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maps.google.com now redirects to google.com/maps
- kqr 4y agoHey now, it used to be local.google.com! I sometimes use that just to see if it still works.
- yalogin 4y agoGood observation! This is the only reason for this change. A very cunning workaround for the privacy barriers, but still within the legal bounds.
- notorandit 4y agoNow? On my PC this is happening since years!
- bheadmaster 4y agoPrivacy and intimacy, As we know it, Will be a memory, Among many to be passed down To those who never knew. Living in the pupil of one thousand eyes.
- codeulike 4y agoAre you missing a Not operator in that last line?
- bheadmaster 4y agoIt's lyrics from a song - the last line sounds like a new sentence, so it's punctuation that I'm probably missing. I've added it for clarity.
- npteljes 4y agoI was curious where this is from, and found it's from "1,000 Eyes" from Death. https://genius.com/Death-1000-eyes-lyrics https://genius.com/Death-1000-eyes-lyrics
- Cockbrand 4y agoFrom 1995 - prophetic, almost.
- zshrdlu 4y agoWhat a pleasant surprise! I hadn't listened to Symbolic in a while.
- xvector 4y agoI wonder if this is why the mega-app model is so common for Chinese companies. It's far easier to justify collecting a million permissions when your app does a million things.
- dspillett 4y agoI think that is more a resurrection of the department store and mega-corp models: if you do a bit of everything then the bottom falling out of one market won't affect you badly as the other areas can soak up the temporary loss. Also, if you have positive name recognition in some areas this can benefit the others, and there is a passive advertising pressure of people using you for one thing seeing something else you have in store or linked to your name (where a more organic search to fulfil a need might be as likely to lead to a competitor as to you). The difference that might break this analogy being that with a mega-app there isn't really a diversity of revenue streams despite the diversity of products/features: it all comes down to stalking to be able to better sell advertising.
- bluepnume 4y agoAlso a great way to share cookies, avoid CORS, and probably a zillion other complexities that result from running on multiple subdomains.
- oblio 4y agoYeah, but do you want to bet that during the management call and the subsequent engineering call that made this decision, the main topic of discussion was the direct financial benefit from improved tracking? We'll never know, but if we could find out, say 1 year from now, I'd bet 100:1 that was the main driver.
- rickdangerous1 4y agoWow...i didn't for even a second think it was anything other than a way to get a financial benefit. Kudos to you for not be as cynical as me.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- functionstooge 4y agoThe 2 things aren't mutually exclusive. Because it reduces complexity you will likely see a financial benefit from the cost of the engineering team alone. Having managed an infrastructure with a ton of subdomains I can say that it's almost certainly in their best interest to standardize the domain across all tools at least for engineering. Your data is just an added bonus :)
- lima 4y agoAnd to increase XSS blast radius!
- deepstack 4y agothought they have moved mail.google.com to google.com/mail a while ago. Tracking would still be possible over 2 domain, but then google would have to do a bit of ETL operations. Guess this will save some more engineering.
- canbus 4y agohttps://www.openstreetmap.org https://www.openstreetmap.org
- ruph123 4y agoUnfortunately this is really not an option for (some) areas in the US. After having moved to a populous LA area from Germany I was baffled at the lack of detail in the maps. Basic things like building numbers are entirely missing. Even after adding more and more details I would never fully rely on OSM here sadly. And if it only works sometimes why even bother using it in the first place? At least this was my progression. From fully using OSM, I am back to Google. The only good in-between solution is MagicEarth which supplements OSM maps with data from lord knows where. However although they claim to be privacy cautious they are quite opaque.
- edf13 4y agoNot heard of MagicEarth before - looks interesting but what's missing is a "Why/how is it free" statement. They don't cover how they monetise this, what's their business model.
- cornedor 4y agoAlso, do not fully rely on Google Maps knowing house numbers. Looks like in some areas (in UK for example) Google used some sort of OCR to find house numbers. There are houses and Wales with random house numbers that only have a house name; Numbering ends a few houses into dead-end alley where the Street View car didn't come; Or totally wrong numbers where house number sings are hard to read.
