DuckDuckGo Expands Use of Apple Maps
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I’ve used Apple Maps as my primary map since it came out, and I’ve only gotten a wrong location one time in literally thousands of searches, and that was years ago. It wasn’t really ready when it launched, but it has gotten consistently better over time. The UX is great, in many cases the satellite imagery is more up-to-date compared to Google, and it doesn’t maul my battery to use. Not saying it’s clearly better than Google, because it isn’t, but for my usage it’s more than “good enough,” and I love to see Apple’s privacy respecting products compete effectively with big G.
If privacy is worth something to you, it’s clearly better than Google.
I, too, use Apple as my primary map. In many cases, Apple Maps is better Google. The ones in which it’s behind are more than made up for by Apple’s values.
Is it? Has everyone forgotten the Yelp tracking beacon? Good thing Apple relies on Yelp for business info and has pretty deep Yelp integration with the mobile app.
You're right, if you click around in the Maps app (desktop or mobile) it takes you straight to the shady source (yelp.com).
Edit: Also this:
https://www.courthousenews.com/data-mining-privacy-suit-agai...
Apple Maps doesn't use Yelp as a primary data source. It's used to add extra information (like reviews and photos) to existing points of interest, but the points of interest themselves are catalogued by Apple or their data providers. If you click around in Apple Maps a bit, you'll find that not all POIs have Yelp data.
> Edit: Also this: [a lawsuit about social features in the Yelp app]
I'm not sure how this is relevant.
Apple Maps steers you pretty hard towards the Yelp app if you want any business info.
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 unpaid Google Scouts (though they could easily fix this) and is wasting time on minutia rather than task their staff/contractors with sourcing & importing higher quality data regularly. One example would be importing county shapefiles, Apple could easily vault ahead of Google Maps if they diffed their map against each of the thousands of county maps in the USA, and they would be the only one regularly doing this (OSM does this occasionally, but not often).
They could also scrape business data from each state and use that to produce more accurate & detailed business listings than Google, among many other low hanging fruit.
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.
Which is? If I say "Hey Siri, how do I report an error with your navigation?" I get search results for how to report problems with Google Maps. And I definitely don't see any UI widgets that suggest that they're for reporting problems.
There is no "i" button from the navigation screen and there's no "i" button from the search results either if you want to report entirely irrelevant results.
This is likely an intentional design decision, and it sounds like a common-sense safety feature.
> there's no "i" button from the search results either if you want to report entirely irrelevant results.
You can hit the (i) after you make the problematic search.
Great feature for walking and public transit directions. They still have interactive bits for the driving directions — I can't imagine what sort of "common sense" simply hides the report a problem thing until you dig through a few levels of mediocre UI.
In another sense I'm not sure why it should matter to the end user how many interns Apple hires to do things behind the scenes. I'm imagining that Apple is well aware of these shortcomings. Not only that I wonder if operational information observations like this quickly become outdated. i.e. it's all manual and terrible until somebody gets around to automating it.
> These user reports take weeks to months to get triaged, making many rather useless.
My experience is closer to the "a few days" as well; they were faster than the one time I remember reporting something to Google Maps. YMMV and all that, but.
My son's school is in a kafka-ish situation with Google where their listing is wrong and cannot be changed. People cannot write reviews, and data doesn't get updated.
98/100 times, updates to Apple or Google mapping products are done in hours or days. The 2/100, forget it.
Apple's data is flat out junk in London. Garbage.
Choose your poison.
Is it? It was widely reported at the time (e.g., [1, 2]) that they were getting rid of Google Maps and creating Apple Maps because Google wanted to keep spoken turn-by-turn directions an Android-only feature.
[1]: https://daringfireball.net/2012/09/get_the_fainting_chair
[2]: https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-jilted-google-maps-over-verb...
This Wikipedia article has a few examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_re-identification
I suspect that all the news articles reporting on this issue are probably greatly misunderstanding how technology works.
