If you’ve ever Googled a local business, you have probably seen a graph, indicating the average traffic (Popular Times) at a specific hour, during their normal business hours.
There is also a “Live” function, that shows how busy they are at that exact moment. How is that information updated in Google in real time? Does someone actually manually update this information regularly or is there some sort of algorithm that makes this determination?
In: 133
Nope, your android phone is “phoning it in”. Part of all that boilerplate junk in the user agreement that you clicked on that noone reads is your phone is constantly sending google information like where you are, how fast you’re travelling.
So they know that android phones are x% of all phones. Lets say 70%. If on average there are 6 android phones are in this store, then they can extrapolate (assuming everyone has a cell phone) and say the average traffic is 10 people. Thus, if right now there are only 2 droid phones in here, there are maybe 3 total people, thus its “not busy”.
Same way how google maps redirects u around traffic – its collecting data from all the droid phones on the road and can tell when a bunch are moving a lot slower than the limit on a road.
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