- oniony 4y agoHouse names, rather than numbers, are very common in rural UK.
- aganumb 4y agoSearching for my address just straight up doesn't work. Named house rather than a number, and the postcode isn't a particular street but covers a number of little tracks up to various farms. I also don't have a road name. The address syntax is: Building name Town County Post code The combination of no road and no number means Google absolutely fails. It just gives suggestions of businesses nearby... Ish.
- deafpolygon 4y agoThis is also so they can invade your privacy, and correlate all of your searches to your geolocation.
- keyle 4y agoIt's a very strange move indeed. maps.google.com implies an application lives there, far better than being on the root domain. It also means that when you start typing maps.google, you'd get all your history searchable related to maps, although arguably that's useless. I can't think of a reason why this would be a good technical move for Google (ignoring the don't do evil thingie), other than simplifying... certificates? Less lines in the firewall config... I'm stretching here, help me understand.
- luckylion 4y agoOther things: slightly simpler external DNS surface, probably tiny speed improvements because users only need to have the IP of www.google.com, not one for maps, one for www, one for whateverelse. More possibility for connection re-use, as you'd only need to have a connection open for www.google.com, not one for each service. And security wise: ISPs can now only see that you're accessing something at google, but not which service exactly. If they also bring in accounts.google.com into the fold, that would make it harder to see whether you have an account or not.
- fnordpiglet 4y agoTrue. I’m sure being a beyondcorp company they can’t figure out how to add dns entries. Those google guys really should learn more about the internet and it’s technologies. I don’t buy the simplicity argument for a second. The infrastructure exists, has existed for many years, and is not particularly exotic in the world. The only thing that matters to a surveillance and advertising company is surveillance and advertising. You don’t need to overthink this one.
- justusthane 4y agoThat’s a rather simplistic take; a company that makes money by surveilling you as you use their products also must care about the quality of their products. If their products suck, fewer people will use them = fewer people to surveil = less money! So not all changes are necessarily directly in the service of surveillance. Also, I don’t think your reply to the above comment was entirely fair; they didn’t say anything about adding DNS records, and also mentioned several other potential benefits of not using subdomains.
- bryanrasmussen 4y agoI am having a hard time figuring out how this would be affected by GDPR.
- gtirloni 4y agoDoes the GDPR care about the concept of apps and URLs? If not, all it matters is the person/company relationship.
- bryanrasmussen 4y agothe GDPR cares about the rights the company asks for, how long it keeps it, does it need the rights for the purpose, does it give you an easy way to opt out of the rights collection and so forth. If in order to not let all of Google have your location information you need to opt out of letting maps have your location information it might be a GDPR problem. Considering also that this was not a problem that people had before if indeed it is a problem now it might be taken as a wilful circumvention of GDPR.
- quicklime 4y agoThe GDPR does care about different “purposes”, it’s not just about the person/company relationship. I’m not a lawyer but my interpretation of this is that consent for Google to use location data for maps doesn’t allow them to use that same location data for email. > Consent should cover all processing activities carried out for the same purpose or purposes. When the processing has multiple purposes, consent should be given for all of them. https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-32 https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-32
- noneofyour 4y agoExactly. The consent was provided for the specific processing, not the TLD. The processing and all of those that are not incompatible with it, that it asked permission for that furthermore adhere to the requirements imposed regarding specific and informed consent in the GDPR (see Article 4, sub 11 GDPR and article 7 GDPR.
- bdcp 4y agohuh? You were always able to share sub-domain cookies with top-level domain cookies no? Set-Cookie: name=value; domain=google.com
- zuhsetaqi 4y agoSetting cookies doesn't allow using Browser APIs lie GEO-Location
- eknkc 4y agoCan you load, let's say maps.google.com/somepage in a hidden iframe and use postmessage to send location data if it already has access? Or do browsers force top level navigation for such permissions?
