • 4 years ago

1373 383 4 years ago

xvector• 4 years ago

I wonder if this is why the mega-app model is so common for Chinese companies. It's far easier to justify collecting a million permissions when your app does a million things.

dspillett2• 4 years ago

I think that is more a resurrection of the department store and mega-corp models: if you do a bit of everything then the bottom falling out of one market won't affect you badly as the other areas can soak up the temporary loss. Also, if you have positive name recognition in some areas this can benefit the others, and there is a passive advertising pressure of people using you for one thing seeing something else you have in store or linked to your name (where a more organic search to fulfil a need might be as likely to lead to a competitor as to you).

The difference that might break this analogy being that with a mega-app there isn't really a diversity of revenue streams despite the diversity of products/features: it all comes down to stalking to be able to better sell advertising.

bluepnume• 4 years ago

Also a great way to share cookies, avoid CORS, and probably a zillion other complexities that result from running on multiple subdomains.

oblio• 4 years ago

Yeah, but do you want to bet that during the management call and the subsequent engineering call that made this decision, the main topic of discussion was the direct financial benefit from improved tracking?

We'll never know, but if we could find out, say 1 year from now, I'd bet 100:1 that was the main driver.

rickdangerous1• 4 years ago

Wow...i didn't for even a second think it was anything other than a way to get a financial benefit. Kudos to you for not be as cynical as me.

lima• 4 years ago

And to increase XSS blast radius!

deepstack• 4 years ago

thought they have moved mail.google.com to google.com/mail a while ago. Tracking would still be possible over 2 domain, but then google would have to do a bit of ETL operations. Guess this will save some more engineering.

ilyt3• 4 years ago

It's funny for browser vendor to push those "security" features, only to work around them in their own products

mananaysiempre• 4 years ago

I actually find that somewhat reassuring, similarly to a Google employee criticising the security practices of a Google-operated certificate authority in public[1]: it demonstrates that the team responsible for instituting security policies in the interest of users still has some autonomy.

[1] e.g. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1709223#c19

deafpolygon• 4 years ago

This is also so they can invade your privacy, and correlate all of your searches to your geolocation.

bheadmaster2• 4 years ago

    Privacy and intimacy,
    As we know it,
    Will be a memory,
    Among many to be passed down
    To those who never knew.
    Living in the pupil of one thousand eyes.

codeulike• 4 years ago

Are you missing a Not operator in that last line?

bheadmaster2• 4 years ago

It's lyrics from a song - the last line sounds like a new sentence, so it's punctuation that I'm probably missing.

I've added it for clarity.

npteljes• 4 years ago

I was curious where this is from, and found it's from "1,000 Eyes" from Death.

https://genius.com/Death-1000-eyes-lyrics

Cockbrand• 4 years ago

From 1995 - prophetic, almost.

zshrdlu• 4 years ago

What a pleasant surprise! I hadn't listened to Symbolic in a while.

canbus• 4 years ago

https://www.openstreetmap.org

ruph1234• 4 years ago

Unfortunately this is really not an option for (some) areas in the US. After having moved to a populous LA area from Germany I was baffled at the lack of detail in the maps. Basic things like building numbers are entirely missing. Even after adding more and more details I would never fully rely on OSM here sadly. And if it only works sometimes why even bother using it in the first place? At least this was my progression. From fully using OSM, I am back to Google.

The only good in-between solution is MagicEarth which supplements OSM maps with data from lord knows where. However although they claim to be privacy cautious they are quite opaque.

cornedor• 4 years ago

Also, do not fully rely on Google Maps knowing house numbers. Looks like in some areas (in UK for example) Google used some sort of OCR to find house numbers. There are houses and Wales with random house numbers that only have a house name; Numbering ends a few houses into dead-end alley where the Street View car didn't come; Or totally wrong numbers where house number sings are hard to read.

edf13• 4 years ago

Not heard of MagicEarth before - looks interesting but what's missing is a "Why/how is it free" statement. They don't cover how they monetise this, what's their business model.

moffkalast• 4 years ago

Makes more sense to switch to bing maps, since they have ever so slightly better satelite imagery and there's no way in hell anyone would use bing for anything else anyway.

mcv2• 4 years ago

Interesting. In my experience, OSM's level of detail in Amsterdam is much higher than Google's. Especially in bike routes, an area that Google often sucks at.

db48x2• 4 years ago

A lot of the US road map was imported from TIGER (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topologically_Integrated_Geogr...>). This is an electronic mapping system set up in the 90s by the US Government to aid in conducting the census. The TIGER data doesn’t have any address information at all, just road shapes. No information about the type of road, the number of lanes, the quality of the surface, presence of sidewalks, signals at intersections, anything. Just the paths the roads follow, and those paths are often of extremely poor quality. The resulting OSM maps are barely usable; sometimes they are not even recognizable by locals.

So OSM has decent geographical coverage of the US, but relies very heavily on individual contributors to correct the deficiencies and add useful information to the maps. The only way it will be usable for you is if others have improved it. The only way it will be usable for others is if you jump back in and do the same.

avtolik• 4 years ago

While I like OSM for some use cases, and have contributed, it can not work as a replacement for google maps for every day use. My biggest problem is the search - absolutely unusable.

kqr2• 4 years ago

Technical nit: OSM as such does not have "a search". Geocoding (as it's known) is a separate component and if you dislike the one used by the openstreetmap.org there are other services that render OpenStreetMap data for you – perhaps with a better search!

verytrivial• 4 years ago

Here's a question for someone who understands cross-site cookies (which isn't me): Why does www.google.com/maps 's site permissions show https://www.openstreetmap.org/ as one of the sites 'that can use cross-site cookies and site data'?

cft2• 4 years ago

I found OsmAnd absolutely essential in my extensive off-road travels in Central America and Spain, paid to support it via Google Play, but i could not for the hell of it figure out how to submit photos and places. It forced me to create a separate account and then always gave me errors when i tried to submit

ce44• 4 years ago

The separate account is needed for openstreetmap uploads/notes/corrections. You can add places on osm.org also or retry with the osm account using Osmand.

dbrgn• 4 years ago

If you need OSM on Android, I can recommend:

- "Organic Maps" (a fork of the old MapsMe codebase) if you want a clean, simple user experience

- "OSMAnd" if you want a very powerful, highly customizable map application, which comes at the cost of a steeper learning curve

Both apps are open source and support navigation, offline maps and POI search.

The things I miss most compared to Google Maps is live traffic information and the powerful search. However, this has a privacy cost, so I generally try to use OSM first, and only fall back to Google Maps (in the browser) if I really need to.

mngnt2• 4 years ago

I'm a OSMand user and OSM contributor. However, sometimes I hate the routing OSMand provides, taking me through narrow streets with awkward turns. Wish they used GraphHopper... A nice feature in OSMand is that even if you get the free version off the Play store, if you log in with OSM and are active, you get free map updates and all the "plus" functions. And on top of that, the full plus version is available off F-Droid.

By the way, OSMand has some support for reporting traffic issues (police, crashes), but it's very very limited due to low adoption way below a critical mass. Also, reporting traffic status would probably require OSMand to run a pretty beefy server and get the current speed/traffic info from all the users - many chose it exactly because they don't want that.

ajuc• 4 years ago

I use OSMand for walking and biking and it's great, much better than Google Maps in my region. Just remember to choose the right kind of traffic in the settings when starting navigation.

It's not as good for driving.

LoveMortuus• 4 years ago

I have Organic Maps, because I thought it would be nice to have in case of an emergency where I don't have internet, but sadly just a few weeks ago, I had such a case and Organic Maps couldn't find the address and the map itself didn't have all the roads on it (nor satelite or topology map), so I couldn't even use it as a normal map... In the end I had to resort to one archaic ways and ask local humans for directions...

