Google Maps Now Supports Full Offline Mode & SD Card Map Storage

Google Maps with ‘Offline areas’ has become a necessity these days. Think of any road trip, somewhere far where you have never been and you will automatically want to store that area in your Google Maps app (via offline places) and add desired pitstops.

It won’t be wrong to say that Google Maps has become an integral part of our lives. The users can now even edit maps and insert suggestions in Google Maps. I always keep my ‘Offline areas’ updated even when I have no plans to travel outside the city. Doing this not only gives me peace of mind, but also makes me ready to traverse those unknown areas of my city without asking for directions.

“Once you’ve switched to “Wi-fi only”, the Google Maps app will work completely offline — no Wi-Fi needed! You will still be able to use other apps and the rest of your phone as you normally would. And you might even save on battery life too. If you need to see what the traffic is like or update your offline maps, you can easily switch back to online mode by changing your setting or finding the nearest Wi-Fi,” said Sanket Gupta, Product Manager, Google Maps.

Google Maps supports offline areas for a while now, but the latest update adds support for ‘WiFi only’ mode letting youuse it completely offline even when the other apps are connected to the internet via mobile data. This would let yousave a lot of mobile data during those long road trips or to places with expensive cellular data.

The ‘WiFi only’ mode would also help save your phone’s battery while offering a seamless offline navigation experience.

Google Maps Becomes Entry-level Smartphones Friendly

Also with this update you would now be able to save offline areas in Google Maps on your entry-level Android smartphones too. While saving offline areas to internal memory has never been an issue for those with mid-range and high-end phones, people with affordable phones (4-8 GB ROM) have had difficulty in storing offline mode in Google Maps.

Entry-level smartphone users what it’s like when they can’t try a new app just because their phone doesn’t have sufficient free storage. Thankfully with this new update, they can now store offline areas in SD card too.

“Now, in addition to saving an area of the maps for offline use later, if you have a device that supports SD cards, you can opt to save your downloaded maps to an external SD card (if your device supports them) and free up storage space for important stuff like your holiday snaps or road trip playlists. Now you’ll never have to choose between snapping more food photos or the ability to navigate offline,” Sanket explained.

Another change that comes with this new update to Google Maps is new options for ride services in various cities across Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand. Currently Google Maps in India shows ride services only fromUber and Ola. We are expecting that Google will soon add more ride services to Google Maps in India too.

Facebook’s New Algorithm Update Aims To End Click-Bait Era!

World’s largest social network, Facebook, is plagued with clickbait titles by blogs and media corporations trying to lure people and increase views on their articles or productions. Facebook did modify its algorithm to tweak news feed and reduce the irrelevant contents, but the changes really didn’t make an impact.

The California-based social networking site has now released an update that aims to tone down clickbait titles and show you the most relevant content. Facebook executives claim that their main aim is to rank content and provide the best experience to its users.

You might see statements like “…And what happens next is hard to believe”, “..And you’ll get shocked by what you see!”, “..And his reaction was priceless” and “…You cannot guess what happened next.” in article and video titles that have regular content but the creators are trying to increase the views on their piece of work.

This is a very smart, and annoying, strategy adopted by content producers these days, and people often fall into the trap, finding themselves irritated by the content. This often leads to poor user experience on the news feed, directly affecting Facebook’s user engagement.

“To address this feedback from our community, we’re making an update to News Feed ranking to further reduce clickbait headlines in the coming weeks. With this update, people will see fewer clickbait stories and more of the stories they want to see higher up in their feeds,” the blog post mentions.

How is Facebook modifying its algorithm?

We regularly see pages with clickbait titles and posts and more often than not, end up closing Facebook altogether. Their older algorithm might have worked for a few, but overall the update wasn’t any promising. With this new update, Facebook is finally doing what we had hoped from them.

Now the company will scan specific clickbait titles, or identify titles that look like clickbaits and categorize them. Now there are two broad key points that Facebook will look into while deciding the relevance of the article –

1. Does the article contain what it says in the headline? Is the information complete and relevant?
2. Is the information provided exaggerated and is the title misleading?

So the next time you see an article saying “Do not go running in the morning because..”, do not click it just because it’s stating something readers might not know. In fact in most cases, you will already have knowledge about the conclusions, and you’ll end up wasting your time. If the article has content that is completely exaggerated and focuses on just one point which is irrelevant, Facebook will be removing the content from your feed.

This algorithm is what spam email filters also do, that look out for suspicious titles and block malicious content. The company will look at the title as well as the content through this algorithm and make sure you get the best content on your news feed.

Will this actually help?

To be honest, spam filters have worked wonders for me 99% of the time and they keep irrelevant mails in the spam box. Yes, sometimes emails might get mixed up, but errors are bound to happen anywhere.

This new algorithm from Facebook is what users had actually expected the first time, but probably was taking the company longer to implement. This definitely looks promising and interesting because not only with clickbait articles have lower rankings, their pages will automatically be affected.

Facebook clarifies that once the page stops making articles with clickbait titles and irrelevant content, this algorithm won’t rank them lower than before. Our news feed is already filled with so many things, we believe this will help reduce the clutter and clean the content.

The rollout has already started, so let us know in the comments section if you see any visible changes in the quality of the news feed now.