- amenghra 4y agoThere were probably covert ways to obtain the same information but it's now easier for Google to grab the information using regular APIs. It also means if app X and app Y on their own subdomains were previously using location APIs without any tricks, you are now effectively opting into both apps. Bottom line: technically it doesn't matter but it probably makes a difference in practice.
- eknkc 4y agoYeah it makes a lot of sense to do it this way, however it does not feel that nefarious when there were plausable workarounds anyway.
- amenghra 4y agoBrowser could implement finer grain permissions (i.e. only permit the API use for a given top level path regexp) but I bet most users won't bother fine tuning their grants.
- lloeki 4y ago
- fbn79 4y agoI'm wondering how much time browsers will take to implement URL match permission granting.
- jialutu 4y agoGoogle maps is pretty much one of the only Google products that I still actively use. It's funny that this article was written and published today, since I had noticed the exact same thing yesterday! Does anyone know when it first started?
- blameitonme 4y agorecently gmail.com became unreachable and was moved to mail.google.com dont know if its related
- Ptchd 4y agofor me, gmail.com has been redirecting to mail.google.com/mail for a long time...
- no_carrier 4y agoI think this change probably has more to do with corporate firewalls than anything else. A lot of corporate internet access isn't set up to MITM the requests (a lot of places are setup for this, but a lot aren't). If they places all their services under google.com as suffixes, places that don't MITM won't have any way of stopping it as all they can see is the request to google.com.
- uniqueuid 4y agoGiven the history of Google's stance towards privacy and tracking, I think it's naïve to assume technical reasons. It may have been ok to fall for that argument for 10 years, but after AMP, manifestv3, android's location log disaster, the recording of wifi names and countless lawsuits across the globe, it seems that the resource of good faith assumptions has been depleted. Some may even say that trusting google (the corporation) to act on technical or altruistic reasons is delusional.
- ilyt 4y agoGoogle: push security theathe features like CORS to make it hard to run cross domain Also Google: decides to use single domain so any permission you ever give work for all of their apps
- hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago> after AMP, manifestv3, android's location log disaster, the recording of wifi names and countless lawsuits across the globe Tangentially, it's funny how the whole Google+ fiasco with forcing G+ account creation for YT etc. was quickly forgotten.
- piva00 4y agoI haven't forgotten because my YouTube account to this day has remnants of that move. The same with my Google Contacts, it is an absolute mess of G+ and Orkut stuff that got shoved in there at some point and Google never cared to clean their absolute mess.
- 4y ago
- kaimalcolm 4y agoHas this not been the case for a while? I think I've been getting /maps for at least the past year.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rtsil 4y agothe /maps URL worked for a while, but I never noticed the redirect from maps.google.com (but I wasn't paying attention to that).
- toastal 4y agoYep. Noticed when I didn't want to enable JS on the whole of Google's domain in μBlock Origin. I switch to another browser for this task alone—especially as some regions have incomplete data for OpenStreetMap
- mkl 4y agoThis is not new. I'm pretty sure Google has done that kind of redirection for ages for me.
- teekert 4y agoFirefox containers to the rescue.
- hdjjhhvvhga 4y agoProbably the best tech we have against tech giants today. I mean, heavier solutions exist (like QubesOS), FF containers are so easy to use, I hope more people learn they exist.
- Namari 4y agoDoes it also contain permissions you give to a website? Will it block it if run within a container?
- deng 4y ago> Does it also contain permissions you give to a website? Will it block it if run within a container? No.
- deng 4y agoHow? Access to location will stick regardless if you use containers or not.
- teekert 4y agoIf you put all G-services in their own container, google.com/mail can't access google.com/maps cookies, so, will it also not track location. Not sure actually, they indeed probably store your "consent" on their server. Could you block location services per container perhaps? Hmm this is a smart move indeed, all of a sudden I'm logged into G-maps whereas I wasn't before... FireFox helpfully opened google.com/maps in my Google container...
