For years, Google Maps has been a go-to tool for millions worldwide, seamlessly integrated into search results for instant access to directions, locations, and more. But if you’ve noticed something missing recently, you’re not imagining things. Due to European Union regulations, Google has been forced to remove its Maps functionality from its search results, marking a significant shift in how we interact with the tech giant’s ecosystem.
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.
“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.”
Click a link? Oh you young whippersnapper! We used to have a note with written domain names or even IP addresses that we would type in if we wanted to go somewhere online.
A hyperbole would be to make a point, an intentional exaggeration for emphasis or generalization.
This is just a lie.
Sell your Google stocks now. This is the nail in the coffin!
It’s cumbersome to change habits if you just wanna search for X but can’t have the shortcut to the location in the results.
Now I need to double search.It is but it’s also better for consumers.
Google dominates search by bundling lots of services in one place and destroying all competition. They want you tied in to all their services and to never leave. You ar ethe product and they want to sell every bit of data they can and sell you to advertisers.
The tech giants keep abusing market dominance to dominate new markets. Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer with windiws and destroyed the browser market. Then Google search sites and android aggressively pushes Chrome and now dominates the browser market. Microsoft bundles Teams in Office and destroys Slack; one of many egrarious actions by Microsoft over the years. Apple forces all browsers on iOS to use Safari - so you can’t bypass the Apple app and service marketplace - their 30% cut is too important.
Regulation is needed to break up the domination of these tech monopploes. By separating navigation from search, people get back in the habit of using other services for navigation results.
That might be Google maps, or that might be Bing maps or OpenStreetMaps. But Google can’t use bundling to make consumers too lazy to leave.
It’s a start. A minimal inconvenience for users benefits everyone longer term.
It could be handled better by forcing Google to offer choices for map providers as they literally already for browsing.
I agree, it is a slight annoyance, but that is all it is.
Or you could switch to another search engine such as Kagi or DuckDuckGo.
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.
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.
Used to be, Waze is consistently better at producing faster routes now at least in the UK. I keep meaning to try out others like organic though.
Waze is owned by Google now so it basically is maps now just with a different skin and some better features.
Has been owned by Google for quite some time now, but traffic or accidents reported by users in Waze still take quite some time to show up on Google maps.
I use Waze when that matters but I’m usually using Google maps to look up stuff like what foo places are near me.
I’ll use organic sometimes too when I want directions but I don’t care that much about time.
Edit: food but it’s funny that way too
It’s been that way for months already. Maybe four or six I’d say.
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.
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.
Like… and hear me out… save the preference with some sort of Cookie technology? Do you think the EU would be up for that?
I can’t tell whether you’re being intentionally ironic. Yes the EU would be up for it. The EU didn’t ban cookies. Putting it simply, you do not need a cookie banner if you aren’t tracking people.
Im a web dev and I build almost all of my sites without cookie banner unless they’re really required (YouTube embeds, invasive tracking etc) and when I don’t include a banner, people usually think I forgot it.
It’s a shame that most people think the internet just has to be crap now and every site needs some dark pattern banner to track its users.
A dark pattern would be some sort of underhanded but legal tactic to trick or coerce a user into agreeing to something they wouldn’t otherwise.
But most websites aren’t using dark patterns for this, instead they just blatantly and plainly violate the law.
There needs to be a browser that auto blocks all cookies, and all cookie banners. You can whitelist the sites you want. Beyond that, your browser tells all the web “fuck you!”
Firefox + uBlock Origin does that for me. You just need to enable the Annoyances filter.
Brave does mostly a good job with this. Though some cookie banners still slip through, and other functional popups get blocked. Still makea browsing the Web more palatable.
This is true. No cookie banners, no ads. Hardly ever a problem
I’m unclear why you’re being downvoted for sharing reccomendations. So, because I’ve experienced similiar issues when I DID understand the downvotes, I’ll assume someone downvoted you because Brave isn’t their browser of choice, and they’re sitting at their computer like “NO! NOT BRAVE! WHY DOESN’T EVERYONE USE (insert obscure browser which may actually be a better experience, but only 50 people have ever heard of) INSTEAD??? WHY MUST THEY RECCOMEND THE MAINSTREAM BROWSERS???”
And then 3pm comes, and it’s time for him to give his sheets to his mommy for the weekly laundry.
Meanwhile, me, someone who’s used Firefox exclusively since 2004, is thinking “Hmmmm, maybe I SHOULD branch out and try other browsers! I’m sure I could try Brave? I’ll be…BRAVE…enough to try a new browser!”
And then I give myself a big hearty laugh as I drink a sip of my hot chocolate, and proceed to live the rest of my life not giving a shit why you were downvoted. Oh, also, have an upvote!
Yeah, you’re not allowed to say anything positive about Brave on Lemmy. Instant downvote. Then downvotes for talking about it being down voted.
It’s like you said something neutral about AI, if you don’t shit on it, they brigade you down.
Yes it’s very good at eliminating cookies, it tracks and sells your data, but not as widely as the big guys.
It’s very good at fingerprint resistance too.
