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.
This is not a significant shift with how we are interacting with Google, it is a minor change.
Eh… Most people (Not the tech literate ones) interact with the internet nearly wholly using the Google search bar. To the point where many have NO idea where to put a URL in their phone to actually go straight to a website and often just google the url and click the first link.
For those people, this will be a significant shift.
“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.
Holy shit! Top comment right there! I read the headline and thought “Geez, that’s going to leave a massive hole in the maps market. There is no clear runner to fill that role. That probably means we’ll see a few years of innovations as competitors try their best to come up with that new killer feature that makes their maps the best.”
No.
None of that. Google.com will just act slightly different on their search pages.
A hyperbole would be to make a point, an intentional exaggeration for emphasis or generalization.
This is just a lie.
Sell your Google stocks now. This is the nail in the coffin!
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
I understand the why of this but this is not an improvement. I suppose search engines should ask you which maps provider you want and then show results based on that.
I suppose search engines should ask you which maps provider you want and then show results based on that.
Why would they ever enable choice. That’s not very capitalism
If they allowed users to select a default, almost everyone would select Google maps and get a better experience. By not giving the user a choice everyone loses, because Google maps is still going to be the top option. I’m surprised that this functionality either doesn’t exist already or isn’t allowed, because capitalism.
Some people would not select google though. And google can’t afford people knowing that there’s competitors to Google! So better fuck everyone over by just disabling the integration.
True. Google is using a monopoly and forcing users to use Google Maps on their platform.
There’s no competition, and everyone is worse of. It’s a long term good change by the EU.
almost everyone would select Google maps and get a better experience.
Spoken like someone who’s never used a different map provider!
Can you give me an alternative that you truely think is better than google maps, not just alternative, something that is objectively better?
Objective ways Openstreetmap is better:
- More regularly updated (one street I used to live on in Amsterdam – a cosmopolis – has only recently been added to Google Maps, whereas I used Openstreetmap to find my way there when I moved in four years ago).
- People who update it get credited rather than an already disgustingly rich company; you can submit edits to Google Maps but they often don’t get implemented, at least not with any alacrity, and they keep the intellectual property rights to the data you submit.
- Better for privacy (probably goes without saying).
- Open-source, for what it’s worth.
- The map is colour-coded and actually easily legible rather than every way being a white or light grey, sometimes hair-thin line on a white background.
- Actually useful for people not sitting in cars as it shows pedestrian ways, cycleways, parks in detail, crossings, gates, stiles, etc.
- Useful for non-navigation purposes, in fact it’s the map of choice for people gathering map data.
- The directions don’t send you the wrong way up one-way streets or along roads you can’t ride your vehicle on, among other mistakes.
- Openstreetmap shows public amenities like bins, water fountains, benches, etc. I’ve used it to help my dad who has Parkinson’s get a quick bit of rest while visiting cities, for example.
- Google Maps is admittedly quicker for looking for branches of big companies, but you can do that without a map, and Google Maps is chock full of random businesses registered at people’s homes and searches can be obfuscated because richer companies pay to come higher in the search results.
- Google Maps has public transport info, but the info is so often wrong that I would seriously advise against using it.
- I used to work at a train station and people would come up asking why the train shown on Google Maps wasn’t showing on the departure board;
- I’ve seen people miss the last train of the night because Google Maps said it was leaving later than it actually was;
- it often doesn’t show the quickest or easiest route and you can’t refine the search the way you can on public transport apps,
- etc. etc. I’d say the info on Google Maps is so bad that it makes Openstreetmap better because it doesn’t tempt you with the false promise.
- The other features Google Maps is garnished with aren’t really needed if you can read a map or if you just need a map, like:
- street view (nice to have and has made Geoguessr possible (now pay-to-play in part thanks to Google’s closed-source APIs), but itself updated by volunteers who have to resort to things like holding signs with their company names to get credit and only updated every few years or so on average),
- opening times (whether it’s correct information aside, you can just look that up otherwise and get it from the horse’s mouth), or
- searching for something like cafés within a given radius (when’s the last time you went to eat out and thought, “any café will do, but I’m slightly pickier than to warrant just walking further up the road to find somewhere, and I can’t be arsed just looking at the local area on the map and picking out cafés”? And are those cafés even open when Google Maps says they’re open? Not necessarily!).
- I’m sure something else I can’t think of at the moment. You can see I’ve been asked this a fair few times.
I will give this a good look. Thanks for the detailed response. I’m working on degoogling, but some products I’m not willing to move on from because the quality is just better, so I’m happy to have something to look into here.
I didn’t expect such a positive reply, haha. Good luck with it, I’ve completely degoogled except for the odd Youtube sesh and I haven’t looked back so far.
Most browsers allow choice of search provider. If you choose Google, you’d get this, if you choose a different search engine, you’d get a different experience. People already had that choice.
The monopoly company try to argue like that, but as seen m365 and teams, windows and edge, safari and iPhone, iCloud and iOS, and many more.
Where you intend to use just one product of a company but the company bundles stuff so that lazy human beings, like most of us, just use their stuff and never check put the competition.
If we let it slide like that, in the far future, you decide shamppoo, food, gadgets, clothing etc. all from the same company that rents you your home and have full control over your live.
Do you want 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.
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.
It’s been that way for months already. Maybe four or six I’d say.
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.
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
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
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.
Is this a big deal? I realize I have a skewed view because I dropped Google search ages ago, but… when I need maps results I go to a maps app, I never really relied on the search bar for that, even when I did use Google search.
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Still showing up in Australia right now.
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.
I was worried that this would be like those cookies pop-ups, but the functionality is still present here in the land of the free…
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is about evening the playing field, making other mapping services having a less difficult way to compete