- deng 4y ago> google.com/mail can't access google.com/maps cookies, so, will it also not track location google.com has now direct access to your location, it doesn't need any cookies.
- mkagenius 4y agoIts reverse for translate. https://google.com/translate https://google.com/translate redirects to translate.google.com
- nroets 4y agoI can understand why: Translate is the only service that works in China. Countries with censorship laws can easily choose what they allow.
- netheril96 4y agoThey don't work in China anymore. And when they worked, the domain was translate.google.cn instead.
- elnr 4y agoI suspect this may more be to do with large organisations (and equally foreign governments) wanting to block Google translate, since it can be used as a proxy in some cases.
- salsadip 4y agoRecently safari (on macos 10.15) started auto completing „maps.“ to „maps.apple.com“, although I only tried Apple maps once and always use gmaps. Maybe google noticed this and tries to circumvent safari‘s „preference“ for Apple Maps
- mngnt 4y agoIsn't maps.apple.com in your bookmarks? Most browsers suggest from bookmarks before anything else. Maybe it got added there in an update to. you know, improve your experience with the Apple ecosystem.
- salsadip 4y agoIts definitely not in my bookmarks. when i start typing, its under the section titled "top hits". google maps is right beneath it, but never first place
- gatefun 4y agoAs others have noticed, this is not a new move. For the past several years I've been accessing Google Maps simply by typing in maps.google.com and it has always redirected me to google.com/maps.
- Tepix 4y agoIt's new for me as well. I hadn't seen google.com/maps before.
- hbn 4y agoEven more confusing and a regular cause of annoyance for me that's been ongoing for a while now is there's like a knockoff version of Google Maps built into Google search that it'll kick you into if you click a map from search results. e.g. you type "gyms near me" and it shows you a map in the search results, and you click it to expand. It's still at the google.com/search domain and while you can zoom and pan around, there doesn't seem to be a way to arbitrarily jump into street view wherever you want, which I frequently want to do. I'm constantly ending up in this view, fighting with it before remembering I need to go to real Google Maps and do my search again.
- AaronNewcomer 4y agoSame. It's so annoying and I feel like they do not always include the relevant info like the URL in that mode. Though looking now I did not find examples of that.
- brazed_blotch 4y agoFunny, for me it’s the opposite. I always try to use the web view, and there’s an annoying pop up that redirects me to download Google maps. When I switch back into the web browser to go back to the web view, it auto redirects me to the app download again. Super annoying.
- dark-star 4y ago> Congratulations, you now have permission to geo-track me across all of your services. I don't think Google needed to do this move to track you across their services. Pretty sure they were able to do that before.
- dspillett 4y agoThis makes it problematical to block. Previously you could give location permission to map.google.com and not elsewhere. Now you can't be more selective: remove permission from search/other and maps stops working (or doesn't work as well). As others have pointed out, there are technical benefits too – but most (all?) of these technical benefits are essentially because it works around features designed to limit the scope of permissions.
- Tozen 4y agoMost people don't check their accounting settings, to see the massive amounts of data that Google is collecting on them or the amount of tracking they are doing. Even if a person adjusts the settings, its not really known to what extent the continual collection is actually mitigated or privacy is being ensured. To include users data being sent to 3rd parties or governments at Google's prerogative or their employees, or to the extent results and services are manipulated for Google's own internal purposes and benefit.
- pharmakom 4y agoYuck! Any suggestions for an good open street maps app on iOS? Offline capability would be a huge plus.
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y agoThis 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 cripple my workflow too much.
- whym 4y ago> (or whatever they are called these days, Google for Work?) Gmail is currently branded as part of Google Workspace, and shows the Workspace logo upon sign in. It probably has been that way architecturarly for a long time, but I think they have made it more explicit relatively recently, at least for non-corporate users. It looks like "Google for Work" is an old name of Google Workspace.
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y agoLike their chat apps, they change names so often that I just call them Google Docs most of the time.
- chrismorgan 4y agoSome 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.