> And all night long, there was some startling behavior by a household name: Yelp. It was receiving a message that included my IP address — once every five minutes. [1]
Literally any load balancer is going to know what IP address you're coming from. Having a website logging your IP address is not cause for alarm. A good mitigator for this probelm would be to disable background activity for Yelp or any other apps you feel do not need that sort of access.
The journalist also makes no attempt to explain what steps they took to attempt to change their Yelp account preferences. They did not inform us whether or not they were logged in or opted in or out of any particular preferences. That's what makes the story so unhelpful.
A more useful version of that article should be informing people to make a check on all their account preferences every time they sign up for a service. Usually, marketing and telemetry settings are on by default. I most definitely don't agree with this, but it's not unique to Yelp.
Perhaps you're also referring to a lawsuit in progress regarding the way in which Yelp transfers contacts? [2]
In this case, the arguments center around some rather nebulous contract law, in my layman's understanding of the case. Again, your OS already protects you - if you never grant an application access to your contacts, you never have to worry about the transmission of that data.
It should be smartphone 101 that allowing an application data access will allow it forever, because that's how iOS has worked since day one. Again, we need more protections in the form of laws, not just conventions, and I don't agree with the idea that data can be sent around willy nilly, but this is the reality baked in to all mobile applications. Once you give third party code access to your data in a rather explicit fashion, it's not in your control what's done with it.
So this still sounds bad, perhaps, but also, an iPhone with the default install and iCloud login is much more private than Google with a Google Account login. In Google's case, Google Maps has seen everything and can correlate it to your email content, business search activity, current location, and a host of other data especially if you use their search engine or YouTube. In Apple's case, Apple Maps just opened up yelp.com within Safari when you click on a business result (unless you explicitly install the Yelp app and give it permissions).
[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/while-youre-sleeping-y...
[2] https://www.courthousenews.com/data-mining-privacy-suit-agai...
You sure about that? For me tapping on any business info takes me straight to the iOS app store.
A bit of a sidenote, but the worst part is that now Yelp doesn't just nag you to get the app and/or login. It displays the nag splash page and doesn't let you see any information at all until you install the app and/or login.
Apple Maps in Melbourne, Australia is fantastic. I find their public transport directions better, and their driving directions on-par.
I reverted to the HERE maps app for navigation which worked perfectly, but does not appear to be compatible with CarPlay yet, so I had to use a mount for the phone.
It’s trivial to lump things together in GAAP accounting statements.
(Hint: your pithy statement is equally meaning free)
Likewise there are many many ways to make money - and when you have other companies who do similar things to you, which route you choose makes you appeal to one sector of the market over another. Differentiation is where vision and values become important (although of course you need to actually turn that into action to be meaningful).
They say that they try to do as much processing on device as possible and when data (for stuff like Maps) is submitted centrally, they anonymise the data collection - so they can learn usage information without knowing who it's from.
We don't know exactly how effective this is, as they are a secretive company, and this doesn't mean that bugs and breaches don't happen. But they make the point that, as their revenue comes from products and services, not targeted advertising, they don't need that data collection in order to grow the business.
I think personally, I don't find it believable that one of the world's largest public companies would have the discipline to forgo a revenue stream as big as advertising over the long term. If they have the data they'll eventually use it IMHO.
It's interesting to think of privacy concerns as split between concerns about sharing data with a "counterparty" company, and concerns about sharing data with a third party like an advertiser. I think I'm at least as concerned about giving data to a counter party as I am to giving it to a third party.
I never really thought about privacy conerns as beeing the concern that one's data could leave a BIGTECH company. Always thought about it as allowing one of those companies access in the first place.
For example, with maps, they chop your travel into pieces with no common identifiers.
So that way, they get traffic information and can understand which routes are busy or frequently used.
But, because there's no identifiers involved and it's broken into pieces before it reaches them, even if they wanted to, they can't tie that data back to you or recreate your actual journey on a particular day.
