Google Maps celebrates 15 years of journeys

It was february of the 2005 when Google Maps became part of our lifes and, nowadays, it didn’t stop to be part of them.

Google Maps revolutionizes the way to move

Thanks to many upgrades Maps becomes a really loyal friend during the daily movements. It calculates the busiest roads, it avoids the men at work, it suggestes the quickest route.

In the 2007 arrives even the Street View which allows to see the streets for real thanks to a serie of pictures shotted by the Google cars all over the world. Sometimes it is only a funny game, other times it’s essential because it is possible to see if the shop that we are looking for it’s really there or if there is a car park around.

If at the beginning then the directions were only about the car journeys, now with Google Maps it is possible to organize  trips with the public transports or by foot.

Sure, sometimes it can make a mistake, and that’s why the anti-Google Maps signs were born in Sardinia, to avoid that the tourists follow wrong routes.

The last news of Google Maps

Live View was added last year and it allows to have on our smartphone’s screen a view of the city in augmented reality. The directions, infact, are straight on the image to easily follow them. The service has been created thanks to the combiation of the informations given by the sensors of the smartphone, together with the machine learning and the images of the Street View.

Other functions instead will be released this year, like Esplora which allows to find out if there is some interesting place around where we are in this moment.

Very similar is the card Saved. In this case the concept is much more social, infact we can see 6,5 billion of places saved by other users to find out even in this case new places, restourants and so on. It will be possible to add our own support by changing timelines or by signing wrong informations in the section Support.

With the card New on Maps instead it will be possible to find out new destinations starting by the news published by experts or local editors.

The feature that can help us

Here you have instead a serie of functions already available for a while which can be very usefull.

Save the car parking position, which is really usefull when we park on a big mall when we come back from the shopping.

Another usefull functions is the location sharing, now it’s available even for WhatsApp and it allows to meet when we don’t know very well the place.

Ne abbiamo già parlato: la mappa con il traffico in diretta, fondamentale la sera al rientro a casa, già normalmente Google Maps segnala i tratti stradali dove la macchine rallentano notevolmente (autovelox, passaggi pedonali, punti con poca visibilità). Selezionando la voce Traffico, invece, si avrà proprio accesso alla mappa in tempo reale con segnalazioni di intasamenti o di lavori in corso.

Per quanto riguarda la scheda sui mezzi pubblici è ora anche possibile impostare un promemoria per arrivare in tempo alla fermata scelta. Basta schiacciare i tre puntini nella schermata e selezionare la voce Imposta promemoria per la partenza.

Con Ok Google se state viaggiando in macchina potrete sapere quanto manca o anche mandare un messaggio a qualcuno avvisando che tardate, senza togliere le mani dal volante.

Ultima chicca presente su Google Maps, in versione desktop, è la possibilità di vedere le foto di una strada da oggi fino all’anno dell’introduzione di Street View, per scoprire cosa c’era prima in quel luogo, una memoria storica di come cambiano le strade.

This post is also available in: Italiano