Open in Google Maps

Quickly open your current Google Search query directly in Google Maps.

Open in Google Maps — What's New This release is about one thing: making the extension work as well in your language as it always has in English. Along the way we found and fixed a bug that had been quietly switching the main feature off for most of the people using it. SMART DETECTION NOW SPEAKS 43 LANGUAGES Open in Google Maps watches your search results and offers a map when your search looks like it is about a place. That decision is made by a feature we call smart detection, and it is on by default. Until now, smart detection only recognised English. It looked for words like "restaurant", "pharmacy" or "near me". If you searched in German, Japanese, Arabic or Portuguese, it found nothing it recognised, decided your search was not about a place, and stayed hidden. The extension was translated into 43 languages, but its central feature only worked in one of them. Smart detection now recognises place searches in all 43 languages the extension ships in. Search for "Apotheke in der Nähe", "近くのカフェ", "صيدلية بالقرب مني", "farmácia perto de mim" or "кав'ярня поруч", and the map option appears exactly as it always has for "pharmacy near me". We added just over 1,500 terms covering restaurants, cafés, pharmacies, hospitals, supermarkets, bakeries, banks, cash machines, petrol stations, parking, airports, stations, parks, beaches, museums, libraries and gyms, plus the phrases people actually type to express location: near me, nearby, closest, how do I get to, open now, address, city centre. Getting this right needed two different approaches rather than one. Languages that separate words with spaces and keep their articles detached — the Latin, Cyrillic and Greek alphabets — are matched on whole words, so "кафе" is recognised in "кафе рядом" but is correctly ignored inside an unrelated word like "кафедра". Languages where that check cannot work are handled differently: Japanese, Chinese and Thai are written without spaces between words, Korean attaches particles to the end of a word, and Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Hindi and Urdu attach the article and prepositions to the front, so that "مطعم" becomes "المطعم". For those, we match on the word stem instead, using only terms distinctive enough that they will not appear inside an unrelated word. We were careful about the opposite failure too. A map card appearing on a search that has nothing to do with places is the mistake you would actually notice. Every term is checked automatically against ordinary non-place searches in each of these languages before it can ship. If any term would wrongly trigger on a query like "how does photosynthesis work" or "什麼是量子力學", the build is rejected outright. A RELATED BUG, FIXED The same underlying flaw had also been quietly breaking accented words in languages using the Latin alphabet. The word "café" was in the extension's keyword list from the very beginning, but because of how word boundaries are defined internally, it could never actually match anything. This is now fixed, so accented terms behave exactly like unaccented ones. We fixed a smaller related problem too: apostrophes. Ukrainian "кав'ярня" and French "l'hôtel" can be typed with several apostrophe characters that look nearly identical on screen but differ to a computer. The extension now treats them as the same character, so your search is recognised whichever one your keyboard produces. TRANSLATIONS COMPLETED AND CORRECTED We audited all 43 languages, checking every one of the extension's 86 text strings. Every translatable string is now present and translated in every language, with nothing quietly falling back to English. Brand names such as Google Maps, Apple Maps, OpenStreetMap, Waze and Bing Maps are deliberately left as they are, being proper names rather than words to translate. Two places still showed English regardless of your language: the example search in the settings preview, and the mock address bar above it on the settings and welcome pages. In French, the preview showed the caption "«café près de moi» ressemble à une recherche de lieu" directly above an address bar reading "coffee near me". Both now use your language. That settings preview had a further problem hiding behind the first one. Because it ran your localised example query through the English-only smart detection, the preview would have reported that nothing would be added to the page — in every language except English. The preview now correctly demonstrates what the extension does. We also corrected the Romanian settings heading, which had been left untranslated, and confirmed with native review that the handful of other words identical to their English equivalents — General in Catalan and Spanish, Recent in Dutch, Preview in Filipino — are genuinely the correct words in those languages rather than untranslated leftovers. WHAT HAS NOT CHANGED The extension still makes no network requests and collects nothing. Your recent searches, if you choose to keep them, are stored on your own device and are never sent anywhere. All of the above happens entirely on your computer.