I love Google Maps a lot but it's becoming very bloated. I would love to use Apple Maps, but I just don't trust it to be reliable and comprehensive enough on the basic features I need.
DuckDuckGo Expands Use of Apple Maps
81–90 of 284 posts
Re: DuckDuckGo Expands Use of Apple Maps
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple have shown times and times again that they wouldn't let 3rd party do shady things into their own Maps app, that's the whole reason they got rid of Google Maps. That's a baseless accusation.
Apple has taken good stances on most privacy issues, but Apple Maps is poorly run. The main failure is not having something akin to a Google Scout, whereby iOS users could submit info about businesses and streets that lack data. Apple instead hires a ton of contractors in Austin (and now India) to manually trace roads and guess business hours based on anonymized GPS traces. Apple lacks the scale of Google's army of u…
> The main failure is not having something akin to a Google Scout, whereby iOS users could submit info about businesses and streets that lack data.
They weren't able to do this while they were still reliant on third-party data, because the contracts required them to submit those changes to the third-party providers first and then once they were accepted, get them in downstream updates. This is one of the main reasons they invested in building out their own data; they'll be able to accept user-sourced fixes much more quickly.
Re: DuckDuckGo Expands Use of Apple Maps
#83Why does neither maps.duckduckgo.com or duckduckgo.com/maps take me to the maps interface?
Thats the number one way I access google maps.
Re: DuckDuckGo Expands Use of Apple Maps
#84I think of Apple Maps the same way I think of North Korea's missile program: I know it exists and it has continent-level accuracy.
I choose to use Apple maps for navigating most places within a city. On iPhone, I think it has far superior ux design. In between cities I use google maps because I feel it is more up to date.
My favourite google maps UX decision is asking me how good of a job google did getting me there before I arrive.
It makes the last part of journeys really interesting especially as it results in me taking my eyes off of the road trying to reinitialize navigation...
Re: DuckDuckGo Expands Use of Apple Maps
#85For those interested in the differences between the maps providers, Justin OBeirne has a set of absolutely wonderful blog posts on them. I look forward to the next one.
Re: DuckDuckGo Expands Use of Apple Maps
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
They do have the !g option in their search though. If you aren't happy with the results, append your string with !g and it will send you to google results. You do lose the privacy layer though. From a purely privacy standpoint this isn't much different. There are a ton of other bang options here: https://duckduckgo.com/bang ?
I was under the impression that a !g search was somehow anonymized. Was that just wishful thinking?
To directly answer your question, !g _used_ to take you to encrypted.google.com, but Google eliminated it and now it takes you to the general search results page.
Use !s for Startpage instead; it proxies google's results.
Re: DuckDuckGo Expands Use of Apple Maps
#87Why does neither maps.duckduckgo.com or duckduckgo.com/maps take me to the maps interface? Thats the number one way I access google maps.
Likewise. Note ddg.co works too, saves lots of typing.
Re: DuckDuckGo Expands Use of Apple Maps
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn’t there an improved Apple Maps being rolled out city by city? What’s the status of that?
I saw an Apple "street view" car in Chicago yesterday, looked to be one of the newest model Toyota Priuses. Honestly had no clue Apple was in the street level imaging space until I saw that car and started looking around the web to learn more. It turns out, and to answer your question more directly, 2019 is apparently a pilot year for a lot of initiatives with Apple Maps. It's got my curiosity, that's for sure. https…
Apple's new "look around" street view competitor looks really impressive.
Rather than being a series of photo spheres and smearing between them as you move, the buildings and other objects are built out from 3D scans so that it can have accurate perspective as you move down the street.
There's still fudging for small objects like overhead powerlines, lampposts, trees, and street signs which don't get picked up in detail by LIDAR, but it looks very good:
In particular, watch how the cars, plants, and buildings slide by as you move from one spot to another.
Having all this information will also help Apple with their address locations, knowing exactly where entrances are to buildings, etc.
They'll need to work on keeping that updated in the case that the scan data goes stale, but having this in-house instead of needing to work through third party providers should allow them to close the gaps behind Google Maps significantly. In other ways (like the quality of the street imagery), they're jumping ahead.
Don't have the new maps available near me yet but I'm looking forward to it.
Re: DuckDuckGo Expands Use of Apple Maps
#89> 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 blog post should use that as its example.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=coffee+shop&ia=web&iaxm=maps&stric...
Re: DuckDuckGo Expands Use of Apple Maps
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Firefox is slightly better in this regard but it still searches when what you typed isn't a prefix match for something in your history,bookmarks,whatever. It's extremely annoying behavior and the go-to add-on "Enter Selects" that fixes doesn't work with WebExtensions. https://github.com/Mardak/enterSelects/issues/16
Does preferences->search->provide search suggestions=(unchecked) not do what you want?
I just tried, it didn't really change it.
How to reproduce the problem:
* Create a bookmark for "Hacker News" as news.ycombinator.com.
* In the omnibar type "Hacker New" and see that "Search with Google" is selected and that second suggestion is the bookmark.
I would like these to be reversed and the top bookmark/history/whatever item is selected over search.