Not sure if anyone else noticed but occasionally navigation tries to take me through some back roads not meant for thru traffic like through office lots or off highway and back while there is no traffic etc. Only way it makes sense is to gather missing data on normally unused roads
I think they try more radical/experimental stuff on Waze before rolling it out to G maps. But I might be wrong.
We’re lab rats for different companies, the most insidious are companies that are dealing with health, in the name of “helping” people, this is nothing.
It looks like you were subjected to A/B testing. I ignore it too when it says I can save 2 mins of make gazillion more turns.
Tag google on the post. Would love to hear what googlers say
If there is one route that is faster, google maps traffic there and it becomes slower. In the end all routes are equally slow so any random path on the grid is “optimal”.
That's during traffic jams though. I've seen this behavior at perfectly clear hours, where it would make zero sense for it to put me through like 20 nodes making all the weird turns through some random office complex vs 4 nodes taking the main road
It would make sense to do it to use me as a probe to gather data on going through that office complex at 10 pm which it would normally lack though
If it’s routing you around the google MV campus then I can guess the motivations
You were probably victim to some boneheaded A/B testing. I have noticed such issues many times. However, in general Google Maps turn by turn navigation has always been shoddy including the accuracy of its directions. The only thing worse was Apple Maps. There have been 3 instances where I almost got into an accident due to Google Maps shenanigans. Once it was when it asked me to turn left onto a road which was a one way street in the wrong direction....when it was raining heavily and it was hard to make out street signs. Luckily I spotted the headlights of an oncoming truck and veered off just in time. And this was in the Bay Area - go figure. It’s kinda unfortunate that Nokia went down and Nokia HERE (ex-Navteq/Nokia Maps) got sold off to an automotive consortium. Nokia Maps has till date been the most reliable turn by turn nav app I have used. It’s PoI database sucked (Google Maps has the best PoI info) but its map data and directions worked reliably every time (and didn’t need an always on data connection on top of that). And unlike Google Maps it would not give me conflicting instructions while my vehicle was standing perfectly still (Google Maps engineers apparently never heard of hysteresis).
Or just trying to avoid a traffic jam?
No, I noticed this when the traffic was all clear way too many times