Estimated Time of Travel


Usually I am not sympathetic to the complaints against the advertisement driven Internet model. Somebody’s got to pay for the service; so what if its via ads? To the common complaint that it incentivizes the site (Facebook, Google etc) to show you content based on the advertiser’s money, surely the site would lose its popularity over time if it kept thrusting content that you didn’t like/care about?

But recently I saw a good example of a far more subtle behavior that ads can lead to in what sites show us. While there’s nothing harmful in what I will describe, it does show that the effects do exist.

When people plan a trip, they use one of these apps to estimate time of travel: Google Maps, Waze or Apple Maps. The first two are ad driven, but Apple isn’t. Artur Grabowski compared the three apps. Here’s what he found:
1)      Waze’s routes are usually the fastest; Google is mid-way; Apple is the worst (relatively speaking). Nothing surprising so far.
2)     But when it comes to estimated time of travel, Apple Maps overestimates and Waze underestimates. Neither is very inaccurate, but it’s a pattern.

Here’s where the ads come into the story. Grabowski feels that most folks go to the app that claims to provide the fastest time of travel. But since Apple isn’t ad driven, they are not that interested about the number of users:
“However, Apple does care about user experience, and sandbagging trip time estimates so that users arrive at their destination on time results in a great user experience. Hence, I believe that Apple is intentionally conservative with estimated arrival times.”
On the other hand, here’s what he has to say about Waze:
“At the other extreme, Waze (Alphabet) makes money through ads when you use their app. What better way to get people to use your navigation app than by over-promising short trip times when no one takes the time to record data and realize that you under-deliver?”

So is this how the slide downhill begins, with a pretty much harmless underestimation of time of travel? Or is this the maximum amount of “harm” that the ad driven Internet model is doing to us?

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