Search
Finding a town, a lake, a park or a street by name with the network off — and what search cannot do yet.
Search runs entirely against the region on your device. There is no lookup service behind it, so it answers just as fast on a logging road as it does on Wi-Fi — and it answers at all where there is no signal.
Tap the search field at the top of the map and start typing. Results appear as you type; tap one and the map moves there and drops a pin.
What is in the index
Every name in the regions you have downloaded:
- Places — cities, towns, villages, hamlets, neighbourhoods, parks, conservation areas.
- Streets and roads — by the name on the map, so “Highway 400” rather than “the 400”.
- Water — lakes, rivers, bays, creeks.
- Named points of interest — a campground, a marina, a lodge, a store: anything mapped with a name of its own.
A long feature is anchored half way along it, so searching a highway takes you to the middle of it rather than to whichever end happens to come first in the data.
Search matches from the start of the name
Type the beginning of a name and matches narrow as you go: “alg” already brings up Algonquin, “kill” brings up Killarney Provincial Park.
The flip side is that it matches from the start, not from the middle. Searching “Provincial” will not find “Killarney Provincial Park”, and searching “Lake” will not find “Kashagawigamog Lake”. Start with the first word of the name.
There is no spelling correction: get the first few letters right and you are fine, but a typo in them will come back with nothing. If a search looks empty, try fewer letters.
Getting a better answer
- Type less, not more. Two or three letters of the first word is usually the fastest route to the right result.
- Check the region. Search only covers regions that are downloaded. Something missing may simply be over a boundary — see Download a map.
- Use Nearby for categories. “Campgrounds” is not a name, so it is not a search. Nearby answers that question properly, by distance from you.
What search cannot do yet
- House-number addresses. Planned. You cannot search “123 King Street West” today. Search the street by name, pan to the right block, and press and hold the map to drop a pin there.
- Fuzzy or typo-tolerant matching. Planned. Matching is by prefix only today.
Why an unnamed place is not in search
A lot of what a road trip needs has no name on the map: a pit toilet at a trailhead, a boat launch off a township road, a picnic table at a lookout. Those are in the region and drawn on the map, and Nearby finds them — but they are deliberately kept out of search.
They would all share one name. If “Toilets” were a search result there would be several thousand identical entries in a province, and search would answer with an arbitrary one, very likely in the next county. Nearby answers the question you actually meant — which one is close to me — so that is where they live.
From a result to a route
Tapping a result pins it and opens its card, with the name and the coordinates. From there, Route here plans a route to it and Save adds it to your saved places. Routing is covered in Routing and avoidances.