But if Google search didn't send me to Google maps when I was looking for maps then I would explicitly go to Google maps. In that case there would be no chance for any competitor to do better.
Why would you want to go to goofle translate or google maps when you search for translate or google? Wouldn’t you want to go to the best service you could get?
And how does one know that Google even has a maps service to go to? Google maps didn't start out great or even good (Its pretty good now). Google promotes their beta-level products over other mature products to the point the competition is starved of visitors, while Google iterates their own product. So now, after the fact, you can go "Well, there's no one else, I guess Google does the right thing in showing me Google maps as the first result".
That is not my memory. Google maps used AJAX to let you pan around. It was fluid, and really nice. What I had been using up until then was MapQuest, where you needed to click an arrow to move around, with long delays.
Google Earth was originally developed at Intrinsic Graphics in the late 1990s. October 2004, Google acquired Keyhole. Google maps started February 8, 2005.
It would have been easy to offer kml links and "force" the users into Google Earth. Before it was tinkered into a steaming pile of shit Keyhole was a truly fantastic product, with a lovely community, arguably the greatest thing since web browsers (with picasa & hello as a close 3rd and 4th)
For a web based thing the ajax maps was quite nice but today I really hate using it. The data is great tho and you cant complaint about the price.
It was such superior experience. If the user has it on his box the map link can simply point at the google earth client.
Take route planning for example. It use to be that you could fly the route in google earth. A line on a paper like map with a bunch of dots is useful for finding a shorter or more preferable route but after you've made up your mind flying over the road from A to B allows you to drive or cycle without any map.
If the application is installed the search results can include tours. (people made countless illustrated tours that kept breaking with each api update until there were no tours left)
Google could probably embed google earth into web pages if the will was there.
We will see where https://earth.google.com/web/ ends up. For now it loads as if booting an OS but its quite smooth after that.
The reason Google Maps was successful in its early days wasn't because of its quality, it was because it was free.
The other options were just as good, but often you had to pay for them. With Google, you could repeatedly refine the bad results until you found something useful, because there was zero additional cost involved.
Maps had smooth, animated panning and zooming that updated the map in real time without reloading the page. MapQuest and the other major competitors at the time only allowed panning and zooming by clicking buttons on the side of the map, which scrolled a predefined number of steps and reloaded, at least initially, the entire page when you did so.
Google Maps was also less cluttered and used the browser's real estate much effectively. MapQuest was a small, cramped map by comparison.
Multimap was quite good. I remember integrating it in to a few sites in the very early 2000s. It wasn't quite as dynamic as Google Maps but it definitely worked pretty well. It was eventually bought by Microsoft and became Bing Maps.
Actually yes - if you look at articles at the time, Mapquest was leading the antitrust charge against Google because the latter had JUST launched and yet was surfacing above Mapquest in rankings.
And when GMaps first started, it wasn’t the beast that it was today; sure it had some nifty UX improvements, but it was nothing close to competitors in the space at the time.