Firefox with UO, privacy badger is very close to it’s level of perf.
You can install stuff to block your telemetry in just about any browser, knock out a lot of your tracking but still get tracked by your browser maker, your OS, your ISP…
But talk about brave, they just get pissy.
To make it even more clear let me rephrase it:
If you want to store sth like that, it would be classified as functional and you wouldn’t even need a cookie banner for it.
Only if you want to use it to track people you need to notify them
Pretty much. Although I continue to be annoyed this ever even needed to be asked. There’s literally a browser setting to communicate this “do not track”. EU really should’ve just forced everyone to respect it :/.
I agree – and before DnT, there was P3P, which also would have done it – but it is what it is at the moment.
I’m mostly exasperated with it because I wipe all cookies each browser restart, which is a much more-reliable and less-obnoxious solution than the EU’s regulatory approach of trying to convince the remote end not to make use of its ability to set them. If you do that, you get the cookie banner every time on sites that show it, which means that the cookie banner regulation has made my experience rather worse. And unfortunately, some sites show the banner to non-EU-based users – we don’t elect EU representatives, but we still get some spillover from their policies.
There’s some Firefox plugin that will try to hide the cookie banners:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/istilldontcareaboutcookies/
EDIT: Yeah, from the description on there, the author is doing exactly what I am with the “not retaining cookies” approach, and smacking into how poorly that interacts with the cookie banner regulation:
The EU regulations require that any website using tracking cookies must get user’s permission before installing them. These warnings appear on most websites until the visitor agrees with the website’s terms and conditions. Imagine how irritating that becomes when you surf anonymously or if you delete cookies automatically every time you close the browser.
If you want to store your map preferences, save the preferences to your account and make sure you’re logged in.
I’m not saying anything like this is preferable or whatever but there’s also little sense in removing all semblance of user experience in favour of removing power from tech giants.
You can literally store all preferences in cookies without a problem with EU legislation.
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.
Is this news? The “Maps” tab has been missing from my search results for a while here in Germany.
Same in Denmark
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=%25sand 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.
Thanks that’s really useful
That explains why I
- Can’t search for <city> and get a direct link to the maps + position
- The toolbar of services missing maps entirely.
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
But they had to take 20 years for that decision.
For example in duckduckgo you can type “city !gm” and it will take you to Google maps search results for “city”.
You can also use ddg.gg as a quick way to be redirected to duckduckgo.com without having to type the whole thing
True but still annoying.
Wondered if I did something wrong and this happened well before I read about it here.
“Over” my ass…
Pics or it didn’t happen
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.
Yes I have an issue with authoritarians controlling private business with the threat of violence
Then the US oligarchy under Trump with no environmental or antitrust regulations and bribes from the wealthy deciding policy should be paradise for you.
For my part, I’m happy to have some possibility for safe food and water and some hope of maintaining my privacy and not be forced into using products and services due to the fact that they have monopoly position in the market here in the EU.
Yes because the US doesn’t have safe food or water, good point
There’s quite a lot of pretty good evidence to back up your point already. When Trump is done there will be plenty more.
You mean the ingredients other countries ban that rfk wants to ban? That will make food less safe like the eu…?
For anything good he will do for food, he will do more damage to the medical profession. And there will have been 10 people in that position by the time Trump is done, so probably he won’t accomplish much anyway. In Trump’s last term he gutted tons of air and water safety regulations, so there’s every reason to expect him to do the same this time.
Yes, private business should be allowed to act fully unfettered, our health and wellness be damned
Didn’t say that
Didn’t even notice. Well done EU.
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.
You can reactivate the map integration in your Google account settings. Something called “Linked Google services”, check “maps”.
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.
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.
Even easier to just slap the thing you’re looking for into the search bar and then read the reviews and get directions all from the one webpage, why did you bring Gemini into this?
Nobody will be affected by this
Nobody I know opens maps to search shit, every one of them would be impacted by this
“read the reviews and get directions at the same time”: yeah thats what map does.
When you use a google search, gemini fills at least a quarter of the page with shit.
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
I don’t care what Google wants. Maybe a search engine shouldn’t be competing using vertically integrated services? Or would you defend them when they remove links to non-Youtube-video platforms, and anything else that competes with their products?
We don’t have to sacrifice healthy competition and functioning services to the wants of corporations.
I don’t care what Google wants.
Good, me either.
Maybe a search engine shouldn’t be competing using vertically integrated services?
Maybe.
Or would you defend them when they remove links to non-Youtube-video platforms, and anything else that competes with their products
Did not and would not defend them about anything.
We don’t have to sacrifice healthy competition and functioning services to the wants of corporations.
Agree
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
They were, but chose to remove the feature instead of complying.
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’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.
Who will shut it down? (It’s the least irritating map app.)
Google’s owned them for a number of years.
Fuck EU
Google was using their monopoly to take away user choices. This is a long term win for everyone, but you can’t see it if you only think shortsighted.
Google COULD just enable a choice in map provider, but they just refused.
Hey, no talking. Dick in mouth at all times.
