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

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

#191

Post by chrismorgan »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #72

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…

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.

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

#192

Post by rmbyrro »

nathan_f77 wrote: post #189

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…

Potentially a black hat SEO trick?

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

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

#193

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

neodymiumphish wrote: post #186
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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.

IIUC, maps would send your location to search if-and-only-if you make a search from inside maps, since that is necessary to do the precise location-based search.

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

#194

Post by johnchristopher »

__michaelg wrote: post #126

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, t…

> 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.

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

#195

Post by dpryden »

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.)

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

#196

Post by mrd999 »

jstummbillig wrote: post #145
stingraycharles wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

This is cute, but 100% no. In this case, those involved in the decision were aware of the privacy implications. Whether this was discussed openly, or whether the change was made 'pass-the-buck' style, it doesn't really matter. The association of privacy settings with domains is a well-established basic function in the browser.

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

#197

Post by vetinari »

Crosseye_Jack wrote: post #165
Lockal wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google could enable ESNI, if they wanted.

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 mo…

Chrome uses DoT, if you have configured one of the well-known resolvers that do support DoT. Otherwise, it respects your local settings.

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

#198

Post by db48x »

mtmail wrote: post #178
db48x wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, sig…

> TIGER data doesn’t have any address information at all In the EDGE tables it does have ZIP codes and house number ranges, split into left and right side of the road. ZIP codes were imported into OpenStreetMap data. House number ranges are imported into the OpenStreetMap search into a separate database table, so searching works in a lot of areas but it's far from complete, all the issues you mentioned with roads tha…

I stand corrected. Maybe the TIGER data or the import process was improved at some point in the last decade?

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

#199

Post by vetinari »

netheril96 wrote: post #144
samwestdev wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DNS over HTTPS is the solution here.

SNI is still in the plaintext.

It it still an improvement; you need to DPI the traffic then, which is more demanding than just logging 53/udp queries.
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