I have been using Kagi because I got so disgusted with Google. I didn't know Kagi had their own map service but just now see that they do. "Gulf of Mexico" the map says.
It is truly ridiculous that Google changed the name on their maps. It is like a bully on a middle school playground forcing another kid to wear his shoes the wrong feet or something equally absurd.
Welcome to our custom-built Kagi Maps (more layers, features, & functionality coming soon)
Kagi Maps (beta) is our custom-built global basemap designed for geospatial search and browsing. This map will serve as our platform to build a variety of features, allowing you to customize and tailor the map experience to your needs. Using an ever-growing list of open-source and third-party datasets, we aim to provide a visually rich way for you to explore and learn about your own world — whether nations to neighborhoods. More layers and functionality are in development everyday.
https://kagi.com/maps#18/25.0261/-89.4247
I think the Kagi project is worthy of support.
A little bit about their philosophy:
Over the years, the web deteriorated to the state it is in now - a highly destructive force. Much of the damage is driven by the monetization of users and every aspect of their lives. Enterprises capture our preferences, our friends, our families, the information we consume, and the information we create. They manage and maximize for their benefit our preferences, our opinions, our purchases, and our relationships. The web can poison individual opinions, freedoms, and political and social institutions. It steals from us, addicts us, and harms us in many ways.
The websites driven by this business model became advertising and tracking-infested giants that will do whatever it takes to “engage” and monetize unsuspecting visitors. This includes algorithmic feeds, low-quality clickbait articles (which also contributed to the deterioration of journalism globally), stuffing the pages with as many ads and affiliate links as possible (to the detriment of the user experience and their own credibility), playing ads in videos every 45 seconds (to the detriment of generations of kids growing up watching these) and mining as much user data as possible.
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Nowadays when a user uses an ad-supported search engine, they are bound to encounter noise, wrong and misleading websites in the search results, inevitably insulting their intelligence and wasting their brain cycles. The algorithms themselves are constantly leading an internal battle between optimizing for ad revenue and optimizing for what the user wants. In most cases the former wins. Users are given results that keep them returning and searching for more instead of letting them go about their business as soon as possible.
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With the inevitable advancement of our civilization, it is reasonable to predict that most of humanity is in for a rude awakening from a world in which harmful agendas driven by misaligned incentives dominate our lives. The shock and realization of how information is really important and how we are currently being treated may feel similar to waking from a coma, like the one that controlled humanity in the movie The Matrix. We’ll look at the current situation in hindsight and wonder “How did this all happen?”
In the future, it is likely that if the current mainstream search engines want to survive, they will have to go back to their roots, dismissing ads as their primary business model (as described by Mr. Page and Mr. Brin in their 1998 whitepaper) and start optimizing for what the user wants. This seismic shift is not a matter of if but when. If nothing else, it will be driven by the erosion of public trust in information served by companies using ad-supported business models.
https://kagi.com/
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