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Comment by zerocrates | Hacker News Reader

I've seen people reporting these and others a lot lately, mostly using the Google "how busy is it" graph as this does. Does that really account for the amount of deliveries? I've always assumed when that says it's "busier than usual" it's just using location tracking for people actually being there.

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Probably looking up the dominoes is enough to make it "busy".

Yeah. Probably some combination of lookups and/or clickthrus.

I had always assumed it was location tracking data, same as they (mostly?) use for realtime traffic data.

But, now that you mention it, Dominoes is a delivery business. So you'd have to estimate their current volume some other way - a spike in demand won't correlate with an increase of people physically visiting the storefront.

True, but is that what google maps is even saying? I have always understood it to be "phones in this area per hour" or whatever, I have never thought or got the impression it would tell you how busy a delivery place is based off of delivery load. Does anyone have a source that says one way or another? I could see it either way.

I'd love a more knowledgeable answer as well!

We'll probably never get it, though? Seems like one of those algorithmic things Google holds close to its chest.

I would think, though, that if it's going to be meaningful whatsoever for a delivery business... it couldn't rely solely on "phones in this area per hour." But I'm just a random yahoo speculating.

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