I mean, seriously, how do they keep everything so close to perfect and how do they map even the smallest roads ( I imagine, satellites help, but satellites don’t know nor can read the name of some small roads/paths ) Not only that to mix into all that, the almost perfect voice directions.
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The most accurate data is in the most heavily populated and most affluent areas. Here, a combination of vehicles on the street and airplanes and satellites provide the bulk of the data, mixed with high precision GPS, topological maps, building records, and of course public GIS (road and terrain maps).
The street view vehicles actually handle more of the heavy lifting than you might think. All those images are heavily processed with ML-driven computer vision to derive and correct a TON of detail that is unavailable from any other source. Have you wondered how it is that Apple knows exactly how many trees there are in your front yard, along with their size and exact position? Satellite imagery helps but it’s mostly vehicle data.
All of this also gets checked and augmented by people just using Maps. As you drive around, you’re almost always on the road, so if your GPS positions you far away from where the road was supposed to be, or a different speed, or a different direction, etc etc, that becomes data which can be used to surface and correct errors. Isolated data points are just noise, but in aggregate you can derive a lot of accuracy from the masses. This is also how real time traffic works.
So the short answer is really just this: data, and a lot of it, whether it’s images or GPS traces or public maps or anything else. Our tools for processing and understanding incomprehensibly vast quantities of data are so much better than most people realize. This is how Google knows exactly what ads to show you, where and when, and it’s also how they have centimeter precise maps of almost every accessible point on the globe.
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