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Comment by ChrisArchitect | Hacker News Reader

Anyone else surprised to hear that MapQuest still even exists? It's like a culture-period reference point when in movies/shows a character looks something up on mapquest or prints a map. I mean it hasn't been a thing for about 15+ years. Assumed it got sold off/absorbed or something

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MySpace still exists. Due to the amazing economy of the web, hosting and operation costs are so low these properties can, and should, live on forever.

This is why it always surprises me when a company kills off a site (eg, dejanews) claiming cost savings. Because pretty much anything can be marginally profitable given passive ad revenue.

I think the way these work is the properties are sold off to some holding company that just ads them to their portfolio of farm sites.

My observation (from nearby, not inside) is that Google's cost structure is so high that pretty much everything is a material burden. It's not surprising to me that they shut things down. They had probably also converted whatever technology platform dejanews started with to Google's internal services, which are pretty much impossible to replicate outside of Google.

Corporate socialism is what you are describing. It makes little sense outside of the Fortune 500, but they can throw good money after bad projects like replatforming onto internal tech, creating massive technical debt in the procof ss and an inability to spin it back out, thus they must murder the failed project.

I think it’s because google has such a super high margin on ads that everything else pales. So theoretically it’s better to focus attention on higher margin stuff.

But hosting Deja forever should have been so cheap for them.

I worked at the company that acquired MapQuest a few years ago. It's been bought and sold a few times, but their most popular feature is still the "print maps" button...

As you can guess it's mostly people over the age of 50 still using MapQuest lol

MapQuest actually has a pretty pleasant developer API and I've used it over more popular "modern" alternatives.

There has got to be value in the map data and maybe they update slower than Google but there had to have been some way they were making the maps before.

No value in the map data itself (for System1), it’s just an ad platform on its last legs. System1 doesn’t own map data, just licenses it for the map and search.

Wikipedia indicates it was owned by AOL (later Oath, Verizon Media) from 1999-2019, after which it was sold to System1 [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MapQuest#History

>Anyone else surprised to hear that MapQuest still even exists?

I'm not, in fact I just used it yesterday. I'd hate to see them go away.

memorably in "Lazy Sunday".

Yahoo Maps, Mapquest, and Google Maps all mentioned in the same song. What a time to be alive.

And it was referenced last weekend during the SNL50 show

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