Which in turn means they can't build a picture of where you, as an individual, go.
That's a rough paraphrase of what Apple have said, anyway.
As far as revenue streams go, they make their money from hardware and increasingly subscription services. Differentiation is important - and because of their business model, they can talk about privacy in a way that their competition cannot.
Is anyone aware of a setting/workaround to use OSM in DDG instead of apple maps? I would rather provide my free labor to an open project, and I'm most likely to submit corrections when I notice them from a search.
Google Maps does a very nice job for bikes. If I should wish something of Google Maps it would be “I bring my bike on the train” routes, which is a very common and nice way to get around here in Denmark at least.
Bonus points if they build in cost optimization, ie, "take the train 80% of the way there and then Uber for the last leg, optionally saving you 20 mins for an extra $8, or bring a bike to save 10 mins for no extra cost". I'm reading that Citymapper might do this in London, but I've not seen it in their NYC version unless I'm just being dense?
Getting all that data for a single city would be impressive, let alone around the world.
Not that Google couldn't do it of course.
It works alright. Sometimes it works really well, but I just tested it out now for a short trip and it suggests going too many stops out of my way to get a citibike. Not sure why, as there are bikes available at closer stations.
I also don't think it supports the idea of "I have a bike". It's mostly transferring from public transport to a bike share and vice versa.
> Bonus points if they build in cost optimization, ie, "take the train 80% of the way there and then Uber for the last leg,
It does do this (or at least is doing it in my current test). If I ask for directions from home to LGA, one of the Labs options is to take the G to the 7 to Junction Blvd and then take an Uber for $10-14. An UberX from my home to LGA right now costs $24.60
These routes are only as good as the data, but at least in Western Europe, the map data is quite accurate.
...if you need bike routes for daily map app use.
Since I don't, should I also not use it because of this reason?
I’ve just started testing Apple Maps as Google Maps replacement, and the quality seems to be highly dependent on the location. Cities, densely populated areas seem fine, but I’m currently traveling somewhat rural polish areas and apple maps seems to have no distinction between solid country roads and unpaved path. If it shows up on a map, you can travel it seems to be its credo.
For navigation, Waze can't find a route 1/5 times for a longer trip, and Google Maps gets weirder and more hostile to use every few months. For me, they have tweaked their routing engine to be more "creative" and direct you in weird ways. Big G is too fat and happy and they need a challenge.
Apple Maps is fine now from an accuracy POV. They are more conservative about routing and Apple gives the app privileged treatment on iOS that improves the UX while driving. Now that Apple seems to be embracing letting services move beyond their platform, I think we'll see them give Google a run for their money.
What you'll find is that they have two general options. From the west coast of North Korea almost straight south, threading the needle between the west coast of South Korea and the east coast of China. And from the west coast of North Korea to the north-east at the general direction of the Tsugaru Strait. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwangmy%C5%8Fngs%C5%8Fng-4#/me...
(Something else to consider is the apogee of the launch. Typically those Tsugaru Straight launches are almost straight up with apogees several thousand kilometers above earth (for reference, the ISS hangs out at around ~400km))
It sure seems to me these are indeed tests, not earnest attempts to nuke Tokyo or anything like that. If it were the later, they'd probably start off by actually aiming for Tokyo.
Dude, Apple Maps jokes are so 2012.
Apple Maps has improved significantly in recent years. With iOS 13, it's going to annihilate Google Maps.
I suffer with Apple Maps because I find Google that unethical, but... the UX is atrocious. Navigation with Apple leaves the phone unresponsive (unlocking takes a few tries), but not with Google. This behavior has persisted for me across a few different phones.
The biggest thing that leads to teeth gnashing for me is that after a while my location search will time out. Great if you've got network connectivity, not so great if you're trying to go somewhere more remote (or have your phone in airplane mode, etc, etc) and the location you just searched for disappears.
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...
