Google Places International Adds Over 1,000 New Categories For Business Listings

Google’s Business community manager, Jade Wang, announced in a Google discussion forum thread that they have vastly increased the number of business categories available to businesses outside of the United States.

Jade said they now have added “over 1,000 new categories in the new Places dashboard” for businesses around the world. The new categories are available in the new Places dashboard “globally and translated to every language Google supports,” said Jade.

Previously, only U.S. businesses had a vast number of categories to choose from. Why? Jade said there were a lot of complexities involved in translation and support. Jade explained that “international business categorization is quite tricky,” adding:

Imagine you’re planning a trip to Greece. When you search from the US, you’ll probably be using English, and you’ll see the categories of Greek businesses in English. However, those businesses in Greece were probably set in Greek using Places for Business in Greek. This means the Places for Business team has to translate and associate categories in many languages. As you can imagine, this can become very complicated very quickly.

This is now rolling out intentionally in the new Google Places dashboard.