Google stops hiding Russian secret sites on its maps | Hacker News Reader

Google stops hiding Russian secret sites on its maps

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Expert here says they were never blurred to begin with. Seems like fake news.

https://twitter.com/konrad_muzyka/status/1516089845990494213

... and that, my friends, is the start of the short story that will end in Google getting banned in Russia (I am assuming this does break some Russian laws). Not that it matters for Russians as Google was surprisingly never a market leader there:

- In Russia, you don't need Google: 5 reasons why Yandex is still No. 1: https://www.rbth.com/science-and-tech/326234-in-russia-yande... ).

- Distribution of search engine traffic in Russia from 3rd quarter 2019 to 4th quarter 2021, by company: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1094920/leading-search-e... .

Almost no one cares about doing business with Russia anymore. Since they just take your business away, some stories are getting more out now.

It's just a criminal organization that should be ignored.

Read a longer "short story" about a hedge fund manager and how Russia operates and how he's now in the n°1 hit list of Russia - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Browder

Note: A lot of Yandex ( English-speaking) employees fled abroad currently, including it's CEO. I'd be suprised if Yandex would hold >6 months ( employees, high-tech eg. semiconductors, sanctions, default looming, ... )

Fyi: Yandex also tried in Turkeye and it didn't work. I'm pretty sure Russia was happy to give Yandex a leg up in it's other divisions ( eg. Law for their self driving tests - considering in other countries they don't even report manual interventions unlike others, so i think it's mostly a fad though). And Google didn't have much will to win the market die to ( reasonable) uncertainty.

Pretty sure a company that gave up on being allowed in China is willing to give up on being allowed in Russia which probably has very little impact on their revenue

I don't use Yandex Search for years already. Because all results I got from it were pages of clever SEO-spam while relevant links lost somewhere far away which started being annoying very fast. Google with its recent decrease of search quality is still way better, even for local results for which Yandex was famous about a decade ago.

As part of my attempt to get away from Google as much as possible, I've switched to Yandex as my main search engine and been using it now for more than 3+ years now. I've found the results to be good for around 70-75% of my searches. For the other 30%, Yandex conveniently provides a link to resume search in Google and Bing. (This is clever as this gives them data on where their search quality needs to improve). The major cons are that Yandex prioritizes Russian language / locale in its search results, even for English keywords, which can be real irritating sometimes. (For e.g. a search for a sony camera will show you the right Sony product page, but it will be linked to the Russian page).

Interesting, but why? Just because it's "hate the Russians" month? What was the reason for hiding these items in the first place? Was there a previous agreement with Russia to keep secrets for them? To what extent is Google hiding the secrets of other oppressive regimes, such as China?

The CIA wants the GRU to know that we know.

The CIA has more effective ways of flipping the bird to the GRU than futzing with Google Earth/maps.

Given the expansive budget of the CIA, I would assume if they wanted to offend them they'd probably leave a handwritten note left inside of a "secure location" somewhere in Russia.

You don't need to be an oppressive regime to get google maps to hide stuff.

https://lifehacker.com/how-to-blur-your-house-in-googles-str...

I think Google pulled out of all Russian interests about a month back, so they no longer need to censor anything for Russia. This might also be a warning for China that there's still plenty they censor for their rocky relationship that may cease to be censored if there is no relationship.

Google draws borders differently if you're opening Google Maps from different countries (e.g. India and Pakistan), it used to only offer bitmaps (instead of vector graphics) of S. Korea to comply with the law there, the satellite images of China are still offset compared to the real world to also comply with the laws...

So the answer is, they do it to remain compliant with the laws.

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