Took DDG Enhanced Maps for a test drive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EnmdbzdOWI
DuckDuckGo Expands Use of Apple Maps
181–190 of 284 posts
Re: DuckDuckGo Expands Use of Apple Maps
#182What I'd want is Apple Maps and Here Maps to enter into a technology/business collaboration agreement.
Here Maps have excellent tech and offline packaging and Apple has the reach.
Put all this together with DDG, we have a winner.
Re: DuckDuckGo Expands Use of Apple Maps
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
These user reports take weeks to months to get triaged, making many rather useless.
They all have that problem. My son's school is in a kafka-ish situation with Google where their listing is wrong and cannot be changed. People cannot write reviews, and data doesn't get updated. 98/100 times, updates to Apple or Google mapping products are done in hours or days. The 2/100, forget it.
Apple Maps has a deep queue for reports about map inaccuracies, your minimum wait time is a few days 98 times out of 100. This is fixable, but it requires even more staffing than Apple already has working on Apple Maps (which is most of the people they employ in Austin and India).
Re: DuckDuckGo Expands Use of Apple Maps
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
"coffee shop" on the other hand yields 20 results. I agree that some support for fuzzy search is needed, but there is a reasonable amount of data there.
I hate when searches parse like that. Ideally coffee shop, coffee shops, coffee, cafe, espresso, etc. should all give me the same exact results: 100% of the stores in the area that sell coffee. I don't think there's a single piece of mapping software that doesn't suck hard in some way. It's pretty annoying how google maps shows you x number of results zoomed out, y zoomed in, and z with the map frame moved half a blo…
where the sets of y and z might not even overlap
Re: DuckDuckGo Expands Use of Apple Maps
#185It's a shame they didn't invest in OpenStreetMap.
Their values would align significantly, and OpenStreetMap has excellent road and path coverage in my experience (though struggles with Points of Interest).
Re: DuckDuckGo Expands Use of Apple Maps
#186> For example, try a query such as "coffee shops" and zoom in on the map to refine your search. There is exactly one result for "coffee shops" in San Francisco. The tech and privacy initiatives sound good, but unfortunately the data needs work to pass basic sanity checks. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=coffee+shops&ia=web&iaxm=maps&stri... Edit: Searching for "coffee shop" (singular) shows many more results. Perhaps the b…
There are only two coffee shops in Wellington (NZ) according to DDG/AppleMaps.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=coffee+shop&t=h_&ia=recipes&iaxm=m...
Edit: searching for "cafe" gives better results but still not great
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cafe&t=h_&ia=recipes&iaxm=places&s...
Re: DuckDuckGo Expands Use of Apple Maps
#187This is cool to see, and I think should be a virtuous cycle. As I understand it, maps is the kind of thing where more usage really helps make the map better, and while DDG doesn’t bring the scale of being the iphone’s default map, it should be adding a non-trivial amount of traffic. I’ve used Apple Maps as my primary map since it came out, and I’ve only gotten a wrong location one time in literally thousands of searc…
Here's the issue with this: the live-traffic component of google maps, waze, etc. is very much a network effect. You get a lot of traffic info by measuring the speeds and stalls of your users. This creates the classic chicken-and-egg problem: need users to get data; need data to get users.
Re: DuckDuckGo Expands Use of Apple Maps
#188This is cool to see, and I think should be a virtuous cycle. As I understand it, maps is the kind of thing where more usage really helps make the map better, and while DDG doesn’t bring the scale of being the iphone’s default map, it should be adding a non-trivial amount of traffic. I’ve used Apple Maps as my primary map since it came out, and I’ve only gotten a wrong location one time in literally thousands of searc…
I primarily use Apple Maps and its directions and the accuracy of roads have always been great for me. But sometimes I can't find a POI and searching for POIs can be significantly worse than Google Maps.
This is a good point. If I know an address, Apple Maps will find it accurately. If I just know a place name it doesn’t always pick the right one. Google seems better at knowing which place name I mean.
Re: DuckDuckGo Expands Use of Apple Maps
#189It's a shame they didn't invest in OpenStreetMap. Their values would align significantly, and OpenStreetMap has excellent road and path coverage in my experience (though struggles with Points of Interest).
My first instinct is that it's a money thing -- kind of like how Yelp results show up in DDG now which I only recently noticed. DDG is taking a page out of Mozilla's book and getting as many corporate partnerships as they can.
Re: DuckDuckGo Expands Use of Apple Maps
#190Does anyone else see Apple buying DDG in the near future?
Probably not. Apple is cautious about acquisitions and doesn’t generally buy things that have a consumer brand, they don’t really do advertising supported products, and they’re also mindful of anti-trust. My guess is that in the search space they see DDG as a useful partner, much like they see Yelp, but they’re not trying to expand into that business so an acquisition wouldn’t do much for them.