Google map, Mapquest, and yahoo map, which one to trust?

United States
December 9, 2010 4:36am CST
Recently I was embarking on a trip to out of state. For back - up purpose, and information on the mileage and hours I should prepare to spend on the road, I do research on all three of them. Guess what, each one of them come out a different result. They are different in mileage, and hours I will spend on the road. Sometimes, the road I will be taking on slightly different too. I don't know which to trust. What do you think? I have my own GPS system too, so, I just want to the comparison test on online map.
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1 response
@owlwings (43910)
• Cambridge, England
9 Dec 10
I have never found any route planning software or website to be 100% accurate. Even if the distances were measured using an odometer on the actual road (which they are not, as far as I know), odometers themselves can vary (depending on tyre pressure and simple mechanical differences) by significant amounts. All route planning databases have to search through millions of possible nodes to choose the optimum route and they all have to add the successive distances, some of which may be small and subject to rounding errors. Different databases will also have different ways of calculating the times based on average speeds for different sections of the route. The best will actually use the speed restrictions and expected traffic delays at particular times of the day but most will use the maximum limits for each section. As a result, the distances may vary depending on the accuracy with which, especially, short distances (in a town, for example) are measured and the driving times may vary even more, depending on the algorithms used. Provided that exactly the same route is chosen, each of the applications should not differ by more than a few percent of the total distance. They are only intended to be - and can ever be - an estimate, anyway, especially when it comes to driving time. Your GPS will probably also use a database if it can pre-calculate routes and this database can be expected to be no better (and hopefully no worse) than any other route planning software.