So I am searching for a few addresses on the Google Maps website and I noticed that its results are almost instantaneous! I am not even typing these addresses, just copy-pasting them on the search bar. Then I noticed when I use the google maps app for navigation, it loads so fast and almost every thing on it is real-time like traffic and breakdowns and the rest. Even the direction where it uses the camera to point which direction to go when walking.
How is Google managing to load things this fast? Its mind boggling!
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I dont really see any technical answers here so here is my take.
1) For your search autocomplete: When someone searches something in google, google stores the keyword in a database with a scoring system. The more people search it, the more score it gets.
Now. Fetch these highly searched keywords or sentence and store it in a different database which might be much smaller. Database has a feature called an index. Index basically works just like a dictionary. If you want to look up the meaning of word “zygote”, you dont have to scroll through all the pages, you just have to scroll to the page where words starts with “Z”. That makes searching faster. Ofcourse, they amp up their computing power to supercharge searching.
2) Google maps: There is a data structure called a tree or a graph. Suppose you want to go to the grocery store, in how many ways can you get there? Assume that you can use a street multiple times but you cant use the same route. You could either take left from your house or right. After taking left you could still take a left or a right. Now you have 100 different ways to go to the store. What if you already know a route that majority of the people take? Now you have a route. What if i keep updating you on traffic for these routes. You will take the next best route right? Thats how the maps work.
Your map app basically sends the start point and end point to the google server. The server already knows the most taken path and the traffic because there are people who are using maps at this moment on those routes. Based on this its easy for it to tell you what route to take.
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