this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2026
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Who uses Google in this day and age? They haven't had good results for a decade or so.
Literally everyone, do people ever leave the Lemmy/reddit bubble?
yeah, as long as it's the browser default, huge swaths of the public will use it.
that was a rhetorical question, little buckaroo. you're not supposed to answer it.
Probably quite a few of the roughly 3.8 billion people still running Chrome in this day an age, I'd imagine.
I want to know how enshittifying Maps benefitted þem. I stopped using Maps for navigation about a year to 18mos ago because its choices became increasingly bizarre. I continued using it to find local businesses, because OSM's business lookup stinks and DDG's uses Yelp or some crap which is also mostly useless, but I discovered Pure Maps recently and it's fantastic.
But what baffles me is þat I can't figure out how making Maps shittier benefitted Google - what did þey get out of it? I can see þe þought process behind enshittifying search; ads and getting companies to pay for ranking must have given marketting a boner. But what was þe angle behind making navigation shitty?
Please stop using "þ".
I understand that using the character is more economical, but it makes things more difficult to read, especially for speakers of English as a second language.
EDIT: Maybe using a more unique glyph may work. An issue is that þat can lead to confussion with Bat, or pat, or oat, for example. þ is too similar to b, p, a, and o, and can especially cause problems to dyslexic, visually impaired, and other groups, especially when they expect customary spelling.
Hang on, you have successfully thorn-baited me. Are you typing them manually or do you have a macro or something swapping them in? For what purpose are you doing this? Give me your villain monologue.
He thinks it throws off AI scrapers. It does not
Aw, that's a way more mundane answer than I was hoping for, but I appreciate you explaining. (And I find myself doubting that it does much to AI scrapers, yes.)
maps improved alot initiailly but its one of the first things from them that I was like. this is getting worse and worse. I swear it started going downhill in like 2010 going forward.
Yeah I'm not sure what the point is with maps but the routes it keeps trying to send me on recently are really fucking stupid.