Google Updates Maps In Countries Across Europe, Asia, and Africa

Today, Google has announced updates to maps in nearly a dozen countries in three continents. The updates provide more overall detail, new additions like 3D buildings, and updates to existing features like ferry routes.

Here are the countries that received the updated maps:

Croatia, Czech Republic, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Lesotho, Macau, Portugal, San Marino, Singapore and Vatican City.

First up for these countries is more details. This means upgrades to coastline and body of water detail. Also, Google has labeled more important points like airports, schools, and public areas.

One of the more interesting improvements is to ferry routes, for example near Naples:

From the Google Lat Long blog:

We’ve also added better and more clearly labelled ferry routes in many places, such as the area below surrounding Naples, Italy. Traveling by ferry is one of my favorite ways to explore a city—I love looking back from the water at the cityscapes—and this improvement will help you find the ferry routes you need to do the same. You can even use Google Maps to get transit-based directions for ferries. We take into account ferry timetables to route you over water just easily as you might follow our driving directions over land.

Finally, Google added more multilingual support for road names and changed the look of highways and local roads to make them more distinguishable from one another.