It's very easy to get lost in case of forgetting landmarks. You miss one turn, you are bound to reach some other place and not to your desired destination. Now Google will try its level best to stop its user from getting lost in their way. Reasons are several, like poorly labeled street name, unclear visibility of street boards in night and difficult names of streets to remember. India is a place where all these can happen to mislead you to an unknown place. Then, the only option left to you is to move according to the direction provided to you by people on the street. It's difficult to locate the right path without street names. Just see the screenshot below of Google Maps directions.
Now Google has jumped in to collect the minutest possible details to draw a map of India based on local landmarks, after getting motivated from the feedbacks of its user around the world. This week Google launched Google Maps India with an added feature. Now Google Maps India shows easy-to-follow landmarks and along the way visible business to describe any route.
In many countries people depend on visual landmarks along way to remember a particular route rather than remembering street names. The problem for Google was to match the understanding of landmarks of the people. It took a whole user research study for Google to derive this service. Google inquired about several routes to those very people and from there Google got its blue print ready. The landmarks, which Google found out in its research are more popular among people and subsequently, are easy to remember for the users. For example, it's always easy to remember landmarks like a red building at the corner than a particular street name. Moreover these street names/boards are not even visual at times, whereas a good landmark is always visible.
Google claims that its new service will be more helpful in the situations like when one needs to make exit from the subway or when one needs to know an exact point to turn. At times people also like to confirm that they are walking on the right track or not. Now people have Google with them to tell them the exact route to their destination, if someone is traveling to an unknown place.
Google has already tested this service with drivers in Bangalore, India. It made the required changes after the trial and now they have added more landmarks and they have tried to be less dependent on street names. The best part if it is that now Google will serve as a local for its users in determining a route to a particular place.
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Navneet Kaushal, CEO PageTraffic is a trusted authority in the search engine marketing industry. He is a featured author at Web Pro News, Search Newz, Promotionworld, Website Notes, DevWebPro, SEO Article and Web Help Now among many others.
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Thank you for your share!
That's pretty cool. I've noticed they started doing this in the US too. I recently had some directions that said to turn on "3rd street on the right". It really does help because you don't always know the street names until you've passed the signs.
RouteGuru pioneered this innovation back in 2007
http://www.pluggd.in/product-reviews/routeguru-te…
Please visit http://RouteGuru.com for a technology demonstration (live for Delhi-India).
We use Google Maps API to (and only to) display our route on a graphical map. It can also be proved that our technology is better than Google’s.
http://www.pluggd.in/routeguru-founders-on-google…
Google has just stolen the credit and formulated a great story to covey their mettle without patronizing RouteGuru.
Cheers,
Avinash
Co-founder, CEO, RouteGuru
(Avinash at RouteGuru dot com)
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