Google Maps’ visuals have long been informative, but also a bit lifeless — you wouldn’t know a lush forest landscape from a desert unless you switched to the satellite view. Google is ready to fix that, however, and it’s improving urban navigation in the process.
The internet giant is rolling out an update to Maps’ imagery that colors the terrain based on whether it’s arid, lush, icy, or mountainous. The darker the shade of green, the denser the forests and plant life. You’ll know where the greenery is along the Moroccan coastline, for example, or just where to find the ice in Iceland.
For most of the 13 years that Google Maps has provided traffic data, historical traffic patterns have been reliable indicators of what your conditions on the road could look like—but that's not always the case. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, traffic patterns around the globe have shifted dramatically. We saw up to a 50 percent decrease in worldwide traffic when lockdowns started in early 2020. Since then, parts of the world have reopened gradually, while others maintain restrictions. To account for this sudden change, we’ve recently updated our models to become more agile—automatically prioritizing historical traffic patterns from the last two to four weeks, and deprioritizing patterns from any time before that.
Over the past 15 years, we’ve provided maps in more than 220 countries and territories and now surface helpful information for more than 200 million places. These efforts bring helpful local information to your fingertips in Google Maps and produce better Google Search results, helping you connect with nearby places and businesses.
Google Maps is finally allowing a separate language from the system language to be set in the Android app. This is an option that probably should have been implemented a long time ago, but at least it's here now.
