
Ask HN: Does Google maps command traffic? - panosv
We were in the same car having two phones on Google maps. We had the same destination plugged in.<p>At an intersection the two phones disagreed about the turn. I am wondering whether Google sends people to different routes in order to split the traffic and get everyone home faster.
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brudgers
My experience is that the quality of directions varies by distance.

Suppose route H -> D passes through intermediate point I.

In cases where most of my concern is directions for the are local to my
destination, I've looked at directions H -> D and known they were crap due to
knowing that the portion from I -> D contained poor segments. In those cases,
getting directions from I -> D tends to improve the poor segments.

As distance increases the search space for routes increases and I strongly
suspect Google limits the amount of computation it runs before returning a
result. In other words, the route Google provides for A -> B is not
idempotent...as is shown by your anecdote.

