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by GCU-Empiricist 2977 days ago
So does Waze do something more aggressive than Gooogle's faster route option. This is the second article Ive seen blaming Waze, but I get similar recommendation's as a casual Google Maps user who checks which of three routes is fastest in each morning.
1 comments

I always assumed that Google used Waze data/algorithm for their maps?

I would be surprised if they bought Waze, but didn't integrate it with Maps at all.

Waze is definitely more aggressive about its neighborhood routing. Though they could be using the same underlying code somewhere, its definitely tuned differently. The main integration point into Google Maps is the accident reporting and active traffic data.
In my experience, I find that Waze seems to underestimate the time cost of intersections. I think that's why it is more willing to route you through local streets than its competitors.
I find it overestimates traffic lights sometimes, on a medium road next to a grid neighborhood to turn right on another medium road, generally has you cut the corner by one block to avoid the light, even if you can't ever make it out into traffic before the light changes anyway.

Try and safely pay attention to wazes route and ignore it sometimes, but it's generally correct.

And you can send audio prompts to a phone speaker instead of Bluetooth, unlike gmaps, so that's also useful.