Do you live in one of those places where the food delivery driver can never seem to figure out
where to drop your Suvlaki because the entrance to your unit is around back and down the steps?
Have you ever tried to meet a friend at the less busy exit of the nearest transit station, or tried
to find the sports field that's literally half a mile away from the street address assigned to your local park?
Well, guess what? Google has the solution for you, a better alternative
to traditional street addresses. They're called plus codes.
And you may have actually seen them already in Google Maps
as strange little codes with a five-dot logo, a short combination of letters and numbers,
and then the name of a geographic location like a town. The idea behind plus codes is that they
are a quick way to identify a specific location within just
a few meters anywhere on the planet. That makes them not only a more accurate supplement
to existing street addresses, but potentially even an outright replacement in certain situations.
Let's say, for example, you're a tourist in a country that uses an address system that you're not familiar with.
Think about how Japanese cities arrange addresses into blocks rather than streets,
or how some Latin American countries just nickname buildings
or use distances from landmarks to denote a specific house.
Well, plus codes can be looked up for spots like these
simply by dropping a pin using the Google Maps app. This provides visitors with an absolute spot
to navigate to rather than the orange building 20 feet north of the big tree.
It also helps with remote locations that simply don't have addresses,
which is not only confusing for visitors, but can be downright life-threatening for anyone
in an underserved area that needs emergency assistance.
Now, I can practically hear you guys shouting, we've had this for thousands of years!
And all right, Magellan, you're kind of right.
Traditional latitude and longitude coordinates can serve as a kind of universal address.
But you'd be writing out a pretty long string of digits
in order to differentiate, say, your house from your neighbor's house a few feet away.
So the real key for plus codes is that they're shorter,
even though they're actually derived from traditional latitude and longitude.
Here's how it works. The system divides the world into blocks
of 20 degrees latitude by 20 degrees longitude,
then it divides those blocks up multiple times over, keeping a 20 by 20 grid each time,
eventually getting down to a block that is only three and a half meters wide on average.
It's small enough to indicate something like an individual business in a strip mall.
An algorithm translates this block into a code of 11 characters,
which can be further shortened by lopping off the first few characters and then appending a location to it,
such as 37XV plus CF, SurreyBC,
which happens to be the studio that I'm standing in right now.
That is a heck of a lot easier than using these coordinates if you're trying to find us,
which of course you aren't because we don't do impromptu tours.
It's a pretty cool system, but are people actually using it?
It turns out the answer is yes. Plus codes are being used
in some of the world's most heavily urbanized areas where people are living in more informal settings,
such as favelas and tent cities, where it's difficult for residents
to receive deliveries, access government services, or even sign up for bank accounts.
That's what it was like for one and a half million people in Kolkata, India,
where a nonprofit called Addressing the Unaddressed
works with the local authorities to have plus codes placed on dwellings,
kind of similar to house numbers in North America. Plus codes have also been used
on rural need of American lands in the US, where some homes do not have traditional addresses.
In these cases, for things like voter registration, ambulance services, mail delivery,
and even just for social calls. But even if you're not trying to save the world
as part of a nonprofit, it can still be useful. Google Maps makes it easy to copy and paste plus codes
just as you would a regular address, both for locations the app already labels,
as well as when you randomly just drop a pin somewhere,
meaning you can copy a plus code and send it to your Uber or DoorDash driver
and have them pasted into Google Maps and show up right at your door.
And while we've talked a lot about Google Maps, since that's what many of you are probably using,
the coolest part is you can also use plus codes on mapping apps like organic maps and Osmand,
since the algorithm used by plus codes is open source.
Just don't expect these codes to straight up replace traditional addresses anytime soon.
I wouldn't recommend scribbling a plus code on the next package you ship via FedEx.
Thanks for watching, guys. If you liked this video, check out our other video
on why Google Maps uses a globe now instead of a flat map.