They'll get their 15 minutes, but there's no _there_ there. They're owned by System1, a bottom-of-the-barrel advertising company where 1990s web brands go to die (Metacrawler? Startpage.com?? Dogpile?!?!). Their maps are OpenStreetMaps maps.
People think they have their back (because OSM is showing Lake Ontario), but it's just marketing.
Or a top of the barrel choice like just using one of the many non-profit FOSS apps that are also UIs over OpenStreetMap instead of one of the scam commercial ad-wrappers.
My experience is otherwise, try alternative search SaaS like Exa, i.e. pay per search, but use multiple because they return different sets. My agent looks at the results, includes some, performs more searches. It's more of a deep search thing, very similar in spirit to how I used to run multiple queries, click a bunch of links, evaluate, keep good ones, run follow up queries, and end up with an alt-tab of dozens of browsers, each with dozens of tabs.
I think people are more going on the "name it what you want" pages doing the rounds on socials, created originally for the Gulf of Mexico and now Lake Ontario, which a lot of people have seen, rather than the name presented by MapQuest's regular map which I don't think many people see.
I've dumped Google Maps for OSM over three years ago and have not looked back. Did this as one of my de-Google steps by choosing a Fairphone.
Looking at a FuriLabs FLX1S to start the next phase by switching to a Linux phone.
I've become a sunk cost to Google by not spending anything on their products or services and always use Ad-Block solution in a private session if I must.
I enjoy how Bing Maps (and Bing in general) are so unloved that it's not even part of the debate. (Bing Maps hasn't changed - yet - but probably will eventually, since they caved on the Gulf of Mexico)
It’s not like Microsoft has artisanal cartographers sitting around deciding what to call every geographic feature. Bing Maps ingests its base map data from providers, which in turn aggregate a bunch of authoritative, commercial, open, and government datasets.
And for things like official geographic names, government naming databases are often one of the authoritative upstream sources. So if the U.S. government changes the name in its official geographic database, it’s not surprising for that change to eventually propagate through map providers and into Bing.
They're one of the few remaining air photography providers for OpenStreetMap editors with worldwide coverage (much of it high quality and regularly updated), so they have their uses.
People have nothing in common with tech giants. Tech giants support whoever is in power, because money. The current tech giants kicked the current President off of their platforms back in the day. Now these tech giants hang out at the White House. Funny how that works.
As long as tech companies make a stand against superficial culture war fights like this nobody will care that they've caved w.r.t privacy over the last two decades. Sad!
Finding MapQuest on the PlayStore was a quest all on its own. More specifically, it does not exist on my PlayStore, and I had to install it on my phone remotely through the browser PlayStore.
Review wise, it sits firmly at a single star, so it's possible that Google burried it, although I would not put it past them to rig things.
I tried it out for a trip yesterday. I wanted to love the app—it has a great retro feel, and an ad-free subscription option—but it gave me weird routes and the audio was extremely stuttery.
I get why people want Apple and Google to push back but ultimately there isn’t any logical approach for them to operate that isn’t “name things as the relevant governmental bodies name them”. Otherwise what source of truth is there?
The responsibility here is with a spineless government. An executive order is not a law and a congress that did its job would quickly contract these kind of mad king declarations.
It’s an international body of water that has had the same name for longer than the government that tried to rename it has existed. The renaming was an overtly political act. There are many logical approaches to leaving the name the same, and there is one logical approach to changing it (appeasement)
What about researchers at universities? Maintain a list of experts and conduct a poll whenever an event like this happens or enough of the experts request.
Or require an act of Congress. Obviously, we can no longer rely on Executive Orders being careful, thought-out, or lasting changes. Does any mapping organization want to change names back and forth? Does any user want to see these changes?
Right but who maintains that list of experts? Google? Aren’t we just giving the tech giants more power in that scenario?
Yes, in this specific instance it would give us an outcome we want. But in the long term we’re replacing democratic government with corporate control. Which doesn’t seem good.
The government has no right to name geographic features. The names are established by popular usage, not the feds. As such Google and Apple should not listen to the demands of a body which has no right to make them in the first place.
“Popular usage” is all very well and good until you have to quantify it in some way. No way it wouldn’t be a complete mess.
For example: the body of water between the UK and France. The UK calls it “the English Channel”. The French call it “la Manche”. It has no official international name. In Google Maps both names are used depending on what country/language you are using. Choosing one via popular usage would not be a good solution.
> No, they show what the respective government datasets contain
Which matches popular usage in the respective countries. Your example is a non sequitir for explaining why matching popular usage can't possibly work.
For the popular usage of major geographical features to change is extremely rare, so I am skeptical that it's a huge amount of work to keep up with changes in popular usage. People made maps before they had automated pipelines for ingesting geographical names.