Google maps does offer being able to download for offline use, but if you don't have internet it quite often doesn't want to do navigation, unless you trick it with saved directions.

How does Garmin do it (I'm guessing map licencing issue)?

And how come this isn't already a solved issue?

KronisLV• 4 years ago

I also had some success with HERE maps: https://wego.here.com

Their Android app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.here.app.m...

Their Apple app: https://apps.apple.com/app/id955837609

The performance is good (especially on a budget Android device, better than the recent versions of Google Maps, even), they're reasonably accurate (I'm in Eastern Europe) and include navigation, traffic information, public transportation, as well as the ability to save regions for offline browsing.

I can't comment on the company behind it, though, but it's a nice alternative nonetheless (and there are simple prompts for choosing whether you want to send them any data, e.g. to enrich traffic information).

Edit: as a criticism, some Android reviews suggest that recent updates have made the app less performant than previous versions, though I didn't notice anything in particular on my current device (2020 budget phone). Some also suggest that navigation needs more work.

ruph1234• 4 years ago

Is panning and zooming in OSMAnd not a huge pain for anyone else? The map rendering (of downloaded maps) is extremely sluggish and absolutely useless for me to use. (Even worse than the tile-based rendering of early Maps on iPhone.)

Organic and MagicEarth work fine for me. I really wonder if it is just my setup or if everyone else suffers from this. I am on a Pixel 5 with CalyxOS using the OSMAnd+ from Fdroid (but same with normal OSMAnd from Aurora)

raybb2• 4 years ago

Lets not forget StreetComplete is a dead easy app to use to help contribute to OSM. It just asks you a few questions like "is this bench still here" or "is there a bike lane on this road" etc

https://streetcomplete.app/

vanderZwan• 4 years ago

Organic Maps is also significantly more optimized in my experience (or maybe a more fair thing to say would be: is faster because it does less). So it pays to have both because OM is basically the "fast path" for its use case in more ways than just the interface.

frxx• 4 years ago

Both Organic Maps and OsmAnd are available on iOS as well.

somat2• 4 years ago

I hope the author of OSMAnd makes enough money from the play store to finance continued development, because the application is amazing, it has an interface that is not dumbed down, it does not phone home to the mother ship, it gives you great tracks, in short it is a great tool that respects the end user.

I wish more applications were like it, first thing I install on my phone.

mcv2• 4 years ago

But is the app as good as Google's? I always struggle with OSM maps.

I think at the moment there's a massive discount on OsmAnd+. Worth it?

therealmarv2• 4 years ago

Really depends, it can be much better than Google depending on country/region. Google Maps is not in every country good. Definitely better for any kind of outdoor activity like hiking, bicycle, ski etc. and offline usage.

therealmarv2• 4 years ago

The problem is you loose a certain percentage of businesses and also user recommendations (no real alternative there). There is no real incentive for businesses to make yourself visible on OSM (probably many don't even know it exists).

NGRhodes2• 4 years ago

Obviously YMMV.

I live about 1 mile from suburbs in a town called Bingley in Yorkshire, England.

I can't trust Google maps locally (though its good for local business searches), as the mapping quality is terrible. My village and local town have roads missing, numerous public rights of way missing (over both public and private land). Major areas of trees missing. OSM is much, much better.

See the difference:

https://ibb.co/fk74k3s https://ibb.co/GTKMTzn

I am noticing more and more how poor Google maps is for non-drivers (such as myself recently having to stop driving), such as not being able to do walking routes over local foot bridges, OSM with OSRM or Grasshopper is fine:

https://ibb.co/NtTf6kr https://ibb.co/sq60YQy

dotancohen6• 4 years ago

OSM with OSRM or Grasshopper

Is this usable on mobile? Can you tell a bit more?

college_physics2• 4 years ago

osm and wikipedia are proof that an alternative, more desirable, digital universe is not utopically distant but begging to be born. imagine if the world would somehow muster to dedicate something more than token support to such projects / designs

prediction: osm will eventually surpass wikipedia as the most successful crowdsourced effort because the more objective and simple nature of its data allows dramatic scaling. if even 1% of the billions of the world's roaming mobile devices get into the habbit of augmenting the osm database (e.g. using streamlined UI's like streetcomplete or yet to be build apps) the disruption will be on its way

NavinF2• 4 years ago

Would you bet money on that? Google Maps is pretty entrenched. A competing 2.4 trillion dollar company that preinstalled their app on the most popular phone in the US couldn't dethrone Google Maps.

dclowd99013• 4 years ago

Or, you know, use the Google maps app (like the company is always haranguing us to do) and turn on “only allow while using” for geo location.

vaakash• 4 years ago

This article is not about one specific service and how an alternative can solve the problem.

It is an example of how companies are dying to permission to track is.

keyle• 4 years ago

It's a very strange move indeed. maps.google.com implies an application lives there, far better than being on the root domain.

It also means that when you start typing maps.google, you'd get all your history searchable related to maps, although arguably that's useless.

I can't think of a reason why this would be a good technical move for Google (ignoring the don't do evil thingie), other than simplifying... certificates? Less lines in the firewall config... I'm stretching here, help me understand.

luckylion7• 4 years ago

Other things: slightly simpler external DNS surface, probably tiny speed improvements because users only need to have the IP of www.google.com, not one for maps, one for www, one for whateverelse.

More possibility for connection re-use, as you'd only need to have a connection open for www.google.com, not one for each service.

And security wise: ISPs can now only see that you're accessing something at google, but not which service exactly. If they also bring in accounts.google.com into the fold, that would make it harder to see whether you have an account or not.

fnordpiglet3• 4 years ago

True. I’m sure being a beyondcorp company they can’t figure out how to add dns entries. Those google guys really should learn more about the internet and it’s technologies.

I don’t buy the simplicity argument for a second. The infrastructure exists, has existed for many years, and is not particularly exotic in the world.

The only thing that matters to a surveillance and advertising company is surveillance and advertising. You don’t need to overthink this one.

phillipseamore• 4 years ago

As you mention there are plenty of performance reasons to run everything under a single hostname. There's also one especially vital for Maps, it loads a tonne of resources and maps are used in various other services at Google. Now that caches are being siloed down to the host level, having all the resources accessible in a same-origin cache will save bandwidth and increase performance for users.

csmpltn2• 4 years ago

"It's a very strange move indeed. maps.google.com implies an application lives there, far better than being on the root domain."

How does "maps.google.com" imply an application "lives there" any more than "google.com/maps"?

Technically speaking, "google.com/maps" is far superior to "maps.google.com" (check out the rest of the comments in this thread for examples: simpler DNS configuration, simpler certificate management, CORS, cookies, etc).

ilyt3• 4 years ago

Technically speaking it goes around any security CORS and friends provide

ojr• 4 years ago

google.com/maps is simpler to type on a mobile phone and more consumer friendly, I’ve always used google.com/ pattern, way easier to leverage autocomplete, type a g to autocomplete google.com then if you are looking for flights type f and in 2-3 clicks you are on google.com/flights

somat2• 4 years ago

Yeah, but flights.google.com or translate.google gets you there even faster.

dns segments are shown backwards for a reason. it was done so that the most specific part shows up first when searching for something.

I have to admit as a data structure snob. I vaguely wish it were the other way around, sigh, as much as I hate to admit it java classes got it right. I also have to admit it does not really matter that much.

bdcp• 4 years ago

huh? You were always able to share sub-domain cookies with top-level domain cookies no?

Set-Cookie: name=value; domain=google.com

zuhsetaqi• 4 years ago

Setting cookies doesn't allow using Browser APIs lie GEO-Location

eknkc2• 4 years ago

Can you load, let's say maps.google.com/somepage in a hidden iframe and use postmessage to send location data if it already has access? Or do browsers force top level navigation for such permissions?

lloeki• 4 years ago

What about other apis such as web notifications or webcam and mic access?

