• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, August 27, 2019

Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak estimates Alphabet could add as much as $5 billion to revenue in fiscal year 2020 based mostly on its strength in Google Maps, Discover, and e-commerce.

Google Maps, per Nowak, should contribute about $1.6 billion in 2020. Then add Discover -- the new name for the Google Feed that serves topics and news items around users' specific interests -- at about $2 billion, and e-commerce at approximately $1.3 billion.

Google Discover began serving up restaurant recommendations on Tuesday under the title “Inspiration for your next meal out,” according to one report. It lets the user scroll through five or more recommendations. Tapping one will open the Google listing for that restaurant in a Chrome Custom Tab.

Nowak isn’t the only analyst talking up Google Maps as a way for Alphabet, Google’s parent company, to generate revenue.

Gene Munster, partner at Loup Ventures, during an interview on CNBC in July pointed to Google’s bundled services — Maps with YouTube and search — similar to the way Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer with certain apps for PCs as a way for the company to generate additional revenue.

Google has been making some improvements to Maps. In the past few days the company has rolled out several shortcut buttons. The buttons include alternate routes, better search, a button for locations, and an overflow menu for other options.

The Maps interface in beta now provides direct access to alternative routes. Someone on Reddit commented that the buttons are similar to Waze.

For the most part the navigational, search and the location buttons have received positive reviews on Reddit. One person wrote that the problem is that “it pushes the navigation display further up the screen so that even more of the screen is obscured when a drop down message notification is received.”