Google can tell you how busy a place is before you arrive there.
But how exactly does Google know if a place is busy?
What kind of data does the company rely on to determine live busyness information?
When this information is not available, the company relies on past data to predict busy times.
Complex algorithms extrapolate past and incomplete data to arrive at a good estimate.
The busiest hour becomes the benchmark.
The rest of the data is displayed around the busiest hour.
For example, suppose youre visiting multiple locations.
The company knows where all the Google Maps users are all the time.
If your location feature is on, your phone is constantly tracking you via GPS.
This means that Google can tell how many phones are at a specific location.
When more devices are broadcasting GPS data than usual, Google assumes there are more people there.
Suppose you dont want Google to use your current location data.
The company uses the same system to determine how fast traffic is moving.
In that case, you could disable this option from your Google account prefs.
Users can also contribute to Google guides.
You may sometimes receive a quick survey that asks you how busy the location was after you leave.
Google then uses the survey data to improve live busyness accuracy.
When a business is near other companies, live Popular Times can be even more inaccurate.
Keep in mind that Google tracks cellphones, not actual people.
This is because the live busyness system thinks each phone corresponds to a different individual.
Business owners cant manually add live Popular Times information.
Live busyness details appear only if Google has gathered sufficient visit data from users.
If theres not enough data, the system uses past statistics to arrive at a good guess.
Google uses the same system to determine how fast traffic is moving.
