Driving Directions in 18 New Countries in Google Maps

Google Maps is a wonderful tool and with the number of features now available, things like traffic reports, public transit maps, Maps Navigation, Street View, it is staggering. If you live in the US and some parts of the developed world, that is. But when Google Maps lists just a couple of international roads in your entire country, the tool is completely useless. Luckily, with the help of scores of people all over the world this is changing, very fast in some cases, and Google can now boast adding driving directions to 18 new countries.

"One of the most requested features on Google Maps in Asia and Eastern Europe is driving directions. Google Map Maker users in these countries have been busy adding detailed data like turn restrictions, road priorities, speeds and one-ways. Using that rich data, we've been able to launch driving directions in 18 Eastern European and Asia-Pacific countries," Vishwajith Krishnamurthy, software engineer at Google Map Maker writes.

"You can now navigate using Google Maps in Albania, Belarus, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, Bangladesh, Cambodia, French Polynesia, Guam, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Nepal, New Caledonia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Vietnam," he adds listing the countries which now have driving directions.

Google can afford to spend millions of dollars for the latest information, the latest imagery and live data reports in the US because it will make a lot more millions from the local ads it can serve on Google Maps. In most parts of the world though, this isn't a viable option financially, so it turns to the users by 'helping them help themselves' with Map Maker, a tool which enables anyone to add new map information and edit existing one.

Now, the work of those busy little bees is paying off not just with better map data, which is making its way into the main Google Maps service, but also by enabling features like driving directions which rely on user contributed data like one-way streets, roundabouts and other info which can't be extracted just from the road map itself.