Challenges of Google Maps' Design
Define the System Design challenges of map services like Google Maps, focusing on scalability and ETA accuracy. Learn how graph segmentation and exit points enable efficient route calculation across vast networks. Understand the role of real-time traffic data in predicting accurate travel times.
Meeting the challenges
We previously identified two main challenges in the Introduction: scalability and ETA computation. This lesson explores solutions for both.
Scalability
Scalability involves efficiently processing a massive road network graph with billions of vertices and edges. Naively traversing the entire graph to find a shortest path is computationally expensive and results in slow query times.
To solve this, we partition the large graph into smaller subgraphs called segments. This allows us to process and query subgraphs in parallel, significantly reducing graph construction and query times.
Segment
A segment is a manageable partition of the global map. Because a segment's road network is small, it can be easily loaded into memory, updated, and ...