What a miserable service.
Not sure which one got it wrong. We ended up in some neighborhood two miles from the theater.
I knew once we pulled off the main road and into that neighborhood that we were screwed.
Have you reported this to Apple? The Apple Maps apps (iPhone and macOS) have a means by which you can report a variety of issues, including incorrect search results. In my experience Apple tends to be pretty good about handling these.
I never reported it as I just immediately went back to Google Maps, but I'll do that now, good suggestion.
I just put the two following addresses into Notes:
23 California St, San Francisco, CA
23 California Ave, San Francisco, CA
California St is at 94104
Please don't blame Apple Maps for user error
You're searching for "California St, San Francisco, CA 94130" and Apple seems to parse this from right to left. California Ave happens to be the closest match to "California St" in ZIP code 94130 and apparently is a stronger signal than "California St, San Francisco, CA !94130 but actually 94104"
Several other people at my final destination reported the same problem, though they'd all caught it and fixed the destination manually.
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://maps.apple.com/imagecollection
https://www.fastcompany.com/90373170/apple-maps-is-catching-...
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.
That's something that stood out immediately as it passed, their camera dome was actively spinning, at a pretty high RPM. Unsure if Google Maps cars are using similar technology, or if their imaging apparatus is still one pod with multiple cameras placed along laterally-I haven't seen one here recently.
Privacy reasons aside, I just despise using GMaps for its clashing app styling on iOS and seemingly heavier battery usage. Apple Maps' design feels like it gets out of your way and focuses on the things that matter.
Yesterday I was trying to remember if this deli was on Howard or Folsom (and I forgot the exact name). The search results for 'deli' were basically everywhere on North America except for where I was (including across town). Searching for businesses with Apple Maps is nearly impossible, and the insistence upon installing the Yelp app to get more info is just infuriating.
Edit: Oh yeah and it can't find Grainger in Millbrae to save its life. Shit happens and business info is one of the hardest parts about mapping. Unfortunately Apple makes it damn near impossible to report problems to a real human.
Edit edit: My all time favorite though was asking Siri for directions to some club that I usually take BART to. I kept getting directions to a not that nearby and not that similarly named bail bondsman.
Click on POI, scroll down and select "Report an Issue" and similarly when a route is complete there is a reporting option.
So what happens when it's clear the route is all wrong and you don't want to follow it to its completion? And, honestly, while I remember a report problems thing at the end of a route I don't remember seeing it recently.
In addition to reporting wrong directions, you can also report the arrival entrance (ex: moving the pin into a parking lot vs. the entrance to the parking lot)
Where? If I go into the detailed list of directions nothing responds to taps and there's no "i" button, only a lonely "Done" button.
This is all anecdotal, which is kind of the issue, isn't it? I'm in the Bay Area, too, and I very rarely have any problems with Apple Maps. It isn't perfect, but it's absolutely not "pretty awful." I have no significant problems finding businesses with Apple Maps; I literally just typed "deli" and the first search suggestion that came up was "Delis - search nearby," and it, well, found delis nearby.
Problems due to long-term construction seem to be a weakness for it, but I've run into those issues with Google and Waze, too.
Even when I know the name I often have problems finding something in Apple Maps. Up in Marin, searching for "Apple Store" pulled up listings for the Apple Stores in the East Bay (the one in Corte Madera was significantly lower).
Or, if I'm looking for the specific address for the junk yard... for a while it would sort the results in seemingly random order. Right now it seems to at least be sorting by distance, but I think it default to heavily weighting towards what you were last looking at, which almost makes sense (but this seems to persist even if you move someplace else lending an utterly unpredictable feel to the results). This wouldn't be a huge problem but the distance is only shown for the top two results, and the city name is often truncated so chains will often be hard to distinguish from one another. Even better if I scroll up too far it backs out of the search itself and clears the search bar.
Edit: Oh yeah, and the deli was actually called a market (but I had also searched for market and only gotten results for Market Street).