With separate domains we could allow notifications for one (e.g calendar) and disallow for another (e.g mail) at the browser level.

Seems like it would now be a blanket allow for all of google.com (with a toggle for each product setting, maybe?) which sounds like a very user hostile move.

I guess it depends if one considers Google products to be separate apps or Google as a whole to be a "Web OS".

(Also on the technical side there's not just google.com but also google.<2 letter country TLD>, which is even worse in terms of CORS, certs, or whatever. Would they get rid of that?)

aembleton2• 4 years ago

Google Maps could have set your location in a cookie that is shared with google.com. Then search would have your location anyway when you next visit it.

fbn79• 4 years ago

I'm wondering how much time browsers will take to implement URL match permission granting.

wruza• 4 years ago

If that was the goal, google could simply &tbm=maps it further.

SCLeo• 4 years ago

Nah, Google will never do it because url parameters have terrible SEO... Um wait

jialutu• 4 years ago

Google maps is pretty much one of the only Google products that I still actively use. It's funny that this article was written and published today, since I had noticed the exact same thing yesterday! Does anyone know when it first started?

sam-• 4 years ago

I’ve been seeing this redirect to google.com/maps for at least a year now because my default has always been to type maps.google.com and I find it weird every time it redirects.

garritfra2• 4 years ago

A/B testing?

2143• 4 years ago

Definitely been a while. Like, perhaps a year or more.

I'm in Asia btw.

blameitonme• 4 years ago

recently gmail.com became unreachable and was moved to mail.google.com dont know if its related

Ptchd• 4 years ago

for me, gmail.com has been redirecting to mail.google.com/mail for a long time...

bryanrasmussen2• 4 years ago

I am having a hard time figuring out how this would be affected by GDPR.

gtirloni• 4 years ago

Does the GDPR care about the concept of apps and URLs? If not, all it matters is the person/company relationship.

bryanrasmussen2• 4 years ago

the GDPR cares about the rights the company asks for, how long it keeps it, does it need the rights for the purpose, does it give you an easy way to opt out of the rights collection and so forth.

If in order to not let all of Google have your location information you need to opt out of letting maps have your location information it might be a GDPR problem. Considering also that this was not a problem that people had before if indeed it is a problem now it might be taken as a wilful circumvention of GDPR.

quicklime• 4 years ago

The GDPR does care about different “purposes”, it’s not just about the person/company relationship.

I’m not a lawyer but my interpretation of this is that consent for Google to use location data for maps doesn’t allow them to use that same location data for email.

Consent should cover all processing activities carried out for the same purpose or purposes. When the processing has multiple purposes, consent should be given for all of them.

https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-32

noneofyour• 4 years ago

Exactly. The consent was provided for the specific processing, not the TLD. The processing and all of those that are not incompatible with it, that it asked permission for that furthermore adhere to the requirements imposed regarding specific and informed consent in the GDPR (see Article 4, sub 11 GDPR and article 7 GDPR.

mkl• 4 years ago

This is not new. I'm pretty sure Google has done that kind of redirection for ages for me.

no_carrier• 4 years ago

I think this change probably has more to do with corporate firewalls than anything else. A lot of corporate internet access isn't set up to MITM the requests (a lot of places are setup for this, but a lot aren't). If they places all their services under google.com as suffixes, places that don't MITM won't have any way of stopping it as all they can see is the request to google.com.

uniqueuid• 4 years ago

Given the history of Google's stance towards privacy and tracking, I think it's naïve to assume technical reasons.

It may have been ok to fall for that argument for 10 years, but after AMP, manifestv3, android's location log disaster, the recording of wifi names and countless lawsuits across the globe, it seems that the resource of good faith assumptions has been depleted. Some may even say that trusting google (the corporation) to act on technical or altruistic reasons is delusional.

hdjjhhvvhga2• 4 years ago

after AMP, manifestv3, android's location log disaster, the recording of wifi names and countless lawsuits across the globe

Tangentially, it's funny how the whole Google+ fiasco with forcing G+ account creation for YT etc. was quickly forgotten.

pydry• 4 years ago

I'm as skeptical as anyone about Google's privacy record but I'm not so convinced that this really helps google invade our privacy more than it already does.

ilyt3• 4 years ago

Google: push security theathe features like CORS to make it hard to run cross domain

Also Google: decides to use single domain so any permission you ever give work for all of their apps

kaimalcolm• 4 years ago

Has this not been the case for a while? I think I've been getting /maps for at least the past year.

rtsil• 4 years ago

the /maps URL worked for a while, but I never noticed the redirect from maps.google.com (but I wasn't paying attention to that).

toastal• 4 years ago

Yep. Noticed when I didn't want to enable JS on the whole of Google's domain in μBlock Origin. I switch to another browser for this task alone—especially as some regions have incomplete data for OpenStreetMap

teekert3• 4 years ago

Firefox containers to the rescue.

hdjjhhvvhga2• 4 years ago

Probably the best tech we have against tech giants today. I mean, heavier solutions exist (like QubesOS), FF containers are so easy to use, I hope more people learn they exist.

Namari• 4 years ago

Does it also contain permissions you give to a website? Will it block it if run within a container?

deng3• 4 years ago

Does it also contain permissions you give to a website? Will it block it if run within a container?

No.

deng3• 4 years ago

How? Access to location will stick regardless if you use containers or not.

teekert3• 4 years ago

If you put all G-services in their own container, google.com/mail can't access google.com/maps cookies, so, will it also not track location. Not sure actually, they indeed probably store your "consent" on their server. Could you block location services per container perhaps?

Hmm this is a smart move indeed, all of a sudden I'm logged into G-maps whereas I wasn't before... FireFox helpfully opened google.com/maps in my Google container...

m5r• 4 years ago

I've been using Mozilla's extension[0] that contains everything Facebook-related automatically with Firefox containers and it's been working great.

This morning I looked for a similar extension for Google and I've found this fork[1] of Mozilla's extension. It's working as expected so far but I'd love for it to be officially maintained by Mozilla at some point. There is an open issue about it[2].

[0] https://github.com/mozilla/contain-facebook

[1] https://github.com/containers-everywhere/contain-google

[2] https://github.com/mozilla/contain-facebook/issues/758

russianGuy83829• 4 years ago

Mozilla probably gets too much money from google to do this

mkagenius• 4 years ago

Its reverse for translate. https://google.com/translate redirects to translate.google.com

nroets2• 4 years ago

I can understand why: Translate is the only service that works in China. Countries with censorship laws can easily choose what they allow.

netheril962• 4 years ago

They don't work in China anymore.

And when they worked, the domain was translate.google.cn instead.

elnr• 4 years ago

I suspect this may more be to do with large organisations (and equally foreign governments) wanting to block Google translate, since it can be used as a proxy in some cases.

kqr2• 4 years ago

Hey now, it used to be local.google.com! I sometimes use that just to see if it still works.

salsadip2• 4 years ago

Recently safari (on macos 10.15) started auto completing „maps.“ to „maps.apple.com“, although I only tried Apple maps once and always use gmaps. Maybe google noticed this and tries to circumvent safari‘s „preference“ for Apple Maps

mngnt2• 4 years ago

Isn't maps.apple.com in your bookmarks? Most browsers suggest from bookmarks before anything else. Maybe it got added there in an update to. you know, improve your experience with the Apple ecosystem.

salsadip2• 4 years ago

Its definitely not in my bookmarks. when i start typing, its under the section titled "top hits". google maps is right beneath it, but never first place

gatefun• 4 years ago

As others have noticed, this is not a new move. For the past several years I've been accessing Google Maps simply by typing in maps.google.com and it has always redirected me to google.com/maps.

