The app introduced several new features on Thursday to make Google Maps more interactive, including one that makes it easier for users to share photos of places they visit.
Efforts to increase engagement with Google Maps appear to be working: the company said on Thursday that it now has 150 million “Local Guides” – users who regularly contribute comments, photos and information on Maps – on the platform. In 2020, Local Guides added more than 8 million places to the app.
“With all the changes that our world has seen in the past year, people are relying more than ever on high-quality, up-to-date information about places around them – like whether a nearby restaurant is open or a local supermarket has updated the time.” , Google said in a statement, adding that it wants to “make it easier for anyone with a Google account to contribute their local knowledge”.
Among the new features announced on Thursday are “photo updates”, which will help people get a better, more up-to-date sense of the places they are considering visiting; for example, they will be able to see if the configuration of a restaurant’s outdoor tables is shaded. With the launch in the coming weeks, people can access the new “Updates” tab by looking at a place in the app, taking a quick photo to add and writing a caption, without having to leave a full review or comment.
Google Maps is also making it easier to report changes to roads in the app, adding an option to “Edit the map” that will allow users to correct errors, including drawing lost roads, renaming streets or excluding incorrect roads. The company says it will review road updates before publishing them.
To make more people take advantage of these interactive features, Google Maps is launching a “Local Love Challenge”, encouraging Android users to contribute photos, comments and information to the app in order to update 100,000 location listings on the next month.