Do you perhaps mean a (solid) quad yellow line (aka a painted island)? It's legal to turn left across a double yellow into a driveway, private road, cross street etc in California (and every other state I've lived in long enough to look up the laws) per [1], specifically (d). It's _not_ legal to pass on a solid double yellow.
[1]: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
I'm pretty sure Van Ness only has a single set of double lines. What I remember from driver's ed is that you're allowed to turn into a driveway but that's about it. While it doesn't appear match up with the legal (or popular[1]) definitions, the DMV handbook[2] seems to indicate you're only allowed to make a U-turn or turn into a driveway on a double yellow.
That said, there are no left turn signs at every signaled intersection along Van Ness these days, and even if not there's so much traffic that a left turn from a busy state highway into a side street was just a blindingly stupid suggestion.
Today was fun. For the hell of it I fired up some walking directions. Instead of walking along the sidewalk, turning at major intersections Apple had me zig zag down an alley and then cross the next street in the middle of the block instead of at the signal.
1: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-08-10-me-4856-s...
2: https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/pubs/hdbk/traffic_l...
It depends on the country, but for search what really matters are the points of interest and Apple Maps in my country doesn't have any, whereas OSM and Google Maps are competing head to head.
Even for driving, the OSM apps available, while lower quality, are more reliable when I travel to Bulgaria for example. The penetration of Google Maps in Eastern Europe isn't great and Apple Maps isn't worth bothering with.
Anyway, I wonder why DuckDuckGo is choosing Apple Maps. It makes no sense IMO from a user experience perspective.
Remember that if you're in California or New York, those are the primary markets targeted by all tech companies, so your experience with Apple Maps is not representative of the rest of the world.
In my travels OSM fares quite well in terms of its POS database and is the only one that can compete with Google Maps in that regard.
There is plenty of room for these tech companies to plow some of their profits into data sets from outside San Francisco.
Not a lot of localization, no voice control in different languages, maps suck, Google is well ahead of them in that regard.
See: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tile_servers and https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Creating_your_own_tiles.
It makes sense from a privacy perspective. Both of the companies are probably aware of the fact that Apple Maps are really fucking bad at the moment. So was DDG at the beginning. It's incredibly difficult to offer a product that matches Google's when you're two decades behind. The only way to improve is to gather more data. You don't need to collect personal data in order to improve the service, just data in general.
Including Apple Maps in a privacy-first search engine gives Apple the marketing boost in their target market: relatively rich people that do have something to hide. If you use a privacy-aware search engine, and you see that search engine partnering with Apple, it's easier to believe that Apple truly is privacy aware. I still have my doubts, but they're slowly but surely diminishing.
From DDG's perspective, it gives them relevance. They're no longer just a small player in the market trying to make a name for themselves. They're big enough to be able to partner with Apple. This isn't their first collaboration neither: Safari was the first major browser that included their search engine out of the box (Firefox was the second one, about two months later).
It also makes perfect sense for them to stick together, because their ultimate goal is the same: to offer an alternative to surveillance capitalism. It still doesn't make much sense in the short run, but it makes perfect sense in the long run. The more people distrust Google/Facebook/Microsoft/Amazon, the more they're gonna look for the alternatives. DDG, Apple, and similar companies just need to be stubborn. The market will find them, not the other way around.
Apple is one of the world's biggest companies and they'll do whatever it takes for them to stay on top. This year they may be privacy friendly, but what about in 5 years from now? Google was not creepy when they started out and even now they are more trustworthy than many other companies.
True privacy oriented solutions are open solutions, projects and databases that can be forked. And the forking aspect is essential, because these online services are locking people in.
This is why OpenStreetMaps is so important, because it can be forked, whereas Apple Maps cannot be.
DuckDuckGo can't be forked either AFAIK, which is also a problem. We need an open index of the web too.
