You’d think users can update business information on Google Maps. Instead, most of the times when you correct, say, working hours, it just gets rejected by the business owner who wants people to keep traveling there in the evening just to be turned away or see the closed doors because their staff goes home early every day.
Google Maps actually processes historical data about how busy the location is throughout the hours and each day of the week.
You can find this rendered as a little bar graph with a blurb describing the current estimate.
This is believed to be aggregated from everyone’s Android devices reporting their locations in a very small radius.
Also, Maps asks its users to answer extended questions about amenities. Such as: parking types, accessibility features, kid-friendly, vegan/vegetarian.
When I am on board a bus or light rail train, there is information about how full it is, what temperature, accessibility, etc. They are tracked in real time because the transit authority shares their live telemetry with Google. Once, Google had demonstrably wrong schedule information and I discovered that it reflected the official website’s version. (It was reporting every train canceled, but they were actually running.)
When I worked in an office in 2012, we were trying to get our arms around various listings in 3rd party "Yellow Pages" publications, on paper and online. It seems that compiling business listings has been around a long time. And every business needs a Social Media manager to be aware of their footprint and manage multiple sites like this. Yelp, TripAdvisor, you name it.
In a dense area where there’s 5 shops within less than a stone’s throw (pardon my reference) away from each other or on different floors of a building, this mechanism does not work. Besides, if the place is “not busy”, that’s when I want to go—who likes to wait in queues?
