





Google Maps has announced a new update that tweaks the look of the map and adds a feature that highlights "hotspots" in your area.

Google says the new map design is cleaner and easier to read. The company has "removed elements that aren’t absolutely required (like road outlines)" and "improved the typography of street names, points of interest, transit stations, and more" to make the map more readable. Google's more "subtle" visual scheme lets you know what kind of location you're looking at just by the color and even provides a color key.

With the map cleaned up, Google is adding a new feature to the base layer of the map. When zoomed out to a sufficient level, clusters of popular points of interest become highlighted in orange. Zoom in and the individual places appear, also highlighted in orange, letting you know how popular they are.

Since this is an update to the cloud-based Google Maps data, the new look should be available on every platform that has Google Maps. No app updated needed.

