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Comment by fruit2020 | Hacker News Reader

fruit2020

This is not always good for the end user. Now I have to go to google maps manually because it’s most of the time no longer integrated with google search

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what exactly prevents them from giving me a dropdown with links to apple maps, kagi maps, bing maps and google maps and my choice gets saved to my google account as the default? Instead all they show me is a useless javascript map which is still google maps but I cant do anything useful on it and it's super frustrating trying to get to a map for a place search

To play devils advocate - it costs money to integrate with all the competing map providers and to display them properly on the site. You could think of a plug in approach where map providers integrate themselves, still someone needs to maintain that plug in infra. Nothing is free.

And it’s the same story for any kind of service that’s subject to DMA.

Yes but this is a multi billion dollar company and the base integration could be as simple as opening the link and it doesn't even have to link to the correct place. They can have the ui make clear that it's a generic link to another map site. Although I just figured out how to link to something with a query text on bing in a minute: https://www.bing.com/maps?q=USA The exact same thing works on kagi.com/maps btw. So I don't think that this is too much to ask for, I rather think that they are trying to create pressure on the EU.

> it doesn't even have to link to the correct place.

That's an obvious DMA violation. You can't preference your own service over others, like when you link to the exact pin on your service but just the general area on another.

They already commit a DMA violation by showing any google map at all then. It's not rocket science to conform to the spirit of the law, if they offer a simple API for other map providers to provide their own strings to google it will be solved in a day. They clearly just don't want to actually advertise other mapping providers for free which is something I understand fully btw. But the way they are currently doing it is actively hurting them because I hate how I can't jump to any map from the searc results now.

Google does a million things that cost money, every day. But this particular thing costing money is a problem. How about no.

If you do all the things that cost money, you can suddenly find yourself not being the big company anymore.

They don't want to link to their competition, so they'd rather not link to their own service and if users complain they tell them to complain to the EU.

That's Google's fault. They could offer an api for other map providers to be displayed.

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