Google Maps has shown what can happen if you use it for anything business critical.
edit: Sadly OSM doesn't yet have services like forward adress search (might be too expensive to provide). It would enable many businesses to use it for adress comparison to clean up their own data for example. I think that could put OSM on the map so to speak.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.github.axe...
Fantastic non-cluttered UI and offline maps that don't eat up my mobile data.
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...
I don't think there's a single piece of mapping software that doesn't suck hard in some way. It's pretty annoying how google maps shows you x number of results zoomed out, y zoomed in, and z with the map frame moved half a block to the left.
Just show me everything. Search the entire city. Flood my map. Let me do the vetting, that's what I came to maps to do anyway.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=coffee+shop&t=h_&ia=recipes&iaxm=m...
Edit: searching for "cafe" gives better results but still not great
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cafe&t=h_&ia=recipes&iaxm=places&s...
I subscribe to OnX Maps for most of my fishing and hunting research in the United States, but Apple Maps is a pretty great free option.
Sidenote: I use duckduckgo for Safari search. I saw an ad on twitter for something that I searched in a private window of Safari. Not sure whose fault that is, but it really disturbed me.
My "shorthand" address missed my house by about 5 miles, and the precise mailing address (like I'd use on an envelope) brought up a steakhouse about 8 miles away. My company name dropped me in Saudi Arabia, and the exact address dropped me in New York (I'm in Minnesota).
It's the same issue I have with Open Street Maps, if you're not in SF/NYC/Chi they're damn near useless. OSM at least gets me to the correct block, although it's still off by about 500 feet.
Edit: Oh boy, this is like Cuil again. Grand Canyon brings up a mall in Israel, Burj Khalifa is somehow underwater, Eifel Tower brings up Las Vegas, Roman Colosseum some residential street in Houston. Statue of Liberty and Taj Mahal are the only two landmarks I tried it got correct. I get it's a "beta", but ouch. If you can't get addresses or major landmarks correct this shouldn't even be public facing yet.
OSM long-time mapper here. SF and NYC are not our strong points. Europe is our strong point.
Imo there's no point in dealing with ddg on an iphone if you can't even install adblockers.
Is it just another step towards aligning with Apple for an eventual buyout/search engine standard?
That said: If privacy is the only concern Apple seems to be a pretty good ally, as the only major player with a significant interest in it.
Perhaps in Apple's own backyard. In the Netherlands it's laughably bad. Cycle tracks? Mostly missing (in a country that has a huge cycling infrastructure). The map doesn't even have building outlines.
Google Maps is slightly better, but mostly because of the more extensive mapping of points-of-interest; because business owners add their own information with an almost religious zeal.
Bing interestingly enough uses OpenStreetMap (and properly attributes its usage) to gain access to the municipally contributed building outlines OpenStreetMap can use due to its permissive licence. The roads are their own though, and they are quite inaccurate at the lower end of the road hierarchy.
OpenStreetMap is probably the most complete map here in the Netherlands (disclaimer: I contribute to OpenStreetMap).
DuckDuckGo using Apple Maps instead of OpenStreetMap is a really weird choice for many countries, but perhaps it works better in the US?
Apple uses Tom Tom data. We never had serious problems with car navigation in Germany where we lived before and in The Netherlands.
Bike navigation is indeed bad, but it is also bad with Google Maps once you cycle in nature (outside cities). Then nothing beats a good Garmin GPS with paid maps (e.g. Topo Germany Pro and Topo Benelux), which do not only contain smaller cycling roads, unpaved roads, etc. but typically also contain paths recommended by national cycling associations (ActiveRouting). Unfortunately, it seems they are not updating maps frequently anymore, I guess it's a small market. I hope that OpenStreetMap continues to pick up the slack.
The car navigation in Germany was fine with Apple Maps for me (although I only used it for one trip), but the public transit info was mostly missing.