- pmontra 4y agoGoogle has been prompting me with an Accept / Reject dialog on Maps and YouTube for years. It used to be split in several sections but luckily it became only two buttons a few months ago. I click reject and start mapping / watching.
- durnygbur 4y agoYou guys are still using google and dreaming about working for them?!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dislikedtom2 4y agoI have never shared my location via browser, including google maps. Still, google very well knows where I live and focuses on my home as default, when I open google maps. I'm curious what do you seek by sharing your location with google (maps)?
- nroets 4y agoPerhaps your home router has a public IP. Google gets the location of the home router from just one Android phone connecting to it. I'm guessing. But some home routers are behind CGNAT infrastructure: Then it's possible that TCP connections from the same browser can go through different public IP addresses. Sharing the location helps Google to help users. And Google to target ads better.
- hartator 4y agoNote that Google before can just have an iframe to load maps.google.com to get your location info. Don’t change much in term of privacy.
- jimlikeslimes 4y agoGenuine question. Is it reasonable as a user to expect data collected by Google via maps.google.com to not be shared with other Google applications e.g. mail.google.com? I'd have thought data collected on any of their domains would be meshed/merged behind the scenes where it suits them to do so?
- rightbyte 4y agoThe different Google Apps surely rat you out to each other. But now google.com will know where he is when he browses it, not just when he uses Google Maps.
- raziel2p 4y agoI think the concern is more about when Google is able to collect said data, not whether it's shared or not. I don't have location enabled for Google maps in the browser, but if I did, then presumably Google could collect that data also when I'm just searching for a website.
- dclowd9901 4y agoBut isn’t collected/shared inherently the same thing here?
- theptip 4y agoNo, what they are talking about is all Google properties (eg Google search) now being able to collect your location every time you use them, if you granted permission for maps to get your location. So it’s now not possible to block location for search, and grant it to maps (at least using the standard browser domain permissions model). https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/114662?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/114662?hl=en&co=GEN...
- luckylion 4y agoBut they could've been doing that all along because they control both sites, they would've just needed to use an iFrame. What changed beyond "it's a little easier now"?
- Eleison23 4y agoI don't use the maps.google.com URL anymore because, 99% of the time, I use the app. Whether it's the PWA desktop app on Windows, or the Android app on my phone, I just don't go to the website of Google properties anymore, I use them through an app and that doesn't expose a raw URL.
- ghusto 4y agoI got this a couple of years ago, and noticed immediately. Just as quickly denied the request, because I have fingers and can type my current address. It's a minor inconvenience.
- tasuki 4y ago> because I have fingers and can type my current address How would you always know your current address? I often use maps with gps to find out where I am. Many places have no address.
- bmacho 4y agoI use maps only for route planning. If I don't know where I am, I use an offline GPS.
- ghusto 4y agoNot trying to be snarky, but it might be that I don't get what you mean: I just look at the street name, which is posted on every street? I've never been anywhere that has no address at all, but I guess in those situations it wouldn't make any difference if I only knew roughly (like when I'm camping?).
- bmacho 4y agoI never type my current address but a location nearby. (I am sure that google know exactly where am I, still..)
- gjadi 4y agoFunny thing is, it depends on your threat model. Using google.com/XXX for all its services protect the user from being spied by external actors such as ISP because everything is hidden behind HTTPS. Whereas, with XXX.google.com, external actors knows that you are using service XXX.
- nottorp 4y agoThe threat here is google.
- gjadi 4y agoIf your threat is google, it would be wise not to use google in the first place. As other mentioned, OSM is an alternative (not equivalent) of Google Maps.
- godzillabrennus 4y agoIf only there was a drop in replacement for Google Workspace… even if you use Fastmail for email you don’t have Google docs anymore and that’s a huge piece…
- nottorp 4y agoThe worse problem is you give Maps location permissions and that can translate now to the 3 billion sites that use Analytics isn't it?