Tepix• 4 years ago

It's new for me as well. I hadn't seen google.com/maps before.

hbn• 4 years ago

Even more confusing and a regular cause of annoyance for me that's been ongoing for a while now is there's like a knockoff version of Google Maps built into Google search that it'll kick you into if you click a map from search results. e.g. you type "gyms near me" and it shows you a map in the search results, and you click it to expand. It's still at the google.com/search domain and while you can zoom and pan around, there doesn't seem to be a way to arbitrarily jump into street view wherever you want, which I frequently want to do.

I'm constantly ending up in this view, fighting with it before remembering I need to go to real Google Maps and do my search again.

AaronNewcomer• 4 years ago

Same. It's so annoying and I feel like they do not always include the relevant info like the URL in that mode. Though looking now I did not find examples of that.

brazed_blotch• 4 years ago

Funny, for me it’s the opposite. I always try to use the web view, and there’s an annoying pop up that redirects me to download Google maps. When I switch back into the web browser to go back to the web view, it auto redirects me to the app download again. Super annoying.

dark-star• 4 years ago

Congratulations, you now have permission to geo-track me across all of your services.

I don't think Google needed to do this move to track you across their services. Pretty sure they were able to do that before.

dspillett2• 4 years ago

This makes it problematical to block. Previously you could give location permission to map.google.com and not elsewhere. Now you can't be more selective: remove permission from search/other and maps stops working (or doesn't work as well).

As others have pointed out, there are technical benefits too – but most (all?) of these technical benefits are essentially because it works around features designed to limit the scope of permissions.

Tozen• 4 years ago

Most people don't check their accounting settings, to see the massive amounts of data that Google is collecting on them or the amount of tracking they are doing. Even if a person adjusts the settings, its not really known to what extent the continual collection is actually mitigated or privacy is being ensured. To include users data being sent to 3rd parties or governments at Google's prerogative or their employees, or to the extent results and services are manipulated for Google's own internal purposes and benefit.

pharmakom• 4 years ago

Yuck!

Any suggestions for an good open street maps app on iOS?

Offline capability would be a huge plus.

mnd999• 4 years ago

Isn't Apple Maps that? They use openstreetmap in a lot of places.

aembleton2• 4 years ago

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mapy-cz-navigation-maps/id4114...

Andrew_nenakhov2• 4 years ago

This made me think how much would I lose if I'll just block all *.google.com domains in the browser? I was using DDG for search and Firefox for browsing for many years without problems, but I also still use Gmail and Google docs (or whatever they are called these days, Google for Work?). Maybe, a blanket ban plus a few exceptions like mail.google.com, docs.google.com, tables.google.com and drive.google.com would not cripple my workflow too much.

whym• 4 years ago

(or whatever they are called these days, Google for Work?)

Gmail is currently branded as part of Google Workspace, and shows the Workspace logo upon sign in. It probably has been that way architecturarly for a long time, but I think they have made it more explicit relatively recently, at least for non-corporate users.

It looks like "Google for Work" is an old name of Google Workspace.

Andrew_nenakhov2• 4 years ago

Like their chat apps, they change names so often that I just call them Google Docs most of the time.

chrismorgan• 4 years ago

Some years back (my memory suggests somewhere between early 2017 and early 2019), Google moved reCAPTCHA to www.google.com, so now anything that uses reCAPTCHA (and that’s a lot, far more than is reasonable when I contemplate the absurdly high efficacy of a simple hidden-by-CSS honeypot when it’s just junk you’re filtering rather than targeted abuse) depends upon www.google.com frame, script and xhr, and www.gstatic.com script.

There may have been other reasons as well, but I have been strongly inclined to consider this a hostile and even malicious action (organisationally, if not individually) from the start, more than the maps.google.com → www.google.com/maps shift (though I think it’s still at least hostile).

Thus you probably can’t quite block even www.google.com even if you never use any Google services yourself.

pmontra• 4 years ago

Google has been prompting me with an Accept / Reject dialog on Maps and YouTube for years. It used to be split in several sections but luckily it became only two buttons a few months ago. I click reject and start mapping / watching.

durnygbur• 4 years ago

You guys are still using google and dreaming about working for them?!

dislikedtom2• 4 years ago

I have never shared my location via browser, including google maps. Still, google very well knows where I live and focuses on my home as default, when I open google maps. I'm curious what do you seek by sharing your location with google (maps)?

nroets2• 4 years ago

Perhaps your home router has a public IP. Google gets the location of the home router from just one Android phone connecting to it. I'm guessing.

But some home routers are behind CGNAT infrastructure: Then it's possible that TCP connections from the same browser can go through different public IP addresses.

Sharing the location helps Google to help users. And Google to target ads better.

hartator• 4 years ago

Note that Google before can just have an iframe to load maps.google.com to get your location info. Don’t change much in term of privacy.

jimlikeslimes2• 4 years ago

Genuine question. Is it reasonable as a user to expect data collected by Google via maps.google.com to not be shared with other Google applications e.g. mail.google.com?

I'd have thought data collected on any of their domains would be meshed/merged behind the scenes where it suits them to do so?

rightbyte• 4 years ago

The different Google Apps surely rat you out to each other.

But now google.com will know where he is when he browses it, not just when he uses Google Maps.

raziel2p• 4 years ago

I think the concern is more about when Google is able to collect said data, not whether it's shared or not.

I don't have location enabled for Google maps in the browser, but if I did, then presumably Google could collect that data also when I'm just searching for a website.

dclowd99013• 4 years ago

But isn’t collected/shared inherently the same thing here?

iglio• 4 years ago

I think the concern is less about other Google businesses having access to maps data as you suggest.

It’s more about the fact that using non map Google services on google.com will not prompt asking for location service permissions, if they’ve been granted when prompted on google.com/maps already.

Users may not want location to be collected for searches, but are okay with the privacy tradeoff for it being collected when using maps.

JOnAgain• 4 years ago

They can already join your activity across everything. This is about access and collection. So if they move store.google.com to google.com/store, they will have access to all browser permissions you gave google.com/maps or google.com/flights.

dsr_• 4 years ago

Do you mean:

- is it reasonable for a user to expect that Google will collect all bits of information about them, because Google isn't prevented from doing that?

- is it reasonable for a society to allow Google (and competitors) to do this?

I think the answers are respectively yes and no.

radu_floricica• 4 years ago

Applications are not juridical entities, so at the absolute best it is debatable.

Most probable version is that they share as much data as their internal regulations say, or a bit more. They definitely have some form of internal regs on this, for basic security hygiene, but they write it.

makeitdouble2• 4 years ago

It could be tricky with permissions on different users: for instance you authorize google.com/maps to track your location while logged as user A.

You logout and switch to user B to look at another Google service, but google.com is still allowed to get your location, and will stick it to user B, which is something you might not have wanted. This didn't happen with the previous domains, so could be a surprise.

fcantournet• 4 years ago

I'm ok with sharing my location with maps (and therefore google) WHILE USING MAPS. Not when I'm reading my emails, or searching for something on the web.

pjc50• 4 years ago

Ask your local Information Commissioner whether this is GDPR-compliant.

stubish• 4 years ago

I think it is reasonable to expect Google to share the data and get sued for it, because it isn't reasonable.

jimlikeslimes2• 4 years ago

Oh having though about it I agree, I just think we're probably a minority.

As others have pointed out the line has been blurred between search and maps so far that maps has search embedded, and search has maps embedded. A lot users of Google search likely expect results to be location aware without realising what privacy has been eroded to enable that.

onlyrealcuzzo2• 4 years ago

FWIW, there's an EU regulation coming that prevents companies from using data necessary for a product (like maps) to be used to improve a different product (like search).

neodymiumphish• 4 years ago

I'd be interested to find out whether this works as intended. There's a good argument that maps is a subset of search. Most people don't open Google maps just to look at a map, they search the map for a place.