My point isn’t so much that it would be impossible to do, more that it’s giving more power to the tech giants to define things however they wish (given they get to define “popular”). In this instance that would be a good thing but as a precedent I’m a lot less sure.
This is a power they already have. Google could ignore this change just as MapQuest has done. They are not legally compelled to follow government naming conventions, and I think it would be a clear first amendment violation to attempt to compel them to do so.
They'll get their 15 minutes, but there's no _there_ there. They're owned by System1, a bottom-of-the-barrel advertising company where 1990s web brands go to die (Metacrawler? Startpage.com?? Dogpile?!?!). Their maps are OpenStreetMaps maps.
People think they have their back (because OSM is showing Lake Ontario), but it's just marketing.
as opposed to a top of the barrel advertising company like Google
Or a top of the barrel choice like just using one of the many non-profit FOSS apps that are also UIs over OpenStreetMap instead of one of the scam commercial ad-wrappers.
But what regular people know what nonprofit FOSS apps are?
That barrel rotted away a long time ago and all we're left with is a head -- the top is the bottom.
There is significant differences in advertising. The things at the bottom of the barrel in advertising are often literally malware.
You mean like software that restricts what your devices can do and collects and sells your personal information? Its the very same barrel.
I think of the three comments that make this point, this one is the most constructive.
I still don't think Google is quite the same, but I agree that they share some fundamental problems and should be rejected as a whole.
Nah, it's all malware. Some just for your brain.
The things at the bottom of the barrel in advertising are often literally malware.
So… Google, then?
It's not like it hasn't been repeatedly documented that malware is pushed through Google Ads and other properties.
>Startpage.com
I thought that was still the best way to get anonymous google index search results?
I also enjoy their privacy focused email startmail.com
Dogpile?!? There's a name I haven't heard in what feels like 20 years.
The concept of searching a bunch of search engines made sense to me.
> The concept of searching a bunch of search engines made sense to me.
It made sense to somebody else[0], too.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo
Ironicly this is what my agent does today on my behalf because regular search has become so bad
Unfortunately at the other end of that websearch is a bunch of slop, your agent can't save you from it.
My experience is otherwise, try alternative search SaaS like Exa, i.e. pay per search, but use multiple because they return different sets. My agent looks at the results, includes some, performs more searches. It's more of a deep search thing, very similar in spirit to how I used to run multiple queries, click a bunch of links, evaluate, keep good ones, run follow up queries, and end up with an alt-tab of dozens of browsers, each with dozens of tabs.
Doubleclick
Perhaps it would have died, too
But no
I think people are more going on the "name it what you want" pages doing the rounds on socials, created originally for the Gulf of Mexico and now Lake Ontario, which a lot of people have seen, rather than the name presented by MapQuest's regular map which I don't think many people see.
https://gulfof.mapquest.com/lakeontario/Epstein%20Files
https://gulfof.mapquest.com/gulf/Epstein%20Files
They forgot to scoop up mapbalst!
never mind looks like they got swallowed up by bing maps (that’s where Bing got line drive from, TIL!)
It still says Ontario because there's no one left at MapQuest that knows how to change it.
That may be, but it's still what many people want.
I've dumped Google Maps for OSM over three years ago and have not looked back. Did this as one of my de-Google steps by choosing a Fairphone.
Looking at a FuriLabs FLX1S to start the next phase by switching to a Linux phone.
I've become a sunk cost to Google by not spending anything on their products or services and always use Ad-Block solution in a private session if I must.
What do you use on Android instead of Google Maps, OsmAnd or something else?
The one provided by Fairpone with their /e/OS. Maps by Magic Lane.
I enjoy how Bing Maps (and Bing in general) are so unloved that it's not even part of the debate. (Bing Maps hasn't changed - yet - but probably will eventually, since they caved on the Gulf of Mexico)
It’s not like Microsoft has artisanal cartographers sitting around deciding what to call every geographic feature. Bing Maps ingests its base map data from providers, which in turn aggregate a bunch of authoritative, commercial, open, and government datasets.
And for things like official geographic names, government naming databases are often one of the authoritative upstream sources. So if the U.S. government changes the name in its official geographic database, it’s not surprising for that change to eventually propagate through map providers and into Bing.
Not only did I have no idea that Bing or Bing Maps still existed, but the very fact that they ever existed at all had slipped from my consciousness.
I guess Bing has an 8% market share, if you don't count services that use the Bing index (like DuckDuckGo does).
I wonder if Bing is worth it for them to still operate because of the people paying to use the index.
They're one of the few remaining air photography providers for OpenStreetMap editors with worldwide coverage (much of it high quality and regularly updated), so they have their uses.