- __michaelg 4y agoThis 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, there is also no evidence that this isn't the real reason and that they wouldn't do that in the future. But the blog post basically list a single symptom and jumps right to the one conclusion that fits what the author expects.
- stingraycharles 4y agoIt 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 to just block without crippling other functionality. So they even have a history of using precisely these types of techniques.
- jstummbillig 4y ago> 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.
- mrd999 4y agoThis 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.
- 4y ago
- newaccount74 4y agoIt's even worse with their iOS apps. I've tried to avoid logging into my Google account on Safari on my iPhone because I am scared of them tracking me, but I also wanted to use the Google Keep app for sharing a shopping list with my partner. But when you launch the Google Keep app, iOS asks you whether you want to allow the app to share data with "google.com". It turns out that there is no way to sign into the Google Keep app without also signing into Google in Safari! I don't know how this works, but it is horrible! If I want to use a Google app on my phone, I basically have to give them permission to track me everywhere!
- darren_ 4y ago> It turns out that there is no way to sign into the Google Keep app without also signing into Google in Safari! If you're wondering why you're getting downvoted it's because this isn't true at all. I'm signed into (several) iOS google apps and my Safari browser is not signed into google.
- newaccount74 4y agoPlease tell me how! All I know is that I was not able to sign into Google Keep without accepting the data sharing prompt, and I was signed into my Google account in Safari after logging into the Google Keep app. It was of course possible to sign out of Safari afterwards. I don't know how to reproduce the issue. I've tried uninstalling the Google Keep app, to trigger the alert again, but when I reinstall the app it remembers my Google account! I'm really surprised how hard it is to get these cookies or app preferences or whatever off my device after signing in once. EDIT: It seems the Google Keep app stores my account in the iOS keychain and there is no way to delete the item from the keychain without deleting all data on the phone, so I can't reproduce the "new device" situation easily. However, if I try to add a new account, I get the same dialog. It says something like (rough translation) "Google Keep wants to use google.com for logging in. If you allow this, the app and the website are allowed to share data about your person". If I tap "cancel" in this alert, I can't log in. So as far as I can tell, what I said is correct. Maybe it was different in the past, but this is what the situation on iOS 16 currently looks like.
- lakomen 4y agoThis title is as clickbaity as it gets
- avar 4y agoIt asked my for the permission earlier. I thought I'd granted it already and I didn't notice the sneaky domain switch, I've now revoked it. I wish browsers had a more granular way to grant this and other permissions. E.g. Firefox just has allow/deny, and then "remember". Granting it only if the user clicks the "show my location" UI element on the web page would be a closer match to user expectations, and would preclude pages from getting the permission in the background. Of course that would introduce extra complexity, e.g. worrying about web pages sneakily making normal looking links the "get location" UX element. There's probably no secure way to do it except for the webpage to communicate that it's a page that might want your location, and for the browser to show the "send my location" UX element itself (e.g. in the toolbar).
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mrjin 4y agoIt looks like the result of the arm race with DNS based ad/tracker blockers. This move will for sure force the users to make a hard decision of "all or nothing".
- ignoramous 4y agoIf this ever was a race, it was always a losing one. DNS-based content-blocker are woefully inadequate. I'd know since I co-maintain one and the barrage of complaints I get make it plenty clear where unaddressable limitations lie.
- r0m4n0 4y agoOn another note, I feel like EVERY day my iPhone asks me if I want to share my location with google. I’ll be searching something in Safari on google that’s obviously location based and I get a dialog that pops up. I have allowed it 100s of times. https://imgur.com/gallery/LleCkEo https://imgur.com/gallery/LleCkEo I hate this and don’t want to see it ever again. Allow always, allow never, I don’t care. This reminds me of the GDPR popups… I feel like once you have popups everywhere, they lose their value and become an annoyance
- r0m4n0 4y agoJust FYI. After this rant, looked it up and apparently you can set in OS settings to allow for all websites, or deny for all websites. No granular control though
- nathan_f77 4y agoI 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 they both look like regular website links.