South Minneapolis is pretty much unpopulated other than parks/schools/churches: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/44.9256/-93.2303
Same in a good chunk of Memphis: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/35.1364/-89.9691
and some major suburbs of Atlanta: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/33.7077/-84.2708
It appears to be a usability/functionality tradeoff. Apple Maps isn't perfect in privacy nor accuracy/completeness, but OSM is useless for many people.
I once picked 100 random coordinates on land (by picking random coordinates and filtering out those that landed in water). OSM is by far the best. It's not even a competition. I still have to do a writeup of that some day, posting just the stats and methodology (scientific paper style) won't interest most people, and I forgot to capture screenshots, so I basically have to redo it completely.
It's almost certainly different if you select random points biased by population centres, but at least know that "not remotely usable" is a very local issue (see the sibling comments about the Netherlands) and that it depends on your use case.
With Apple Maps, they just have to include some JavaScript and Apple deals with all of that.
Their values would align significantly, and OpenStreetMap has excellent road and path coverage in my experience (though struggles with Points of Interest).
Just a thought.
From a purely privacy standpoint this isn't much different.
There are a ton of other bang options here:
Remember, though, because your search is actually taking place on that other site, you are subject to that site’s policies, including its data collection practices.
It's possible the strip some information in the transfer but not everything?
The bang shortcuts just take you to the other websites.. sure, you gain a few things, like Google not knowing what you typed to arrive at the final search, typing speed, etc. but DDG can’t really do anything to protect your privacy once you’ve ended up at google.com.
So `!g hello world` just redirects to `https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=hello%20world`
I'm can't see how that could possibly be more anonymized then just going to google.com yourself.
I guess because it makes zero sense the way it is. What's the point? Might as well have gone to Google directly. And what DDG user would ever want to be redirected to Google? They're using DDG for a reason (and for 99%, it isn't the search engine quality). It just makes no sense.
> I'm [sic] can't see how that could possibly be more anonymized then [sic] just going to google.com yourself.
DDG could proxy the traffic the way startpage does.
There are over 10.000 different bang shortcuts. They’re very valuable for several reasons, especially if you make DDG your default search engine. “Denmark !w” will take you to Denmark’s Wikipedia page, saving you the time and bandwidth it would take to click on the link through the DDG/Google result. Similarly, you can search “hello !gtda”; and sure, for short translation queries then you could also just type “hello danish” in Google, but try doing that with an entire paragraph. You could also search “duckduckgo !gandi” to see available duckduckgo domains on Gandi (or whichever domain registrar you prefer).
> And what DDG user would ever want to be redirected to Google? They're using DDG for a reason (and for 99%, it isn't the search engine quality). It just makes no sense.
DDG users aren’t (or at least they shouldn’t) append !g to all their searches.. it should only be used as a last resort (and even then they should still be using !s instead of !g). DDG’s primary selling point is privacy, but even if they were just as evil as Google (and there were no other privacy-friendly alternative available) then I’d still be using DDG as my default search engine thanks to the bang shortcuts.
> DDG could proxy the traffic the way startpage does.
That would defeat the purpose of the bang shortcuts, which is to take you to the search results on other sites. Besides, they already offer this through !s.
Use !s for Startpage instead; it proxies google's results.
Users know this and are cautioned, explicitly against using it for that very reason.
Now if you don't care that google knows your information, then yeah, just use google maps. But a user must be at DDG for some reason right? And that reason is as likely to be privacy as it is not. So if you're at DDG for privacy, why ask for all google information?
A better alternative would be !s which redirects your search through Startpage.
I don't know which language you use, but at least the German translation is kinda wrong since it is called 'Kartensystem' which you could translate as 'Karten = Maps' and 'System = System' and it certainly is not the general map system you select, but just the one being used for calculating routes/directions. Sadly :-/
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/settings
[2] https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/features/m...
> (e) No Use With Non-Google Maps. Customer will not use the Google Maps Core Services in a Customer Application that contains a non-Google map. For example, Customer will not (i) display Places listings on a non-Google map, or (ii) display Street View imagery and non-Google maps in the same Customer Application.
