Due to the fact that the spread of the coronavirus doesn’t seem to be abating anytime soon, this means that many businesses that are deemed non-essential are being forced to change the way they operate. For some, this means temporarily suspending their operations for the time-being.To make it easier for customers to know if a business is closed, shut down, or continuing to operate, Google has announced a new “Temporarily Closed” feature for Google Maps listings. This means that businesses will soon be able to mark themselves as being temporarily closed, so that customers won’t turn up and discover that the shop they want to visit is closed.
According to Google, this is part of the company’s efforts at helping people find correct information in trying times like this. In an earlier blog post, Google writes, “Based on data from governments and other authoritative sources, Google Search and Maps will now display if a place, like a school or local business, is temporarily closed. In the coming days, we’ll make it possible for businesses to easily mark themselves as “temporarily closed” using Google My Business.”
These changes should already be live, so don’t be surprised if you start seeing listings on Google Maps where businesses have marked themselves have temporarily closed.
Filed in . Read more about Google and Google Maps. Source: 9to5google