<story><title>maps.google.com now redirects to google.com/maps</title><url>https://garrit.xyz/posts/2022-11-24-smart-move-google</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nolok</author><text>This makes perfect sense product wise, if I&amp;#x27;m searching &amp;quot;bakery&amp;quot; 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.&lt;p&gt;As a techie I hate any direct change to the user-agnostic absolute search, but as a user I get it.</text></item><item><author>dpryden</author><text>I recall from my time in Google Geo years ago that the idea of integrating Search and Maps was a big part of the &amp;quot;New Maps&amp;quot; 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&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x2F;maps around that time, but I don&amp;#x27;t know if that was ever launched fully or if it was just an experiment.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;s possible that this change is just a code cleanup. It&amp;#x27;s also possible that someone is trying to increase the percentage of searches that have location information, that doesn&amp;#x27;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.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>philsnow</author><text>&amp;gt; if I&amp;#x27;m searching &amp;quot;bakery&amp;quot; on my mobile phone I probably want the ones around me&lt;p&gt;And yet for me, even in google maps on my iphone, when I search for bakery, the first one is almost always one that&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;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.</text></comment>
<story><title>maps.google.com now redirects to google.com/maps</title><url>https://garrit.xyz/posts/2022-11-24-smart-move-google</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nolok</author><text>This makes perfect sense product wise, if I&amp;#x27;m searching &amp;quot;bakery&amp;quot; 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.&lt;p&gt;As a techie I hate any direct change to the user-agnostic absolute search, but as a user I get it.</text></item><item><author>dpryden</author><text>I recall from my time in Google Geo years ago that the idea of integrating Search and Maps was a big part of the &amp;quot;New Maps&amp;quot; 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&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x2F;maps around that time, but I don&amp;#x27;t know if that was ever launched fully or if it was just an experiment.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;s possible that this change is just a code cleanup. It&amp;#x27;s also possible that someone is trying to increase the percentage of searches that have location information, that doesn&amp;#x27;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.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>startupsfail</author><text>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.&lt;p&gt;It is doubtful that Google can overcome that internally. Perhaps regulators should break up the monopoly in advertisement and search.</text></comment>