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Google Maps’ tab for saved places gets a useful boost

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The fact that more than 7 billion places globally are currently stored in Google Maps’ Saved tab tells us two things. One: There are a lot of interesting spots in the world; and two: The tab is darn popular among users.

The feature, which until February 2020 appeared in the app under the “for you” name, lets you save and manage all of the places you’re interested in, including everything from your favorite restaurants and cafes to faraway places you dream of visiting.

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This week the company announced three useful improvements for the tab.

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The first one makes it easier to find a place that you saved some time ago. As Google Maps product manager Greg Backstrom points out in a post highlighting the update, “It can be hard to remember what the name of the place was or what list you even saved it to. Now, your recently saved places are organized at the top of the Saved tab so you can quickly find the place you’re looking for.”

Second up, Google Maps now lets you know when you’re close to a place in your saved list. If you have a lot of places saved in your immediate area, it can take time to sort through them as you try to decide where to go. But now, if you have location permission enabled, you can see all your nearby saved places sorted by distance and arranged in a carousel, making them much easier to browse through.

Finally, the app now makes it easier to remember where you’ve been, if you happen to want to quickly pull up that data. As Backstrom explains: “If you’ve chosen to turn on your Location History setting, you can use your Timeline to remember the places you’ve been and routes you’ve taken. You can see how far you’ve biked, walked, and ran over the past few days. You can also easily find that amazing hole-in-the-wall restaurant you visited during one of your past vacations, or that cute boutique you popped into a few weeks ago. All of these insights are now organized by time, city, region, or country.”

In his post, Backstrom reveals that the most-saved place on Google Maps is currently the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France, followed by the Louvre Museum in the same city, and, in the third spot, Kiyomizu-dera, a Buddhist temple in Kyoto, Japan.

Use Google Maps? Then be sure to check out Digital Trends’ recently updated piece offering a slew of tips on how to get the most out of it.

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Trevor Mogg
Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
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