Google has added a major new feature to Google Maps Platform, providing the ability “to solve real-world problems” with Geospatial Analytics.

Google Maps is already the most popular mapping software, offing a wealth of features, including Street View, 3D view, and standard satellite view. In its latest update, however, Google is adding Geospatial Analytics, a powerful tool that can be used for a hosting of applications, including infrastructure analysis.

Google Maps Platform is used by over 10 million websites and apps. Customers want to access more insights from our up-to-date, comprehensive geospatial data, so they can make more informed business and sustainability decisions. That’s why for the first time, we’re integrating new Google Maps Platform datasets, along with Earth Engine datasets and capabilities, directly into BigQuery, to make it easier for data analysts and decision makers to access insights. Read this blog to go deeper on our geospatial analytics capabilities. Starting today, the following datasets can be accessed in BigQuery:

• Our first Imagery Insights dataset, available in Experimental, applies Vertex AI in Google Cloud directly to Street View imagery in data clean rooms, to identify, detect, and see the condition of key infrastructure objects, like telephone poles, street signs, roads, and bridges. If a telecom company wants to identify which utility poles require maintenance, they can use this dataset to more easily locate all their poles virtually.
• Places Insights available in Preview, enables businesses to get customized, aggregated insights about many places in a wider area, based on ratings, store hours, parking, wheelchair accessibility, and more. If a retailer wants to open a new store in an area with a high concentration of expensive restaurants and a low density of large retail brands, Places Insights will provide insights on locations that fit this criteria.
• Roads Management Insights available in Preview, helps public sector and road authorities analyze traffic data and improve roads with historical and real-time traffic information. For example, traffic authorities can use the insights from this to identify accident-prone areas and add safety measures like speed bumps or stop signs. They can also build models that forecast traffic conditions to mitigate congestion before it even occurs.
• Earth Engine in BigQuery available in Preview, enables organizations to derive sustainability insights, such as wildfire risk or deforestation, from satellite imagery for a specified area of interest. With a new geospatial function and 20 new Earth Engine datasets available in BigQuery, this feature makes advanced geospatial analysis accessible to data analysts–even if they don’t have remote sensing expertise.

What’s more, Google is providing a host of no-code geospatial analytics tools to help non-developers to take advantage of the new features. The company is also integrating Google Earth with the Google Maps Platform.

To offer a more comprehensive suite of geospatial tools for developers, data analysts and geospatial practitioners, we’re bringing Google Earth–which remains available for everyone–and our new geospatial analytics datasets into the Google Maps Platform family.

The update is sure to be useful for city planners, civil servants, and data scientists.