The US technology giant Google has launched a new feature for its extensively used Google Maps users in India. It is the Google Plus Codes, and lets users share and save their important addresses, in the form of 6-7 alphanumeric codes.
Originally launched in the country in 2018, the Google Plus Code feature has been widely used by different business, NGO and other entities, and is now being extended to home addresses.
Google Maps Codes: What are These?
Up until now, Indian users could only use Google addresses, while typing the name of the place they wanted to search for, or travel to.
However, now one can save key Google addresses using a combination of 6 or 7 numbers along with letters, and town or city’s name, by using latitudes and longitudes instead of relying on the names of ambiguous and oftentimes difficult to spell street and locality names.
According to the Product Manager at Google Maps, Amanda Bishop,
“We piloted this feature in India a month ago, and are thrilled to share that over 300,000 users in India have already found their home address using Plus Codes.
We are looking forward to expanding to more types of places, and are actively looking for opportunities to partner with e-commerce, logistics, and delivery companies, to scale up the experience to more people across the world.”
Google will first launch this feature for Android users and then to iOS users.
Benefits of Google Maps Codes
It can promptly locate one’s location, no matter how dense of a cluster it might be in, and they are shorter in length, compared to global coordinates, which makes them easy to share too.
On top of that, these coordinates do not need an internet connection to work, meaning they can be used in patchy internet areas or the ones with no internet connection.
These Plus Codes are independent of language. Each Plus code represents a unique geographical location, states Google.
It adds, “In our user studies we realized that people are not always looking for pinpoint precision. Approximate information is also what is needed. So we played around with the length of the code. One does not need all of the ten characters in the code, some characters represent the city, and we took those out and added it to the end.”.