The article appears to be a gross oversimplification. As is stands, it's a lot of words to convey the fact that "Google uses Dijkstra's algorithm to calculate the shortest distance"
The article is a complete puff piece. There is no substance to it whatsoever.
Google Maps most probably does not even use Dijkstra. According to my Algorithmics lecture notes, Dijkstra has O(|V|^2) which is too slow for large street networks.
Yeah that wouldn't surprise me. I can imagine they've got some smart heuristics built in too to come up with suboptimal routes that are good enough.