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Comment by sunshadow

16 hours ago

They made 11B$ last year. It has incredible amount of ads. If you haven't noticed, then that means they did a great job. (tip: look for the custom logo pins in the map. Its printing money)

While I have no way to validate this, I highly suspect that the routing algorithm is also subtly manipulated. There is a route I drive with regular frequency that contains a roughly 20 mile section of two mostly parallel roads, one for through traffic and one for local. Every single time I drive through, Google routes me to the local traffic road. I know for certain the local road is slightly slower and it's also simply incorrect. The only way it makes sense is if it's a bug, or my hunch is that Google weights the route a little higher because it goes by a bunch of businesses that pay for advertising.