| A couple points here. First, you get data about how pedestrians can reach all the truly popular locations. If you also get extra data about how pedestrians can reach various irrelevant locations, okay, that doesn't have value but that's not harmful; what matters is that all kinds of niche landmarks that would be interesting to tourists are somewhere in your data. Second, people making a detour from their normal day-to-day route to reach some location is the whole point - these are local people with knowledge of how their city works; you don't want to measure how tourists usually get from landmark A to landmark B; you'd want to see what shortcuts an optimizing local would take when getting from landmark A to landmark B - which is different than simply looking at random people walking habits with no intent to optimize the route; the gamification provides an incentive to optimize routes and allows you to harvest the knowledge of that optimization. If someone tells google maps that they want to go from A to B, and google maps tracks how they got there, then it doesn't harvest any information about the best route because the user doesn't know it, they wanted a recommendation and likely tried to follow it even if it's very suboptimal, so you'll just get a reprocessed version of the data you already had (and gave to that user). On the other hand the data from Niantic is useful so that Google maps can make a better recommendation. Third issue is that the Niantic process also allows you to detect undesirable routes. If Google maps directs a tourist from A to B through a shortcut that's passable but unpleasant in some manner, then they'll take that route; and if they send another one there, they'll also go there, because they don't know better and the alternatives are (probably) not obvious. You'll only get a signal of people not going there if it's really bad e.g. impassable. Niantic, however, can detect that most people who want to go from A to B (because of game incentives) but who know all the routes from A to B (instead of asking for directions like the google maps usecase) are intentionally taking a longer route for whatever reason - which is again useful data for improving Google Maps recommendations. |