maps.google.com now redirects to google.com/maps
I recall from my time in Google Geo years ago that the idea of integrating Search and Maps was a big part of the &quot;New Maps&quot; release that happened around 2014. The rumor I heard was that someone (possibly even Larry himself) wanted to be able to have interactive maps directly on the search results page, so that the navigation from a search query to a map wouldn&#x27;t involve even a page reload. So the big Maps frontend rewrite actually ended up merging MFE into GWS, the web search frontend server. I recall seeing maps hosted at google.com&#x2F;maps around that time, but I don&#x27;t know if that was ever launched fully or if it was just an experiment.<p>In any case, though, my understanding is that the technical capacity for this has existed for nearly 10 years now, just behind a configuration setting. So it&#x27;s possible that this change is just a code cleanup. It&#x27;s also possible that someone is trying to increase the percentage of searches that have location information, that doesn&#x27;t seem terribly far-fetched either, and I can imagine lots of ways people could try to rationalize it as actually benefiting users. (Whether it actually does benefit users is of course debatable.)