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This is just a guess, but could they be using some algorithm based on analytics data (say, which cities are zoomed in on and searched for the most and/or A/B te
by gheaslip 16y ago
This is just a guess, but could they be using some algorithm based on analytics data (say, which cities are zoomed in on and searched for the most and/or A/B testing) to determine which cities should show up on zoomed-out maps? They can't show every town and city at once without things getting very cluttered, and it seem very Google-like to relentlessly optimize based on user data.
- hugh3 16y agoOr else they're just going off some combination of population size and avoiding clutter/overlap. I opened up google maps to stare at it for a while, and one thing that jumped out at me is that I think they might be using different algorithms for different countries. Using what comes up as the default zoom for me (four notches from the bottom, enough to make the USA about 600 pixels wide) I see that the US has cities marked relatively sparsely, whereas they're much denser in Mexico. Scrolling down to Australia it looks like the algorithm is far from perfect; it shows all the state and territory capitals except Adelaide, which is an odd omission.