TL;DR
Soon, Maps won’t just be used for navigation & directions. Reviews and Recommendations from Top Local Guides for your Location in the Google Maps app will soon inspire you to travel and explore your city better!
You use it. I use it. Most of the people around you use it. In fact, every month, more than a billion people use Google Maps! A majority of them have been using it for navigation, everyday commute or traffic updates but that’s changing fast.
Google’s looking to expand the usage of Maps beyond the quintessential navigation tool with its newest addition – travel destination guidance. This feature will let users know a lot more about locations with the help of Local Guides, whose views, content and suggestions will be featured prominently in the app. Sure, this sounds like unnecessary distractions for those who just wanna find the best route home from work. But Google hopes this will inspire people to explore more.
There’s an active, thriving community of 120 million Local Guides across 24,000 cities all using Google Maps to passionately share their experiences of the surroundings & neighborhoods through reviews, lists, photos, and more.
Experiences of the best guides or the “Top Local Guides” will be featured prominently in the “For You” tab of the Maps app. By following these Top Local Guides, their suggestions & recommendations will start popping up for you about the places to go and things to do. Pretty neat.
Google, in a recent support release, explained that Local Guides were selected to try out this feature based on circumstances like quality & frequency of sharing reviews, recommendations, and contributions on Google Maps. Although it’s not clear how these Top Local Guides are chosen (as of writing), reputation is sure to be one of the primary requisites.
Here are some examples:
In Bangalore, India, a Top Local Guide named Melvin John offers recommendations for the city’s beer & microbrewery scene and is highly popular. And in Tokyo, Photography by Ayaka Ohkawa has helped a lot of people explore the city’s culture, food, and monuments.
When will this feature be available on Google Maps?
As the select roll out begins, people in Tokyo, Osaka, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, San Francisco, New York, London, Bangkok, and Delhi will soon be able to see featured content from top Local Guides in the app. If you live in one of these nine cities, look out for updates to your “For You” tab of Google Maps, you just might discover something new with help from a local guide/influencer.
