Google has launched precise location mapping tool Plus Codes in India. According to The World Bank, half of the world’s urban population lives on an unnamed street. The aim of the Plus Codes is to provide address to everyone which they can share with anyone.
Plus Codes is another name of Open Location Code (OLC). OLC was developed at Google‘s Zürich engineering office. It was officially released on late October 2014. OLC is very useful where buildings haven’t assigned number or streets don’t have name. Open Location Codes are a way of encoding location into a form that is easier to use than latitude and longitude.
How Plus Codes works?
Plus Codes are 10 characters long in length. It contains 2 parts. Second part has a plus sign before the last two characters.
- The first four characters are the area code, describing a region of roughly 100 x 100 kilometers.
- The last six characters are the local code, describing the neighborhood and the building, an area of roughly 14 x 14 meters – about the size of one half of a basketball court.
In India, we know how challenging it can be to reach a given residential address. They are unique in format, and vary across regions, localities, and use cases. While some addresses are well-defined by street names and house numbers that are easy to find, others can be long-winded and hard to locate. The other reality is that millions of people and places in India are hard to locate — especially those in remote areas. We are deeply committed to helping find solutions to these challenges.
Who can use Google Plus Codes?
- Individuals
- Organizations
- Businesses
- Developers
With the accurate pinpoint location Google Plus Codes are useful to everyone like individuals, organizations and businesses. It shorten the address in effective way. One can reach destination building exactly with this code. After reaching the building, anyone could reach to their particular destination easily.
Organizations are the ones who get more benefits as it locate any area on mother earth. Any gov or non-gov body can provide better service to any location despite of area or street name. One more important benefit of this is it saves time. In emergency, any help could reach as soon as possible.
As we know now, Plus Codes are based on Open Location Code – and OLC is open source. So if you want to use OLC in your IT service, you can implement it in your project. Expand the usability of OLC as you want.
Google Maps Plus Codes
Google Maps have already implemented Plus Codes. Paste any Plus Code in Google Search and it shows exact location accurately.
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