Google Maps Adds Descriptive Phrases To Church Listings

Google has announced that listings in Google Maps will now include descriptive phrases associated with the listing.

“Google Maps search results in the U.S. and Great Britain will include some of the phrases which are most frequently used to describe those places. These phrases come from sources all across the web, such as reviews, web pages and other online references, and they can help people quickly identify the characteristics that make a particular place unique.”

Say you are moving to a new city and looking for a church to attend.  Now, you can see some additional descriptive phrases about some of those churches as you can see in the listing below:

In the listing above, you can see they have the descriptive terms, “stained glass windows”, “William Tinsley”, “admission”, and “choral”.  Probably not the best set of descriptions a church could have.  But the church doesn’t control what those descriptions are, so you can’t really blame them.

After doing several searches, it seems that either Google is slowly rolling this out to the Google Maps listings or there are certain criteria which must be met for a listing to receive the new feature as most of the listings I saw did not have descriptive terms.

You can see the official announcement here:

http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2011/06/introducing-descriptive-terms-in-local.html

What do you think about the new descriptive terms?

Do you think they are helpful?