Why shortest paths not always are the same

I often hear people complain about the GPS they use for routing. Some do a better job than others. This is due to two things: the algorithm which may vary and the network used. Here I will focus on the network. Often the algorithms have to use different networks because: the network has not been updated or a different provider is used. This is illustrated in this post showing that the total length in the networks used by TomTom and OpenStreetMap are quite different. As a result the shortest path algorithm will find different optimal paths as illustrated in this post.