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Comment by fixermark | Hacker News Reader

When a user searches for "Restaurants near me," how does Google answer that question reliably without using its own mapping service?

Trying to feed that query to a third-party service and then give users the results back adds significant risk that the third-party changes their API, changes their feature-set in an incompatible way, goes out of business, gets in a corporate fight with the search provider...

It's both cheaper and more convenient for the end-user if the search provider handles the mapping itself (in the absence of some kind of universal understood interface standard, complete with some kind of incentive to adhere to it).

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They pay to integrate with third party services via a bidding process.

> adds significant risk that the third-party changes their API, changes their feature-set in an incompatible way, goes out of business

All very unlikely to happen when dealing with a client the size of google.

> It's both cheaper and more convenient for the end-user if the search provider handles the mapping itself

added bonus, google gets to dominate mapping then jack up the cost 30x when they decide they want it to be a billion dollar business. LIke they did recently.

> They pay to integrate with third party services via a bidding process.

It's an interesting idea; I don't think I've seen something like that floated before outside of the government space of fair bidding against contracts.

> added bonus, google gets to dominate mapping then jack up the cost 30x when they decide they want it to be a billion dollar business. LIke they did recently.

I hear OpenStreetMaps still exists, and has an API.

An API not suitable for commercial use. So now you're relying on a third party who is suddenly trying to cope with some percentage of the insane traffic of google maps. If they can they make a lot of money.

if not you lose money by switching to them. if it's less than the new rate that you get from google, it's a hard sell to switch. You might point out that this third party should spend the money to scale, but unlike google they aren't equipped with an advertising firehose of cash that they can point at a losing business whenever they want. They have to operate a scale they can afford. Best case they have the staff to build out a service that they can scale quickly enough to take advantage. Realistically, that means using a cloud service provided by one of the oligarchs.

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