Eleison232• 4 years ago

I don't use the maps.google.com URL anymore because, 99% of the time, I use the app. Whether it's the PWA desktop app on Windows, or the Android app on my phone, I just don't go to the website of Google properties anymore, I use them through an app and that doesn't expose a raw URL.

ghusto2• 4 years ago

I got this a couple of years ago, and noticed immediately. Just as quickly denied the request, because I have fingers and can type my current address. It's a minor inconvenience.

tasuki• 4 years ago

because I have fingers and can type my current address

How would you always know your current address? I often use maps with gps to find out where I am. Many places have no address.

bmacho2• 4 years ago

I use maps only for route planning. If I don't know where I am, I use an offline GPS.

ghusto2• 4 years ago

Not trying to be snarky, but it might be that I don't get what you mean: I just look at the street name, which is posted on every street? I've never been anywhere that has no address at all, but I guess in those situations it wouldn't make any difference if I only knew roughly (like when I'm camping?).

bmacho2• 4 years ago

I never type my current address but a location nearby. (I am sure that google know exactly where am I, still..)

gjadi3• 4 years ago

Funny thing is, it depends on your threat model.

Using google.com/XXX for all its services protect the user from being spied by external actors such as ISP because everything is hidden behind HTTPS.

Whereas, with XXX.google.com, external actors knows that you are using service XXX.

nottorp2• 4 years ago

The threat here is google.

gjadi3• 4 years ago

If your threat is google, it would be wise not to use google in the first place.

As other mentioned, OSM is an alternative (not equivalent) of Google Maps.

samwestdev• 4 years ago

DNS over HTTPS is the solution here.

netheril962• 4 years ago

SNI is still in the plaintext.

ddalex• 4 years ago

Doesn't change the fact that the SNI is sent in clear text.

Havoc• 4 years ago

The whole "threat model" thinking is useful for security, but I don't think it translates well to privacy and data sharing consent matters.

gjadi3• 4 years ago

I disagree on the former, but I agree on the later, technology is not a good substitute for consent.

Regarding the privacy:

If you are using a VPN to protect your privacy, then you are effectively transferring your trust from your ISP to your VPN provider. The VPN provider is your new ISP. So you have to make sure you trust the VPN provider more than your ISP.

Lockal• 4 years ago

Google could enable ESNI, if they wanted.

Crosseye_Jack4• 4 years ago

I presume they are talking about the DNS "leak".

google.com/maps would result in a DNS request for google.com so anyone monitoring DNS would know they are connecting to a google service but wouldn't know which one.

maps.google.com would result in a DNS request that show they are connecting to maps.google.com and could presume they want some maps.

DoH (and ESNI on the server side) would fix it, but iirc Chrome (the most used browser) doesn't use DoH by default.

mrjin3• 4 years ago

Google poses a larger threat to most people I guess.

pygy_• 4 years ago

I’m pretty sure you can still identify specific services from trafic patterns. It is more expensive, but within reach for well funded actors.

__michaelg5• 4 years ago

This is a fantastic example of motivated reasoning. This "change" (which apparently isn't even new) can have so many different reasons, some of which are less harmful and some of which are probably worse (privacy-wise) than the one mentioned here. There is no indication that re/mis-using permissions is specifically what they wanted to do here, there is also no example of them doing it right now. Don't get me wrong, there is also no evidence that this isn't the real reason and that they wouldn't do that in the future. But the blog post basically list a single symptom and jumps right to the one conclusion that fits what the author expects.

stingraycharles• 4 years ago

It may not be the only reason, but you’re being too generous if you don’t think this was at least one of the reasons they did it.

Other than some abstract “branding” campaign, I cannot really see many other reasons why they would be doing this.

And as someone who worked in adtech in the past, it was very well known that Google used their domain as their tracking cookie domain as it’s nearly impossible for adblockers to just block without crippling other functionality. So they even have a history of using precisely these types of techniques.

jstummbillig• 4 years ago

but you’re being too generous if you don’t think this was at least one of the reasons they did it

If you consider it absolutely unthinkable that it was not one of the reasons, it's you who is being too generous. Unconsidered side effects occur plentiful and all the time.

trudler• 4 years ago

bro, data is money and those corporates extract as much as they can. don't try to reason that google would not be interested in exactly that. one does not have to find a specific evidence for exactly this scenario in my opinion. this evidence likely might never emerge, while the spying definitely will happen. otherwise you would need to come up with a huge scenario where they actually farm a ton of benefits by doing this change, because a move like that you don't "just do for a better experience".

mrjin3• 4 years ago

Cannot agree more. Money is the most important if not the sole driver of decision making in those large organizations.

rkagerer• 4 years ago

Even if it's entirely innocuous at present, that's still little better. It would signal modern-day Google engineers lack the nuanced understanding and user-first deliberation of their predecessors.

Given the breadth of services the company provides, a user ought to be able to restrict the permission to the scope of the maps tool.

croes2• 4 years ago

I think the grand master of user tracking and the developer of the web's most used browser knows exactly what they are doing.

underdeserver• 4 years ago

Google is huge. You'd be surprised how something that's common knowledge in one team is completely unknown to other teams.

agumonkey• 4 years ago

Didn't know this has a name. It feels that it's the main mode of reasoning in society.

kristianheljas• 4 years ago

The only conclusion this article made is that google now has the permission to-do so, and this is 100% correct - motivated or not. Although, given you overly defensive response makes me suspect you have more insight than we do..

hooby2• 4 years ago

1. The change does exist (although it apparently has been live for quite some time in some regions at least)

2. The change does have the effect of Google gaining more permissions (and subsequently more data) than previously

3. The author assumes that (2) is the (main) reason why (1) was done in the first place

Regardless of whether (3) is correct or completely wrong - and regardless of whether the author truly believes (3), or only uses it as a rhetorical trick to increase the controversy (and therefore the reach) of their post - both (1) and (2) remain fact.

And (2) is the actual problem here - regardless of whether it was done intentionally by Google or not.

__michaelg5• 4 years ago

Upvoted, this looks more correct than what I wrote.

delroth2• 4 years ago

The change does have the effect of Google gaining more permissions (and subsequently more data)

There's a huge logic gap here. Obtaining more permissions doesn't at all imply obtaining more data when it's caused by an incidental change. Maybe the permissions aren't being used outside of the Maps context, or maybe it doesn't matter because the data was already be known.

ryantgtg• 4 years ago

1. The change does exist (although it apparently has been live for quite some time in some regions at least)

Pretty sure I’ve been experiencing this change for many years at this point.

eternalban• 4 years ago

This is a fantastic example of motivated reasoning.

Did we read the same short article? [not parody]

It's so short, we can copy paste it here and then you can point out where he reasoned that Google did this with intent to track.

But the blog post basically list a single symptom and jumps right to the one conclusion that fits what the author expects.

OP is simply stating a consequence of this change!

"Congratulations, you now have permission to geo-track me across all of your services."

D13Fd• 4 years ago

I think it’s the part where he says “Smart move, Google.”

__michaelg5• 4 years ago

[...] though I'm sure they're just beginning to transfer their services to the main google.com domain.

This and the wording across the article imply more than the factual changes. But granted, hooby's comment above is probably more correct than what I wrote.

dethos• 4 years ago

The real reason or intention isn't that important, compared to the outcomes of the change. The author correctly evaluated one of those outcomes and the respective implications.

