Google Maps bringing innovative features for India to discover local places

Google Maps has introduced three new features available to Indian users: a redesigned, India-inspired Explore tab, a new For You experience, and dining Offers that will help users explore areas they’re likely to enjoy, offering suggestions tailored to their tastes.

Announcing the new features, Krish Vitaldevara, Director, Google Maps said, “We’ve heard that Indian Maps users prefer a more assistive and visual browsing experience that is easy to access. To reflect this, we have a redesigned, India-focused Explore tab, the For You feature, and dining Offers. This will help Google Maps users discover a new side to their city, whether looking for things to do around town, getting offers on dining out, or getting recommendations that are personalized to their unique tastes.”

The ‘Explore’ tab has been a one-tap route to getting suggestions on dining, events, and things to do in the area being viewed in Google Maps. Now, based on top queries and the way people interact with Google Maps in India, seven new shortcuts have been added to the Explore tab: Restaurants, Petrol Pumps, ATMs, Offers, Shopping, Hotels, and Chemists. Using machine learning, Google Maps automatically identifies the top suggestions across these categories in every city.

Users can now explore popular neighborhoods in their city by simply tapping the arrow beside “Explore Nearby” and making a selection. Apart from exploring their own city, users can also look up other Indian cities by searching the city name -- an easy way to get up to speed before you travel!

The ‘For You’ tab serves users information on new restaurants, trending places, and personalized recommendations tailored to their interests. This feature also uses the ‘Your Match’ score, which uses machine learning to combine what Google Maps know about millions of places with the information a user has added like restaurants rated, cuisines liked, and places visited. The first time a user launches this feature they can select areas/localities they are interested in, and get more personalized and relevant recommendations over time.

Users can now also follow a business and get relevant updates, news on events and stay on top of offers they post to the ‘For You’ tab. The feature will also recommend other businesses based on merchants a user follows. The For You tab offers a simple, assistive experience to help discover the city with a single tap -- and it will continue to improve over time.

Furthermore, Google Maps is launching an ‘Offers’ section where users can find deals and claim them at restaurants across the top 11 Indian cities: Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Pune, Chennai, Kolkata, Goa, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Chandigarh and Hyderabad. To use this feature, users can simply tap the ‘Offers’ shortcut in the Explore tab or filter for restaurants with offers. The Offer feature is being launched in partnership with EazyDiner, where users can now find offers from over 4,000 restaurants, with more categories and partners coming soon.

On the occasion of this launch, starting from today, Google Maps users will get exclusive access to EazyDiner Prime offers for 15 days, across 1,500+ restaurants, with a guaranteed discount of at least 25 per cent on all of them. To avail this offer, users can look out for the ‘ EXCLUSIVE’ tag while exploring ‘Offers’ on Google Maps.