-- https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/terms/
As far as OSM goes, Apple Maps is based heavily on OSM data. (I've submitted corrections to OSM and seen the changes propagate to Apple Maps.) So I don't see much point in supporting two different services which are that closely related.
Apple does make some contributions back to OSM though for submitted corrections in areas that use OSM as a fallback, IIRC. Apple Maps unfortunately doesn't do a great job of mixing those results though and only uses them as "fallbacks". It's why some areas have poorer quality even compared to OSM (such as Germany mentioned in another comment) because they're strictly using their own data instead of using OSM, et al. to fill in the gaps.
I've moved since, so I'll spell it out: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=5940+Arapaho+Rd%2C+75248&t=osx&ia=...
Apple Maps believes that the driveways are to the south and east, but in fact the front driveway--the main entrance--is to the north, and there is no direct passage from the east. So every set of directions to or from those apartments begins or ends incorrectly. When leaving, I just have to guess whether I should turn east on Arapaho to catch up to where Maps thinks I should have ended up on Preston to start out, or whether it will send me west on Arapaho once it realizes I'm already most of a block in that direction from Preston. It added a minute or two to every trip, and delivery people would fail to find my apartment unless I specifically said "don't use Apple Maps." So I started saying that to everyone, all the time.
Apple's commitment to privacy means that they deliberately don't track the beginning or ending of any trip, but that's precisely the bits they needed to track to see that their routing was completely and totally wrong. So the problem will apparently never be fixed, at least until an Apple employee happens to want to visit a friend who lives in the Enclave at Prestonwood and realizes they can't get there.
So I've switched to Google Maps, and I loathe the lack of privacy, but I love the sharing option, so I guess I'm staying, even though I live elsewhere now.
[0] To test, I navigated from 'Renner Frankford Library Branch, 6400, Frankford Road, Dallas, Collin County, Texas, 75252, USA' to '5940, Arapaho Road, Dallas, Dallas County, Texas, 75248, USA' at https://www.openstreetmap.org/directions
Or you can report the issue yourself in-app?
It is very annoying to type "n <enter>" and it goes on to search any query starting with "n" that I happened to have searched in the past instead of going to HN as it was the case for the last several years.
It is happening now with all my usual "shortcuts".
Chrome now is less a browser and more a Google widget.
I wonder if I change the default search engine to DuckDuckGo it would still be the case.
Alternatively, use Firefox.
Take a bookmark for mail.mycompany.com bookmarked as "Email" -- if you type "mai..." it will complete but if you type "emai..." it will search.
It's extremely annoying behavior and the go-to add-on "Enter Selects" that fixes doesn't work with WebExtensions.
If you have a bookmark "Hello World!" pointing to "example.com" and type "Hello" the selected option will be "Search with Google" and not the top bookmark entry.
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.
One coffee shop in Hong Kong and one on the other side of the Pearl River Delta in Macau. That’s pretty bad. Screenshot here: https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/1151182624108318720?...
I mostly use maps for finding routes.
I think it’s important that people differentiate between what they are using maps for, since finding places and orienting oneself are very different use cases.
The ability to limit the duration of search history is another nice feature.
I feel less inclined to use Apple maps these days.
Anyways, it was a really good lesson in the value of checking multiple sources of truth, which gets harder and harder to remember as Google penetrate further into our lives.
Any suggestions welcome!
[1] https://developers.google.com/maps/billing/understanding-cos...
Here Maps have excellent tech and offline packaging and Apple has the reach.
Put all this together with DDG, we have a winner.
One thing I look forward to is the ability to get the distance from X to Y in DDG.
I’m not sure if this something many do as well but personally it’s probably one of my top ten things I Routinely search(Weekly) for.
Thats the number one way I access google maps.
None of the articles I found explain how DuckDuckGo managed to convince Google to give it to them.