[fixermark]

... and benefits from horizontal scaling.

Maps is okay, search is okay. Maps that can take signal from search to figure out what people care about, and search that can utilize geographic signal to guess what a person might want as an answer for "restaurants near me" is huge.

[acover]

You make a good point.

I don't see why that type of sharing can't happen with open source services. Though it would require more customer consent.

[fixermark]

Personal opinion: the fact that type of sharing hasn't happened with open source services speaks volumes about the priorities of the open-source communities and is the single-biggest argument in favor of allowing large corporations leeway to create big cool things with big data. I don't see anyone else stepping up to solve the hard problems like this.

[acover]

Have there been open source projects that had the opportunity to and decided against it?

[fixermark]

OpenStreetMap currently exists. Is there an open-source search engine out there that could try to integrate with them?