Request for Official List of Categories for Google Maps

[EjazShah]

Hi Google Team,

Requesting your support if you can publish a list of official categories for Google Maps and can update every month or quarterly. This will certainly save our time while searching for a specific category as well to ensure we update a place with its proper category.

This request is raised as per members discussion in the following link.

https://www.localguidesconnect.com/t5/Mapping-Your-World/Official-Category-list/m-p/347168#M10967

[YanniY]

Hi @EjazShah, thanks for your feedback - we have shared this with our team internally. 

[EjazShah]

Thanks @YanniY

[JeroenM]

Hi @EjazShah,

This list has been requested a number of times before. Gus from the LG Team gave a negative answer (see also quote below). There is however a section of the list published in a formal help document, related to the Google My Business Community. This is a list of the so called Establishment subset and I am not sure if it is being kept up to date.

There is a lot of things that can be said on the topic Categories. I am in the process of writing a paper on it and have already 8 pages of text, so there is a lot more to Categories than most Local Guides realise on first sight.

In case you are interested: here are many interesting Local Guides Connect posts related to Categories:

http://www.pearltrees.com/t/research/posts-related-categories/id17681574

This collection is a work in progress by the Research Team of the (unofficial) Local Guides Academy.

This is a excerpt of my draft paper that might interest you:

Category List Evolution

On the one hand, we are told by (ex) Regional Leads that the current category list is very mature and that therefore it is not often that categories are added or changed. It has also been stated that the procedure to get a new category added to the list, can take a very long time.

On the other hand, when asking Google officials for the list of categories, they tell us they cannot do so, because the available categories are not the same all over the world and that categories change.

Google Maps categories is an ever growing list that keeps changing to adapt to our strategies and resources to make sure we have the most accurate data on the Map.

Gus M, Google Local Guides Team

(draft excerpt of paper on Categories, by Jeroen Mourik)

Last but not least, this is a very recent  Connect discussion on the topic, where we also talk about how the Google AI bots could be the solution to the category challenges that we Local Guides have to deal with:

https://www.localguidesconnect.com/t5/Feedback-and-Feature-Requests/Categories/m-p/344118/highlight/...

With warm regards,

Jeroen

[EjazShah]

Hi @JeroenM, I hope your efforts are recognized and you get supported accordingly. Thumbs up for you 

We will wait and see response from Google team as mentioned by @YanniY in her previous comment in this post.