- rmbyrro 4y agoPotentially a black hat SEO trick? We might see Google services' rankings punished on Google from now on...
- dpryden 4y agoI 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.)
- nolok 4y agoThis 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 techie I hate any direct change to the user-agnostic absolute search, but as a user I get it.
- hbossy 4y agoIt gets really annoying when you are trying to search for some specific term in English and google keep guessing that you wanted something that sounds similar in your native tongue.
- titzer 4y agoThis is achievable with geolocation based on IP address, which is how it works on, e.g. a desktop web browser.
- syliconadder 4y agoI already assumed this was the case to begin with, so I sold my soul even before it was up for auction.
- api 4y agoI’ve noticed that Google searches often request location. I never say yes but most people will to maps. So yeah this makes sense… as a way to make sure I don’t use Google.
- codeflo 4y agoI noticed that Google Search itself has very recently become much more aggressive about asking for location permission. Coincidence, or is collecting more location data someone high up’s KPI for the year?
- pifm_guy 4y agoA bit reason for using separate subdomains originally is because there are security benefits. If there is an XSS attack that leaks cookies from Google Keep, you would prefer that not get your cookie for Google Maps. As browser security models have evolved, subdomains are no longer as isolated as top level domains, so I dunno...
- saltcured 4y agoI think the main issue here is people conflate the security boundaries defined by the website operators with the security or privacy boundaries a user might want to enforce. The web origin chosen for the service operator's XSS sandbox is not necessarily what a privacy-focused user wants. It's only useful when a trustworthy operator is designing for the benefit of the user. There should really be a more granular way for the user's policy to adjust the origin definitions used for cross-origin logic as well as other types of content blocking and enforcement. Why shouldn't a user be able to isolate https://example.com/app1 https://example.com/app1 as much as https://app1.example.com https://app1.example.com? Why shouldn't they be able to grant any permission to be used in a single page https://example.com/app1/usefulpage https://example.com/app1/usefulpage and not in other pages on the site? The multi-container approach to browser session isolation faces the same issues. Different users may have different preferences for when navigation shares the session and when navigation should kick you into a new session that lacks authentication, tracking, or app state.
- coffeeblack 4y agoThis is actually something that browsers can mitigate. Allow users to give tracking permissions not only for subdomains, but also for paths. Deny: google.com/* Allow: google.com/flights Something like that.
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoYeah but, the biggest browser is Chrome, by Google; they have an incentive to allow tracking and access across their services.
- vanilla_nut 4y agoIndeed. If you use Chrome, you should just assume that your location is shared with Google at all times, since they likely collect it via telemetry anyway. If you use Firefox, assume your location is always shared with Mozilla via telemetry... and likely indirectly to Google as well, since they use Google Analytics for so much of their infra. Likewise for Apple/Google/Microsoft collecting data from iOS/macOS/Android/Windows. And of course your cellular provider. As far as I know the only way to ensure your personal data isn't shared with your browser publisher is to use a verifiable, open source browser that has telemetry disabled, like Iceweasel or Librewolf. And an open source, verifiable OS with telemetry disabled, like... Fedora, maybe? Manjaro? But you're being spied on by your ISP or cellular provider anyway, and the US government indirectly through your ISP and cell provider. And let's be honest, foreign governments through some combination of ISP/cellular provider/govt backdoors. Oh, and if you've read "Trusting Trust" you'll know that even OSS isn't necessarily verifiable unless you wrote the compiler yourself from scratch. So I'm not sure there's much benefit to any of it?
- LoganDark 4y ago> Oh, and if you've read "Trusting Trust" you'll know that even OSS isn't necessarily verifiable unless you wrote the compiler yourself from scratch. And even a compiler you wrote yourself from scratch isn't necessarily verifiable unless you designed from scratch the hardware that you used to write it. Almost nobody knows what those Management Engines are doing!
- nigamanth 4y agoThe chances are, geotracking or not google knows a lot about you and this just adds on to the data.
