Google is close to settling a $1.3billion deal to buy Waze, a traffic and navigation app that harnesses GPS data and feedback from a community of tens of thousands of users to generate driving routes. Google is the front runner among a group of Silicon Valley giants, including Facebook, who were vying for Israel-based Waze. It seems that Google thinks the money will be well spent to bolster its maps business, which is already a leader in the field. 

Waze’s capabilities would improve Google’s location-based services, where users, as they migrate to mobile devices, share data about their exact whereabouts. Buying the business would also help Google block Facebook from challenging it in the navigation and maps business.

Waze works by connecting drivers to one another. According to its website, once a user types in an address and begins driving with the app activated on his or her mobile device, the system passively collects GPS data to see how they are progressing down the route. That allows the system to generate better routes for other users.