We’re excited to announce that map and address-related searches on DuckDuckGo for mobile and desktop are now powered by Apple’s MapKit JS framework, giving you a valuable combination of mapping and privacy. As one of the first global companies using Apple MapKit JS, we can now offer users improved address searches, additional visual features, enhanced satellite imagery, and continually updated maps already in use on billions of Apple devices worldwide.
With this updated integration, Apple Maps are now available both embedded within our private search results for relevant queries, as well as available from the “Maps” tab on any search result page.
I’m sure Apple users in San Francisco will be very happy with this news.
For me, this means there’s no way I’ll be using DuckDuckGo’s location search and other mapping functions – Apple Maps is entirely unusable in The Netherlands, with severely outdated and faulty maps that are outright dangerous. I understand the privacy angle, but I feel like are better, more accurate options than Apple Maps. The world is larger than Silicon Valley.
Why? Apple Maps has never been good. Is there a technical reason why they made the change? I see where they do the whole “pizza in Cupertino” example, and a few others, but is that it?
I actually used DuckDuckGo for doing location searches exactly because they used OpenStreetMap.
They probably needed some funding as well as Apple needed some PR about users’ security and privacy. I smell that typical fragrance of an upcoming scandal…
Maybe this is the reason to do the change, according the user Dan East in Slashdot:
“I would have preferred it if Duckduckgo had worked with Openstreetmap.
> OSM provides the data, however they do not provide hosting of tilesets. From OSM’s terms:
> OpenStreetMap’s own servers are run entirely on donated resources. They have strictly limited capacity. Heavy use of OSM tiles adversely affects people’s ability to edit the map, and is an abuse of the individual donations and sponsorship which provide hardware and bandwidth. As a result, we require that users of the tiles abide by this tile usage policy.
> *OpenStreetMap data is free for everyone to use. Our tile servers are not.*
Emphasis theirs. That is why DuckDuckGo was using MapBox. MapBox hosts tilesets generated from Open Street Map data (plus they have some really sweet interactive map styling tools and can provide tiles in your own styles), however MapBox gets expensive if the volume is high, and certainly DuckDuckGo’s volume is extremely high.
Also, MapBox uses tracking just like Google to generate traffic layers for their maps. Apps that have MapBox embedded in them are contributing their location data and motion for MapBox to generate live traffic maps, exactly like Google Maps.
So it’s likely that DuckDuckGo is no worse off using Apple for their maps, from a privacy and data sharing perspective.”
Bad choice, they should have used Wikimedia Maps.
Wikimedia Maps gets it data from OpenStreetMap, which is a creative-commons (CC BY-SA) and supported by the open source community. Whilst it’s obviously not got the funding that Apple Maps have, i’d still trust it more than Apple maps.
Mind you, i’d trust a map drawn on a napkin in ketchup, more than Apple maps.
I wasn’t even aware they have maps, if I use their “pizza in Cupertino” example, I see maps, but for “pizza in [my East European city]” there is no map at all.
You mean, there’s actually a world outside of the US? Even aliens only go to the US, look at the movies…
They’re attracted to all the weather balloons.
Like there are weather conditions to screen above area 51…
Considering that they’re a US based company, it kind of makes sense, but Apple Maps is really not great at all outside of heavy metropolitan areas in USA (Can’t speak of metropolitan areas elsewhere).
I have used them and often use them in heavily congested metro areas, because the maps have a very, very useful guidance in such an use case, from telling you way in advance to merge from telling you exactly on what lane to be for that merge. If that can be expanded into elsewhere in the world, I’d be OK with that, but it’s a kick in the ass of anyone not meeting those specific scenarios.
Duckduckgo makes it fairly easy to use other engines right from within their search bar: add !ost or !map to your search for openstreetmap or google maps respectively.