BGP doesn't inherently measure time for hops. The base setup is to use the path with the lowest number of unique Autonomous Systems (AS). But, there are also concepts of weight, where you can influence the chosen path manually. And, there's also "Multi-Exit Discriminator", or MED, where you can pass a metric to a peer on what the best path to a specific AS is.

Even that's an unfair simplification, though. Cisco has a pretty good page that shows how path choices are made: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/ip/border-gateway-...

There are products, though, that tweak these settings to pick for best performance, or lowest bandwidth cost.