Given Google's track record, I think it is a sensible evaluation of the situation.

darthrupert• 4 years ago

When companies like Google are involved, I believe the Hanlon's Razor works in reverse. I.e. never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice.

akudha• 4 years ago

My default mode is to trust everyone until they break my trust. Now that I am old, I have realized that trusting everyone by default is not a good idea, especially big tech.

In cases like this, I think it is better to assume malice, even if we are proved wrong later. This is not our fault, this is big tech screwing with us repeatedly for years, with no shame or conscience

account42• 4 years ago

The way I see it, people deserve the benefit of the doubt when it comes to their motivations but corporations don't.

matkoniecz• 4 years ago

Also, by most reasonable metrics, Google broke that trust long time ago anyway.

johnchristopher• 4 years ago

But the blog post basically list a single symptom and jumps right to the one conclusion that fits what the author expects.

That conclusion isn't wrong though. Your comment basically claims author is twisting facts but the conclusion remains that giving google.com/maps permission to geotrack does give google.com permission to geotrack.

"Pinky swear I won't enforce that clause" is not reassurance enough.

forgetfulness• 4 years ago

They've promised nothing, to boot. Google does not deserve the benefit of the doubt here.

__michaelg5• 4 years ago

Meta: my answer here is probably also a good example of motivated reasoning because I likely read a bit more into what the author wrote than is factually in the blog post. Oh boy.

garritfra2• 4 years ago

Oh boy.

Do you mind pointing out where you think this applies?

powerapple• 4 years ago

Recently I have been trying to recover my gmail account. Besides sending verification code to my phone number, it also sent a code to YouTube app, high on the list. I have lost access to my google account, so I cannot open my YouTube. So it sent a verification code to the exact gmail address I am trying to recover. The whole process is unreal. This YouTube verification thing is definitely new, I don't know the motivation behind it, it couldn't even detect if my YouTube App was activate or not (or maybe it knows I wasn't using YouTube, maybe it is encouraging me to log in YouTube or open YouTube. Either way, I am not impressed.

dclowd99013• 4 years ago

Are people really surprised when they hand their location off to a domain that any other part of the domain might have access to it? Like, taking away the technical specifics of how location allows actually works, you’ve given the data to the _company_. At the very least, they throw it on an internal service and allow other parts of the company’s infra to grab it.

WhyNotHugo2• 4 years ago

The change may have happened for any of many reasons. Regardless of which reason was the motivator, it's clear impact is reducing user privacy. When talking about a tracking/advertising company, so it's kinda natural to assume that this was kept in mind.

zython• 4 years ago

I will accept motivated reasoning when in a friendly setting but big tech is not my friend. Their only and only purpose is to extract as much value (data or money) from me as possible.

Looking at Heartbleed and other famous security we should know that minor mistakes "disguised" as "typos" can have devastating effects.

They know what theyre doing alright.

newaccount742• 4 years ago

It's even worse with their iOS apps.

I've tried to avoid logging into my Google account on Safari on my iPhone because I am scared of them tracking me, but I also wanted to use the Google Keep app for sharing a shopping list with my partner.

But when you launch the Google Keep app, iOS asks you whether you want to allow the app to share data with "google.com". It turns out that there is no way to sign into the Google Keep app without also signing into Google in Safari! I don't know how this works, but it is horrible! If I want to use a Google app on my phone, I basically have to give them permission to track me everywhere!

darren_• 4 years ago

It turns out that there is no way to sign into the Google Keep app without also signing into Google in Safari!

If you're wondering why you're getting downvoted it's because this isn't true at all. I'm signed into (several) iOS google apps and my Safari browser is not signed into google.

newaccount742• 4 years ago

Please tell me how!

All I know is that I was not able to sign into Google Keep without accepting the data sharing prompt, and I was signed into my Google account in Safari after logging into the Google Keep app. It was of course possible to sign out of Safari afterwards.

I don't know how to reproduce the issue. I've tried uninstalling the Google Keep app, to trigger the alert again, but when I reinstall the app it remembers my Google account!

I'm really surprised how hard it is to get these cookies or app preferences or whatever off my device after signing in once.

EDIT: It seems the Google Keep app stores my account in the iOS keychain and there is no way to delete the item from the keychain without deleting all data on the phone, so I can't reproduce the "new device" situation easily.

However, if I try to add a new account, I get the same dialog. It says something like (rough translation) "Google Keep wants to use google.com for logging in. If you allow this, the app and the website are allowed to share data about your person".

If I tap "cancel" in this alert, I can't log in.

So as far as I can tell, what I said is correct. Maybe it was different in the past, but this is what the situation on iOS 16 currently looks like.

lakomen• 4 years ago

This title is as clickbaity as it gets

avar• 4 years ago

It asked my for the permission earlier. I thought I'd granted it already and I didn't notice the sneaky domain switch, I've now revoked it.

I wish browsers had a more granular way to grant this and other permissions. E.g. Firefox just has allow/deny, and then "remember".

Granting it only if the user clicks the "show my location" UI element on the web page would be a closer match to user expectations, and would preclude pages from getting the permission in the background.

Of course that would introduce extra complexity, e.g. worrying about web pages sneakily making normal looking links the "get location" UX element.

There's probably no secure way to do it except for the webpage to communicate that it's a page that might want your location, and for the browser to show the "send my location" UX element itself (e.g. in the toolbar).

mrjin3• 4 years ago

It looks like the result of the arm race with DNS based ad/tracker blockers. This move will for sure force the users to make a hard decision of "all or nothing".

ignoramous• 4 years ago

If this ever was a race, it was always a losing one.

DNS-based content-blocker are woefully inadequate. I'd know since I co-maintain one and the barrage of complaints I get make it plenty clear where unaddressable limitations lie.

r0m4n02• 4 years ago

On another note, I feel like EVERY day my iPhone asks me if I want to share my location with google. I’ll be searching something in Safari on google that’s obviously location based and I get a dialog that pops up. I have allowed it 100s of times.

https://imgur.com/gallery/LleCkEo

I hate this and don’t want to see it ever again. Allow always, allow never, I don’t care. This reminds me of the GDPR popups… I feel like once you have popups everywhere, they lose their value and become an annoyance

r0m4n02• 4 years ago

Just FYI. After this rant, looked it up and apparently you can set in OS settings to allow for all websites, or deny for all websites. No granular control though

nathan_f77• 4 years ago

I think they probably did this for SEO. Having /maps on the root domain will help it rank higher in search.

This was a joke, but now I'm wondering if Google services are special cases that are hard-coded in the search results. Or are they just treated like normal websites and use the same pagerank algorithm as every other site? If I search for "maps", I see Google Maps at the top, and Apple Maps in second place, but they both look like regular website links.

rmbyrro• 4 years ago

Potentially a black hat SEO trick?

We might see Google services' rankings punished on Google from now on...

dpryden• 4 years ago

I recall from my time in Google Geo years ago that the idea of integrating Search and Maps was a big part of the "New Maps" release that happened around 2014. The rumor I heard was that someone (possibly even Larry himself) wanted to be able to have interactive maps directly on the search results page, so that the navigation from a search query to a map wouldn't involve even a page reload. So the big Maps frontend rewrite actually ended up merging MFE into GWS, the web search frontend server. I recall seeing maps hosted at google.com/maps around that time, but I don't know if that was ever launched fully or if it was just an experiment.

In any case, though, my understanding is that the technical capacity for this has existed for nearly 10 years now, just behind a configuration setting. So it's possible that this change is just a code cleanup. It's also possible that someone is trying to increase the percentage of searches that have location information, that doesn't seem terribly far-fetched either, and I can imagine lots of ways people could try to rationalize it as actually benefiting users. (Whether it actually does benefit users is of course debatable.)

nolok2• 4 years ago

This makes perfect sense product wise, if I'm searching "bakery" on my mobile phone I probably want the ones around me and not the generic location-agnostic google search of it, just like I would if I was searching on map. Matter of fact, this is actually something I do a couple times a month, search then clic the maps tab to see localized results then from them click the website result to find their webpage.

