How This Cairo Google Guide Helps Keep the City's Digital Record
"A Local Guide review is real, it comes from someone who actually sat in that chair and ate that food.”
If you’ve ever looked up a restaurant, bakery or coffee shop online in Cairo, you’ve likely come across Mohamed Yones’s words and his visuals. By day, he has a regular job as a HVAC engineer living and working in Cairo — a city he prides as his home. By night, however, he turns to his hobby as a Google Guide where he documents and reviews experiences he’s had across the chaotic city while helping fill in the gaps on the map.
“The concept of a Google Local Guide is not widespread in Egypt the way vlogging is on other platforms, we lack the visual element that grabs people. It is invisible work,” Yones tells CairoScene.
The Google Local Guide program is a global network of volunteers who add places, photos, reviews, and missing information to Google Maps. While he's not the only one in Cairo, Younes has reached the highest level within that program, Level 10 - or, in his own words, the black belt of cartography.
To get to that level, he's taken more than 22,000 photos, submitted 1,300 reviews and answered more than 4,000 questions from people he’s never met for longer than a decade.
"A Local Guide review is real," Younes says. "It comes from someone who actually sat in that chair and ate that food.”
Younes's passion for photography and documentation began when he was a kid. When he wanted to tell a story, he drew pictures. He often created drawings of Cairo, a city he was too young to explore on his own. In 2005, he got his first camera phone, a Nokia 6600. The screen was the size of a postage stamp and the drawings turned into digital documentations.
The camera captured images that looked like memories even when they were new, pictures with blurred edges and fuzzy details. He organised them in folders by year and place; a first-wave digital library of a city he was already falling for.
In 2017, a notification arrived on his phone: Become a Google Local Guide. He clicked yes. "I already loved photography and going to new places," Yones says. "The program gave me a reason to be consistent about it. A structure or a place to put all those photos I was taking anyway.”
When asked why he does all this, specifically why he spends his free time photographing stairwells and verifying opening hours, especially for free, for strangers, for a corporation that will never know his name, Yones responded candidly: It's because of Cairo. There’s a nagging feeling that a city this vast and this careless, that seemingly has its own memory, needs a record keeper of sorts, Yones explains. A local bakery not on the map still deserves to be found, and a Wi-Fi password posted in an airport lounge is a kindness worth extending.
Yones is adamant that he will keep photographing and reviewing. Despite his worry that this map will never be finished because of the rapid progression of change in Cairo, Yones believes that someone has to try.
