Navigation tools these days can be pretty advanced and accurate and the amount of data available should be enough for anyone, even in the more remote locations. Yet good old fashioned ‘asking for directions’ is still usually the best way to find a place and navigate in an unknown area, the digital solutions, while accurate, fail to convey the data in a way that makes more sense to us humans. Google realized this and made extensive studies trying to improve the experience by making directions in Google Maps read out more like the ones one of your friends give you, with plenty of landmarks and other visual cues to help guide you.
“We discovered that street signs or names tend to be less important than landmarks such as civic buildings and gas stations. A friend giving you directions might tell you to ‘Turn left at the school’ or ‘Go past the convenience store’,” Dave Walker and John Leen, software engineers at Google wrote.
“Our new algorithm determines which of these landmarks are most useful for navigation, based on visibility, importance, and closeness to the turns that you’re making. We now combine landmark data, counted turns (“the 2nd right”), intersection names, and road names, and try to use whatever information is most relevant and useful. We’re using landmarks in two ways: to identify where … (read more)