Not All Navigation is the Same

In today's news, there is a story about how Google Maps is making some woman's life miserable by designating her driveway as an entrance to a state park. I thought this was hilarious.

Personally, I would have set up a collection booth and given a tour of the house.

We've seen plenty of past instances where Google Maps have driven people into the ocean or made other odd mistakes. But, overall, most of these mapping systems are pretty amazing. The number of ridiculous errors, such as this driveway story, is minor.

More interesting news is the latest navigational maps from the various vendors. This includes Google's free turn-by-turn navigation you get with the Android OS. I have chatted with other people about the navigation found on the Nexus S phone, and we all agree that it is pretty amazing. By that, I mean it's amazing, amazing. I recently had to find a location, so I could pick up a Craigslist purchase, and it was on a weird street on the SF Peninsula that had two versions of itself. You had to make a unique maneuver to get to this offshoot clone street, and the navigator did a great job of having me ease over in a peculiar way—a way I would have never done on my own. I would have missed this trick and driven onward for miles.

This navigation is far better than the pretty much useless navigation I had on the Nexus One and on other phones.

The cute thing about the Google navigation is that at the end of your trip, when "you've arrived at your destination," you get a picture of your destination, courtesy of Google Street View.

(I do not know how often the Google van drives up and down the various streets of California, but I have seen three distinctly different pictures of my house, and the most recent was probably done within the last month. So these guys are going nuts, driving around taking pictures.)

But it should be noted that not all navigation systems are the same. The user interfaces are different. Some are smarter than others. I have used the Magellan system, which gives good navigation but has an exceptional data entry system that works backwards. Once you get the hang of it, you can quickly load your destination.

Google's is more old-fashioned, but smart enough to know that I am probably looking for something nearby. But if you're use the voice feature, then you can forget it. It's just terrible.

Curiously, while testing a Chevy Volt, I used the GM navigation system, and it seemed rather brain dead by comparison. It never assumed anything, and its routing was through neighborhoods and backways. I was stunned to find out that it uses Google Maps for its advice. But it is not using the Google navigation algorithms; that's for sure.

One thing I like to do is comparative testing. I take two different devices and run navigation on them both at the same time in the same car. It's quite interesting to see which device gives the best instructions. I'd love to be in a meeting with a navigation expert to see how these routing algorithms work and get a few questions answered. How are streets assigned values? Why did the GM navigator take me though a sleepy subdivision to get to a location? Was it because it was a shorter distance? Do these systems account for stop signs? Do they account for speed limits when doing the calculation? (I would assume so.)

I've noticed one thing that seems to have changed over the years with most of the navigators. And this is the rerouting function. With the better systems, if you ignore an instruction and go a different way, the navigator assumes a new starting point and continues to give advice. There is no more of the annoying "Go back! Go Back!" and "make a U-turn" that used to be common, as the system tried to get you back to the originally calculated route.

All I know is that in my experience, no two navigation systems will plan the same route, except in the most simplistic of circumstances.

I would love to see a consolidated review of all the systems and the results taken from a series of complex city and hillside routing targets to see which one does it best. Right now, the newest Android phones seem like pretty awesome routers (at least around here).