Announcing the Experimental release of a new altitude_meters field for navigation points in the Destinations service. The altitude_meters field contains the altitude of the navigation point in meters.

Experimental release of Street View imagery and parking information

Announcing the Experimental release of two SearchDestinations response fields:

• Imagery and annotations. This field provides Street View imagery and annotations. See the documentation.
• Parking information. This field provides detailed parking information for destinations. See the documentation.

Geocoding API v4 is now generally available.

Announcing the GA release of the Geocoding API v4.

Navigation point tokens now available.

You can now use the Destinations method of the Geocoding API v4 to allow your users to select pickup and dropoff points, improving the consumer and driver experience in situations like food delivery or rideshare. Use the navigation point token from the selection to pass key this contextual information to the Navigation SDK for precise routing. See the documentation.

Preview release of the SearchDestinations method of the Geocoding API v4.

Announcing the Preview release of the SearchDestinations method of the Geocoding API v4. This release includes these new features:

• AI-powered summaries to help users understand a destination. See AI-powered summaries for more information.

• Relational descriptions of landmarks. A new relationalDescription field helps users locate a destination. For example, "Around the corner from the Empire State Building." See the API reference.

• Place filters for locationQuery. The placeFilter object in geocodeLocationQuery lets you filter results by structureType and addressability.

• Landmark distance details. New fields straightLineDistanceMeters and travelDistanceMeters are available within landmark details to provide proximity information.

SearchDestinations method added to the Geocoding API v4 in experimental.

Announcing the Experimental release of the SearchDestinations method of the Geocoding API v4. For more information, see Search for destinations.

With this release, the following experimental features are no longer supported in the Geocoding API v3:

• Entrances
• Navigation points
• Building outlines
• Grounds

For continued use of these features, we recommend developers to use the SearchDestinations method instead. For more information, see Migrate from v3 features to the SearchDestinations method.

Enhancements to the building outlines and entrances Experimental release

The Experimental release of Building outlines and entrances adds the following enhancements:

• Increases entrance coverage by returning all entrances on the same building as the geocoding result. In the previous release it only returned entrances that were for the geocoding result itself.
• A new response field, entrance_tags[], is associated with each entrance to distinguish between entrances that are for the geocoding result and other entrances that are on the building. An entrance that has a value of PREFERRED in entrance_tags[] indicates that the entrance likely provides physical access to the geocoding result.

Announcement

Grounds Experimental release available

Announcing the Experimental release of grounds. The new grounds field in a Geocoding response contains a single grounds definition that, when populated, gives contextual information about the immediate territory that the geocoding result is on.

Geocoding API v4 is now in Preview.

Geocoding API v4 is implemented on the service infrastructure on Google Cloud which brings with it a more secure and trusted platform with enhanced security options like OAuth.

For more information and examples, see Geocoding API v4 overview.

Road name added to navigation points; Migration to new parameter and location fields required

The new road_name response field contains the name of the road the navigation point is offset from. To return the road_name response field, and to continue receiving navigation points, you must include the following query parameter in the request:

extra_computations=NAVIGATION_POINTS

Migration Notice: Existing applications must be updated to include the NAVIGATION_POINTS parameter. Additionally, migrate to using location.lat and location.lng response fields instead of location.latitude and location.longitude. Future requests without this parameter will not return navigation points, and the older location fields will be removed. For more information, see Navigation points.

Navigation points and road names are Experimental (pre-GA) features.

Address descriptors released for General Availability (GA) in India

Address descriptors include additional information that help describe a location using landmarks and areas. For more information, see Address descriptors request and response.

This feature is available in all regions and is in GA for India and in the pre-GA Experimental launch stage for all other regions. The use of address descriptors in India incurs no additional cost and usage is covered by the existing Geocoding (India) Essentials SKU. For more information, see coverage details.

Experimental navigation points added. Navigation points are a list of points that are useful for navigating to a place. For more information, see navigation points.

Address descriptors added

New Preview address descriptors added. Address descriptors include additional information that help describe a location using landmarks and areas. For more information, see Address descriptors request and response.

This feature is available in all regions. For more information, see coverage details.