As a techie I hate any direct change to the user-agnostic absolute search, but as a user I get it.

titzer• 4 years ago

This is achievable with geolocation based on IP address, which is how it works on, e.g. a desktop web browser.

qwery• 4 years ago

if I'm searching "bakery" on my mobile phone I probably want the ones around me

Only when you're using a phone? Only if you're not at home? What if you want to find out what a bakery is?

(Apologies for rapid fire, I'm not having a go at you, just curious)

amluto• 4 years ago

Somehow DuckDuckGo has taken this to absurd extremes. Almost any search that doesn’t get many natural hits shows branches of my local government toward the bottom of the first page of results.

startupsfail• 4 years ago

What we see is likely the attempt to squeeze even more juice from advertising over which Google virtually have a monopoly. Google is trying to continue its exponential growth while relying on selling advertisements. The market had already been saturated and optimised to crazy levels. Smart thing would be to expand to other sources of revenue, but other projects inside Google fail. As they are failing to compete internally for resources against that crazily optimised source of revenue.

It is doubtful that Google can overcome that internally. Perhaps regulators should break up the monopoly in advertisement and search.

philsnow• 4 years ago

if I'm searching "bakery" on my mobile phone I probably want the ones around me

And yet for me, even in google maps on my iphone, when I search for bakery, the first one is almost always one that's ~40 miles away, and the closest one is almost always the second in the list. The rest of the list is definitely not sorted descending by distance. If I've searched for a _particular_ ABC bakery, I get other bakeries commingled in the list even if I know damn well there are other ABC bakeries closer than those.

hbossy• 4 years ago

It gets really annoying when you are trying to search for some specific term in English and google keep guessing that you wanted something that sounds similar in your native tongue.

pimlottc• 4 years ago

This reminds me of how Google integrated Maps into Calendar as a sidebar a while ago, a move that I absolutely hated. And instead of providing a preference setting to disable it, you have to “hide” the sidebar in a non-intuitive way [0]. I had to search to figure it out.

0: https://www.howtogeek.com/695504/how-to-stop-google-calendar...

delroth2• 4 years ago

I have links to google.com/maps in my IRC logs dating back from June 2014, so this absolutely tracks.

I actually remember google.com/maps being launched at IO in 2014 -- the presentation had a broken link in it for the new version of Maps, and a few of us DoS SRE watching the livestream were able to hack together a config change in a few minutes to fix it without waiting for a urlmap push :)

the-rc• 4 years ago

I remember the spiffy demo where the thumbnail in search results morphed into the full Maps UI without reloading.

But unification had started even earlier than that. Pretty much since Larry became CEO again, he pushed this mantra of "One Google", which brought the infamous Kennedy redesign across all services, as well as more of them available under the google.com host (e.g. maps as discussed here, but also flights and more). One of the ideas behind the latter was that you had to log into your Google account just once, which gradually made it all the way to YouTube(!). I vaguely recall other factors, such as compensating for the increased latency from going HTTPS everywhere, but also discussions about securing and hardening cookies.

As far as I know, google.com/maps has been around the entire time, but perhaps now it might be simply the canonical URL in a larger number of cases.

CSSer• 4 years ago

It's also possible that someone is trying to increase the percentage of searches that have location information, that doesn't seem terribly far-fetched either, and I can imagine lots of ways people could try to rationalize it as actually benefiting users.

Could you speak more to how this kind of thing figuratively plays out? With privacy on most of our (tech-focused) minds, I’m mostly curious how openly an initiative like this is/would be carried out. Would you imagine it as a buried lede or as a very transparent, explicit OKR?

hansvm• 4 years ago

It's easy to rationalize it as benefiting the users, so I'd imagine it's an explicit OKR, maybe even a few levels up in the org.

Like, one thing I've wanted on occasion is the ability to search for brick and mortar stores in a given radius who have the thing I want -- either because I want to physically inspect it before committing to a purchase or because for whatever reason the time/cost of shipping wouldn't be practical.

That sort of query is hard for Google to serve right now though for reasons including the lack of relevant location information in both the search results and the queries whose user behavior would help drive relevance rankings for those location-specific results.

Location information is a bit of a double-edged sword too though, even ignoring privacy concerns. I have to spoof my location and change my search language to get some results because of aggressive filtering happening behind the scenes. If a given query doesn't match Google's current understanding of the user then the right results existing in the corpus often won't imply that the user is able to find them with _any_ search operators.

googleburner• 4 years ago

With the document policy changes over the last 5 years, most decisions are now very opaque. Google TTLs everything except Docs and code history & reviews, at this point: emails, chats, bug reports, ...

There's probably a tech debt focused OKR for this work, but some other teams probably has OKRs that indirectly benefit from the data, and they're probably providing staffing support, tied to the tech debt OKR. OKRs are for telling people why you're great, if you're at the bottom of the pyramid, and for giving the rank-and-file some direction, if you're at the top. The top level OKRs are usually very precise and very vague at the same time.

So there's probably an OKR in search to improve the quality of the location signals. It can be vague on how. Plus, having more and better data filters into your downstream systems, so even without an OKR for the data you know it will make your models more powerful.

The5thElephant2• 4 years ago

It is absolutely bizarre to me how half-assed Google is with integrating its products.

I have a week of events coming up in Google Calendar each with a different event location. Why can't I see a map of all those event locations alongside the calendar with all the same event details listed? Why can't I associate a Google Calendar event with a specific album or set of photos in Google Photos and see those in the map and calendar as well?

This is why I'm building https://visible.page with my brother. We have all these capabilities of visualizing data on the web, yet no one has actually put them together in a convenient and consumer friendly way to visualize any type of information together in one place.

All these big tech companies seem to just give up on any kind of significant innovation as soon as they reach a certain level of monopoly on their market. Twitter, Spotify, Facebook, Google, etc. I can think of a dozen significant feature experiments they could try that would make my daily life better using those tools yet they don't.

NameError2• 4 years ago

An example of poor google integration that bugs me from time to time - when you search for a geographic feature, the info panel shows a great preview map with the outline of the feature. E.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=rhine+river

If you click into google maps, the outline is gone. Searching "Rhine River" just puts a marker at one point along the river.

noswi• 4 years ago

Innovation, oh my, sometimes it feels like the fat ones (and, by proxy, everyone else) are living in some alternate fantasy world where the mantra "you're not gonna need it" is taken to the extreme, so they're not even trying.

The pendulum should swing back to complex and more complicated interfaces sometime — but right now these are the dark times where, for example, Netflix, this huge, popular movie and show library, doesn't even have a way to find out exactly what movies with some actor or director it has available. It's hard for me to wrap my head around that.

Your project does look useful and on point though!

thanhhaimai• 4 years ago

It is absolutely bizarre to me how half-assed Google is with integrating its products

The answer can be summed up in one word: "privacy".

There are two forces at play here. One side wants privacy. When they give data to Google Calendar, they don't want Google Maps or Ads know about it. The other side (your opinion above) wants more integration between services.

In this political climate, the privacy side has an edge. This means if Google Photos want to access data on Google Calendar to provide the integration you asked above, they will have to jump through multiple quarters of privacy reviews, with a very high odd of being shutdown.

