Why Google Maps no longer works directly in Google Search (and how to fix it) – Released

No need to hammer your phone or frantically click your mouse: For almost a week, Google Maps is no longer directly accessible through the famous search engine. A change due to a new European regulation, the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which has a direct impact on the user experience – but which is not intended (only) to make user navigation more cumbersome. We will explain everything to you.

What is DMA?

In a tech world dominated by a few major companies, the Digital Market Act – French for “law on digital markets” – was designed to “Ensure fair and open digital markets”, According to the European Commission, combating practices considered anti-competitive. There are six of them “Access Controllers” To be affected by this new law: American Alphabet (parent company of Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta (Facebook, Instagram…) and Microsoft, as well as Chinese ByteDance (TikTok).

With a deadline of March 7 set to get up to speed with this new European standard, these companies are stepping up their actions to get on track like Apple, which reluctantly had to open its devices in stores that compete with the App Store. Because the Commission has set the tone for the envisaged action against potential petitioners, especially those who are disaffected. Among possible sanctions, the EU can count on fines of up to 10% of the company’s total annual global turnover or even its partial sale.

What will be the impact on Google Maps?

On the website of the European Commission, we can read that the DMA will no longer allow giants in this field to promote their own services to the detriment of similar products offered by the competition. So when Google directly promotes Maps – its app – through its search engine, the multinational future violates European law standards. More broadly, the same applies when it transfers its users’ personal data between different services of the group, such as Google Chrome or YouTube. This connection between its services cannot be effective by default. So Google has decided to limit the appearance of the map in the search header to a simple map that is impossible to click on.

How to reuse maps directly from Google?

Although considered anticompetitive and restricted by the European Union, interoperability of services may be selected by the user. The service can be linked back to Google by going to the settings of your Google account, then to the “Data and privacy” section and finally to “Related Google services”. Various options are then offered, including the possibility to connect data from YouTube or Chrome to your account, even from Maps.