- RobertRoberts 4y agoThey did this with Gmail years ago. Same scheme, I warned everyone that gmail.com would change over to a google related domain, and it didn't take long. And I tried to explain how it meant every email could be directly related to your internet traffic. "What do I have to hide?" was always the response...
- jsnell 4y agoI don't believe your alleged change happened. Gmail was hosted under google.com literally from the day it launched [0]. [0] http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2004/04/google-gets-message-launches-gmail.html http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2004/04/google-gets-message-...
- RobertRoberts 4y agoIt did, I watched it explicitly for this reason, but I guess unless it's documented somewhere, oh well. It was even googlemail.com for awhile. Edit: It's possible my concern was the subdomain and my memory is off. It moved from a subdomain to a /gmail at one point (or something similar). That is when I swore off it. What clearly recall is that there was something wrong, either it was how it did a redirect to google.com first and then back or shared cookies in a very sneaky way that alerted me. (I was building sites at the time and I was privacy conscience early on in my career)
- jsnell 4y agoSure, this is what that Wikipedia page says: > As of 22 June 2005, Gmail's canonical URI changed from http://gmail.google.com/gmail/ http://gmail.google.com/gmail/ to http://mail.google.com/mail/ http://mail.google.com/mail/. As you can see from your own source, the canonical URL has always been under google.com, not under gmail.com. Edit: the parent post was originally linking to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gmail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gmail, before being edited
- RobertRoberts 4y ago
- rrwo 4y agoIt makes sense to use geolocation for search. It's not just for searching for businesses, as the meaning of a word you are searching for will depend on where you are. IP-based geolocation isn't very reliable. And if people are using VPNs then it's useless.
- butz 4y agoI wonder, why Google hasn't moved to .google domains, as they own TLD? maps.google, mail.google, search.google seems to be shortest versions possible.
- OrangeMusic 4y agoMost people are confused with this, they expect websites to end with .com.
- stonogo 4y agoI'd appreciate a shred of evidence to back this up. It's been my finding that people don't have any expectations of URLs at all. People expected .com in the 2000s, but times have changed.
- gernb 4y agoSlightly different but I find it super confusing when search shows maps. For example https://www.google.com/search?tbs=lf:1,lf_ui:9&tbm=lcl&q=closest+pizza&rflfq=1&num=10 https://www.google.com/search?tbs=lf:1,lf_ui:9&tbm=lcl&q=clo... This looks like maps but it's not, it's search, so the UI is different. Features I expect from "maps" are missing
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- AtNightWeCode 4y agoIt is for SEO. Maps product will ride on the widely used google.com domain. ;)
- torstenvl 4y agoMaybe they'll fix the ~5yo regression where a search for from:City, ST to:Town, ST no longer results in the obvious (and previous) behavior.
- lapcat 4y agoI've been seeing this redirect for literally years. It's not new.
- Izkata 4y ago...this redirect has been in place for years. Honestly maybe even a decade at this point, it's been a long time.
- Jowsey 4y agoI've also been using earth.google.com etc for many years, can confirm not new at all
- calibas 4y agoAccording to my browser's history, March 31st, 2022 was the last time maps.google.com didn't perform a redirect.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- iambateman 4y agoMaybe they think the subfolder approach will help their SEO.
- bambax 4y agoHN title "moderation" (ie, arbitrary ex post facto editing) is frankly infuriating. It doesn't add meaning, it removes it.
- maxfurman 4y agoIt just started doing this now? I've been using google.com/maps for years, and that isn't the canonical address?
- aiddun 4y agoNow how long until they put ads under google.com/*
- soheil 4y agoI kinda like the new url. The other reason could be that browsers won't be able to autocomplete the url any more if you start typing map... and hit enter to go directly to the site. Now you probably have to do a google search for "maps" first and then click on the first link driving more traffic to Search.
- fragmede 4y agoThis changed yesterday? What the hell? Don't you people know there's a freeze going on?
- Sebguer 4y agoNow if someone could just update movies.google.com to point to literally anything else.