What new thing have you learned today ?

[skysidhe]

[glatt]

A friend was complaining about traffic this morning, and out of curiosity I pulled up a Google map and clicked on the traffic option. Sure enough, I saw red and black markings all over the map on her route in.

That got me wondering how Google can create these maps. Where do they get the information? So I looked for the answer on the web.

It turns out that while Google gets some of its information from various departments of transportation, the majority of their information comes from us. When we download Google Maps to our phones, and agree to share data with Google so that they can plot our location on the map, they use anonymous GPS information from our phones to see where we are and how fast we are moving. They gather that data from millions of cell phone users, and load it into the maps they send back to all of our phones. They gather information from enough phones that the traffic data is very accurate.

Cool huh? The more people use the feature, the more accurate and detailed it gets.