According to my browser's history, March 31st, 2022 was the last time maps.google.com didn't perform a redirect.
maps.google.com now redirects to google.com/maps
311–320 of 396 posts
Re: maps.google.com now redirects to google.com/maps
#312[deleted]
Re: maps.google.com now redirects to google.com/maps
#313I 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 re…
This makes perfect sense product wise, if I'm searching "bakery" 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. As a te…
> if I'm searching "bakery" on my mobile phone I probably want the ones around me
And yet for me, even in google maps on my iphone, when I search for bakery, the first one is almost always one that'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'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.
Re: maps.google.com now redirects to google.com/maps
#314I 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 re…
It is absolutely bizarre to me how half-assed Google is with integrating its products. I have a week of events coming up in Google Calendar each with a different event location. Why can't I see a map of all those event locations alongside the calendar with all the same event details listed? Why can't I associate a Google Calendar event with a specific album or set of photos in Google Photos and see those in the map a…
An example of poor google integration that bugs me from time to time - when you search for a geographic feature, the info panel shows a great preview map with the outline of the feature. E.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=rhine+river
If you click into google maps, the outline is gone. Searching "Rhine River" just puts a marker at one point along the river.
Re: maps.google.com now redirects to google.com/maps
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is absolutely bizarre to me how half-assed Google is with integrating its products. I have a week of events coming up in Google Calendar each with a different event location. Why can't I see a map of all those event locations alongside the calendar with all the same event details listed? Why can't I associate a Google Calendar event with a specific album or set of photos in Google Photos and see those in the map a…
An example of poor google integration that bugs me from time to time - when you search for a geographic feature, the info panel shows a great preview map with the outline of the feature. E.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=rhine+river If you click into google maps, the outline is gone. Searching "Rhine River" just puts a marker at one point along the river.
oh wow, it's actually worse for me: there's no marker at all, just a map of western europe: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Rhine+River/@49.34645,7.87...
Re: maps.google.com now redirects to google.com/maps
#316This 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…
My default mode is to trust everyone until they break my trust. Now that I am old, I have realized that trusting everyone by default is not a good idea, especially big tech. In cases like this, I think it is better to assume malice, even if we are proved wrong later. This is not our fault, this is big tech screwing with us repeatedly for years, with no shame or conscience
Also, by most reasonable metrics, Google broke that trust long time ago anyway.
Re: maps.google.com now redirects to google.com/maps
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
This makes perfect sense product wise, if I'm searching "bakery" 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. As a te…
> if I'm searching "bakery" on my mobile phone I probably want the ones around me And yet for me, even in google maps on my iphone, when I search for bakery, the first one is almost always one that'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've searched for a _particular_ ABC bakery, I get other bakeries comm…
The first one is the one that put the most coins into the AdWords slot, I'd guess.
Re: maps.google.com now redirects to google.com/maps
#318I 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 re…
> 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. Could you speak more to how this kind of thing figuratively plays out? With privacy on most of our (tech-focused) minds, I’m mostly curious how openly an initiati…
With the document policy changes over the last 5 years, most decisions are now very opaque. Google TTLs everything except Docs and code history & reviews, at this point: emails, chats, bug reports, ...
There's probably a tech debt focused OKR for this work, but some other teams probably has OKRs that indirectly benefit from the data, and they're probably providing staffing support, tied to the tech debt OKR. OKRs are for telling people why you're great, if you're at the bottom of the pyramid, and for giving the rank-and-file some direction, if you're at the top. The top level OKRs are usually very precise and very vague at the same time.
So there's probably an OKR in search to improve the quality of the location signals. It can be vague on how. Plus, having more and better data filters into your downstream systems, so even without an OKR for the data you know it will make your models more powerful.
Re: maps.google.com now redirects to google.com/maps
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
Less than half the population has decent geolocation by IP. Most people the IP address will only identify the country or even nothing at all. Not much use if you want to search bakery's.
Google is my ISP. My geolocated IP is accurate within a 15 mile radius. It doesn't matter if I have location services turned off or I'm using my desktop, searching "bakeries near me" finds them without issue. I suspect that isn't all just one big coincidence.
Google has what 3 or 4 cities where they operate as an ISP, each with a pretty small footprint. It's no surprise anyone knows where you are.
A cable or telephone company has generalized coverage measured in states; some of them organize their network and customer IPs by small geographies, but sometimes all of southern california is in a single pool of IPs.
Re: maps.google.com now redirects to google.com/maps
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> DoH (and ESNI on the server side) would fix it, but iirc Chrome (the most used browser) doesn't use DoH by default. It would fix it for some specific circumstances. Since maps.google.com resolves differently than www.google.com, you can ignore DNS and just look at TCP connections to tell what service is being talked to.
Granted that Google is basically the exception here. But when I query the IP's for maps.google.com I get 142.250.179.238 and when I query google.com I get 142.250.200.14
If make a http get request to 142.250.179.238/ (the maps IP) but with the host header set to "www.google.com" I get the search page returned to me. If I make a http get request to 142.250.200.14/maps I get google maps.
OK. /maps might be a bad example because well google.com/maps is already a thing :-p
So if I make a request to 142.250.179.238 with the host youtube.com I get youtube. This is because most of googles public facing servers can act as the front door for many other google services not just the service that its dns is set to.
Not really sure it it comes under "domain fronting" because isn't that tactic many used to bypass censorship, pretend your connecting to one CloudFront customer when really wish to connect to another. Where google explictly configured their services to do this so they can easily load balance as demand and network conditions allow. Anyways I'm rambling now.
My point is, with google you can't rely on the ip address alone to determine the service (however it still wouldn't stop you peeking into connection and pulling out the host header unless ESNI was used) but as I said at the start, Google is more the exception here.