Crossing the digital divide to Grandma’s house

How do you get to grandma’s house in the digital age?

It’s like asking five New Yorkers how to get to Brooklyn: Everyone’s got a different answer and no one’s necessarily wrong.

Say you live in St. Petersburg and grandma lives in Palm Beach. Mapquest would send you southeast from Tampa. The trip would be 200 miles and take three hours and 27 minutes.

Google, however, would send you northeast before sending you southeast. That trip would be 232 miles and take three hours and 50 minutes.

Mapquest sends you through Brandon on SR 60 — no fun if it’s rush hour — and then through Bartow and on to Yeehaw Junction to Florida’s Turnpike. Google sends you along Interstate 4 near Orlando — always a potential traffic nightmare — through Kissimmee and then to Florida’s Turnpike.

How can there be so many ways to get from Point A to Point B?

It’s all about the algorithms.

Source: St. Petersburg Times

Note: Shirl Kennedy, ResourceShelf senior editor, is a news researcher for the St. Petersburg Times.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 20th, 2009 and is filed under Geographic, Search News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.