> In 2019, Verizon sold MapQuest to internet advertising company System1.
It's ad companies all the way down.
And this is a PR piece put out by the ad company that people eat up because orange man bad.
Curious. Do you think orange man not bad here?
Y’all good with a president who changes a 400 year old name on a hissy fit and spends his days shitposting at the level of "dumb teenage boy"?
At least when China does it they come up with elaborate historical documents. This is just sad.
I think a lot of people are desperate for tech giants to stand up to the current US administration.
People have nothing in common with tech giants. Tech giants support whoever is in power, because money. The current tech giants kicked the current President off of their platforms back in the day. Now these tech giants hang out at the White House. Funny how that works.
As long as tech companies make a stand against superficial culture war fights like this nobody will care that they've caved w.r.t privacy over the last two decades. Sad!
Finding MapQuest on the PlayStore was a quest all on its own. More specifically, it does not exist on my PlayStore, and I had to install it on my phone remotely through the browser PlayStore.
Review wise, it sits firmly at a single star, so it's possible that Google burried it, although I would not put it past them to rig things.
Recommend you instead use something like OsmAnd. Mapquest pulls data from OpenStreetMaps - might as well use an open source application.
https://osmand.net/
So OSMAnd is better than Organic?
Haven't tried Organic, to be honest. I'll have to check it out. :)
I feel like it wasn't defiance as much as "we need to come up with a story why we don't have any developers who know how to update this".
I tried it out for a trip yesterday. I wanted to love the app—it has a great retro feel, and an ad-free subscription option—but it gave me weird routes and the audio was extremely stuttery.
On the back of a cocktail napkin, I drew a map of you...
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49510969
I get why people want Apple and Google to push back but ultimately there isn’t any logical approach for them to operate that isn’t “name things as the relevant governmental bodies name them”. Otherwise what source of truth is there?
The responsibility here is with a spineless government. An executive order is not a law and a congress that did its job would quickly contract these kind of mad king declarations.
It’s an international body of water that has had the same name for longer than the government that tried to rename it has existed. The renaming was an overtly political act. There are many logical approaches to leaving the name the same, and there is one logical approach to changing it (appeasement)
What about researchers at universities? Maintain a list of experts and conduct a poll whenever an event like this happens or enough of the experts request.
Or require an act of Congress. Obviously, we can no longer rely on Executive Orders being careful, thought-out, or lasting changes. Does any mapping organization want to change names back and forth? Does any user want to see these changes?
Right but who maintains that list of experts? Google? Aren’t we just giving the tech giants more power in that scenario?
Yes, in this specific instance it would give us an outcome we want. But in the long term we’re replacing democratic government with corporate control. Which doesn’t seem good.
How are they determining the relevant government bodies?
The government has no right to name geographic features. The names are established by popular usage, not the feds. As such Google and Apple should not listen to the demands of a body which has no right to make them in the first place.
“Popular usage” is all very well and good until you have to quantify it in some way. No way it wouldn’t be a complete mess.
For example: the body of water between the UK and France. The UK calls it “the English Channel”. The French call it “la Manche”. It has no official international name. In Google Maps both names are used depending on what country/language you are using. Choosing one via popular usage would not be a good solution.
> Choosing one via popular usage would not be a good solution.
Huh? Isn't that exactly what you've described? In the UK they show the popular usage in the UK, and the same in France.
No, they show what the respective governments describe them as in official datasets etc.
> No, they show what the respective government datasets contain
Which matches popular usage in the respective countries. Your example is a non sequitir for explaining why matching popular usage can't possibly work.
For the popular usage of major geographical features to change is extremely rare, so I am skeptical that it's a huge amount of work to keep up with changes in popular usage. People made maps before they had automated pipelines for ingesting geographical names.
My point isn’t so much that it would be impossible to do, more that it’s giving more power to the tech giants to define things however they wish (given they get to define “popular”). In this instance that would be a good thing but as a precedent I’m a lot less sure.
This is a power they already have. Google could ignore this change just as MapQuest has done. They are not legally compelled to follow government naming conventions, and I think it would be a clear first amendment violation to attempt to compel them to do so.
Why did they comply with this so readily? And also this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49520439
Take that Cory Doctrow [0]
[0] - https://boingboing.net/2019/10/10/do-webrings-next.html
I think Cory would be surprised to see how many Mapquest referrers show up in the referrer logs of brick-and-mortar businesses.
In other news, Canada will be renaming Lake Michigan to Lake Epstein.
(saw it on the internet, had to share)
https://gulfof.mapquest.com/lakeontario/Epstein%20Files
Once again, private equity ruined another fine company ... with incessant advertisements
Sad to see the WaPo wishcasting with no clear benefit