I've noticed Google Maps will sometimes give me Uber ads when I'm looking up directions ("this route only $N on Uber" or such). Idle speculation but I wonder if this was a mistake for Uber -- perhaps Google has seen a high rate of click-through on these and will now try to get in on that action themselves.
In some places (all, IIRC, outside of the US), the Google Maps ride service feature already supports non-Uber ridesharing services. In the US, I think it only has Uber, but its basically a feature that lets GMaps be a platform for commoditizing ride services.
If the GMaps ride service functionality is accessible to other services (it currently is by specific negotiation/partnership only, apparently, so not really, but as a platform that could change), it provides an avenue for weakening Uber's moat and making it easier for competitors to gain traction.
In my city in Spain Uber is not available but GMaps offers rides with Cabify instead, a local alternative. But I think it is negotiated on a case-by-case basis.
I've noticed that too, and wondered about the connection with this.
I wonder if this was a similar play as when they opened that 411 service back in the day. Turned out, they were using it as a way to amass a large collection of voice samples.
I kinda wonder how valuable ride sharing data would be. They might necessarily have to make a profit directly on that. It might have something to do with their self-driving cars. For example (just randomly spouting off), knowing where people want to ride towards the same direction might inform how to deploy a fleet of self-driving taxis.
Oh, interesting. I remember reading an article [0] when it came out that mentioned that the integration was only visible on devices with Uber installed. Unless the parent was referring to a different ad?