All these big tech companies seem to just give up on any kind of significant innovation as soon as they reach a certain level of monopoly on their market

After I see how the sausages are made, I think claims like these are naive. It's worth learning more about the factors at play before criticizing something. More often than not, the agents are acting pretty rationally based on the situation.

joshuahutt• 4 years ago

Your app looks beautiful. This is something that I've wanted to build some time. Would love to help out if possible.

googlryas• 4 years ago

Funny, because there is a crummy form of Google maps present into he SERP, and it behaves completely differently from actual Google maps. It constantly annoys me, usually when searching for a business, that something that looks exactly like google maps, in Google, doesn't behave the same as google maps.

cco• 4 years ago

100%! I always ascribe it to some PM somewhere, but when I click on the "search maps" I would _love_ to be taken to the "real Google Maps".

The search maps is just a terrible experience, half implemented, doesn't do what I want, even down to little things.

My hack is to pick directions, which will get me to Google Maps, then cancel directions, this loses all state, but you're still in the location you want and can usually then just click the business you were looking for.

syliconadder• 4 years ago

I already assumed this was the case to begin with, so I sold my soul even before it was up for auction.

api• 4 years ago

I’ve noticed that Google searches often request location. I never say yes but most people will to maps. So yeah this makes sense… as a way to make sure I don’t use Google.

codeflo• 4 years ago

I noticed that Google Search itself has very recently become much more aggressive about asking for location permission. Coincidence, or is collecting more location data someone high up’s KPI for the year?

pifm_guy2• 4 years ago

A bit reason for using separate subdomains originally is because there are security benefits.

If there is an XSS attack that leaks cookies from Google Keep, you would prefer that not get your cookie for Google Maps.

As browser security models have evolved, subdomains are no longer as isolated as top level domains, so I dunno...

saltcured• 4 years ago

I think the main issue here is people conflate the security boundaries defined by the website operators with the security or privacy boundaries a user might want to enforce. The web origin chosen for the service operator's XSS sandbox is not necessarily what a privacy-focused user wants. It's only useful when a trustworthy operator is designing for the benefit of the user.

There should really be a more granular way for the user's policy to adjust the origin definitions used for cross-origin logic as well as other types of content blocking and enforcement.

Why shouldn't a user be able to isolate https://example.com/app1 as much as https://app1.example.com?

Why shouldn't they be able to grant any permission to be used in a single page https://example.com/app1/usefulpage and not in other pages on the site?

The multi-container approach to browser session isolation faces the same issues. Different users may have different preferences for when navigation shares the session and when navigation should kick you into a new session that lacks authentication, tracking, or app state.

coffeeblack2• 4 years ago

This is actually something that browsers can mitigate. Allow users to give tracking permissions not only for subdomains, but also for paths.

    Deny: google.com/*
    Allow: google.com/flights

Something like that.

Cthulhu_• 4 years ago

Yeah but, the biggest browser is Chrome, by Google; they have an incentive to allow tracking and access across their services.

vanilla_nut2• 4 years ago

Indeed. If you use Chrome, you should just assume that your location is shared with Google at all times, since they likely collect it via telemetry anyway.

If you use Firefox, assume your location is always shared with Mozilla via telemetry... and likely indirectly to Google as well, since they use Google Analytics for so much of their infra.

Likewise for Apple/Google/Microsoft collecting data from iOS/macOS/Android/Windows. And of course your cellular provider.

As far as I know the only way to ensure your personal data isn't shared with your browser publisher is to use a verifiable, open source browser that has telemetry disabled, like Iceweasel or Librewolf. And an open source, verifiable OS with telemetry disabled, like... Fedora, maybe? Manjaro? But you're being spied on by your ISP or cellular provider anyway, and the US government indirectly through your ISP and cell provider. And let's be honest, foreign governments through some combination of ISP/cellular provider/govt backdoors.

Oh, and if you've read "Trusting Trust" you'll know that even OSS isn't necessarily verifiable unless you wrote the compiler yourself from scratch.

So I'm not sure there's much benefit to any of it?

coffeeblack2• 4 years ago

Chrome users are probably okay with tracking anyway, but Firefox, Brave, Vivaldi, etc could implement more fine grained controls. Not only for geolocation.

asadotzler2• 4 years ago

I don't think DOM permissions are going to stop Google if they want to share the data between services.

nigamanth• 4 years ago

The chances are, geotracking or not google knows a lot about you and this just adds on to the data.

RobertRoberts3• 4 years ago

They did this with Gmail years ago. Same scheme, I warned everyone that gmail.com would change over to a google related domain, and it didn't take long. And I tried to explain how it meant every email could be directly related to your internet traffic.

"What do I have to hide?" was always the response...

jsnell2• 4 years ago

I don't believe your alleged change happened. Gmail was hosted under google.com literally from the day it launched [0].

[0] http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2004/04/google-gets-message-...

RobertRoberts3• 4 years ago

It did, I watched it explicitly for this reason, but I guess unless it's documented somewhere, oh well. It was even googlemail.com for awhile.

Edit: It's possible my concern was the subdomain and my memory is off. It moved from a subdomain to a /gmail at one point (or something similar). That is when I swore off it.

What clearly recall is that there was something wrong, either it was how it did a redirect to google.com first and then back or shared cookies in a very sneaky way that alerted me. (I was building sites at the time and I was privacy conscience early on in my career)

rrwo2• 4 years ago

It makes sense to use geolocation for search. It's not just for searching for businesses, as the meaning of a word you are searching for will depend on where you are.

IP-based geolocation isn't very reliable. And if people are using VPNs then it's useless.

butz• 4 years ago

I wonder, why Google hasn't moved to .google domains, as they own TLD? maps.google, mail.google, search.google seems to be shortest versions possible.

OrangeMusic• 4 years ago

Most people are confused with this, they expect websites to end with .com.

stonogo• 4 years ago

I'd appreciate a shred of evidence to back this up. It's been my finding that people don't have any expectations of URLs at all. People expected .com in the 2000s, but times have changed.

gernb• 4 years ago

Slightly different but I find it super confusing when search shows maps. For example

https://www.google.com/search?tbs=lf:1,lf_ui:9&tbm=lcl&q=clo...

This looks like maps but it's not, it's search, so the UI is different. Features I expect from "maps" are missing

AtNightWeCode• 4 years ago

It is for SEO. Maps product will ride on the widely used google.com domain. ;)

torstenvl• 4 years ago

Maybe they'll fix the ~5yo regression where a search for

    from:City, ST to:Town, ST

no longer results in the obvious (and previous) behavior.

lapcat• 4 years ago

I've been seeing this redirect for literally years. It's not new.

Izkata• 4 years ago

...this redirect has been in place for years. Honestly maybe even a decade at this point, it's been a long time.

Jowsey• 4 years ago

I've also been using earth.google.com etc for many years, can confirm not new at all

calibas• 4 years ago

According to my browser's history, March 31st, 2022 was the last time maps.google.com didn't perform a redirect.

iambateman• 4 years ago

Maybe they think the subfolder approach will help their SEO.

bambax• 4 years ago

HN title "moderation" (ie, arbitrary ex post facto editing) is frankly infuriating. It doesn't add meaning, it removes it.

notorandit• 4 years ago

Now?

On my PC this is happening since years!

maxfurman• 4 years ago

It just started doing this now? I've been using google.com/maps for years, and that isn't the canonical address?

soheil• 4 years ago

I kinda like the new url. The other reason could be that browsers won't be able to autocomplete the url any more if you start typing map... and hit enter to go directly to the site. Now you probably have to do a google search for "maps" first and then click on the first link driving more traffic to Search.

aiddun• 4 years ago

Now how long until they put ads under google.com/*

fragmede• 4 years ago

This changed yesterday? What the hell? Don't you people know there's a freeze going on?

Sebguer• 4 years ago

Now if someone could just update movies.google.com to point to literally anything else.

yalogin• 4 years ago

Good observation! This is the only reason for this change. A very cunning workaround for the privacy barriers, but still within the legal bounds.

maps.google.com now redirects to google.com/maps

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