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Thanks to Lake Ontario, MapQuest is popular all over again
https://archive.ph/Nm77k https://archive.ph/Nm77k
- alephnerd 2mo agoTake that Cory Doctrow [0] [0] - https://boingboing.net/2019/10/10/do-webrings-next.html https://boingboing.net/2019/10/10/do-webrings-next.html
- reaperducer 2mo agoI think Cory would be surprised to see how many Mapquest referrers show up in the referrer logs of brick-and-mortar businesses.
- ChrisArchitect 2mo agoEarlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49510969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49510969
- wlonkly 2mo agoThey'll get their 15 minutes, but there's no _there_ there. They're owned by System1, a bottom-of-the-barrel advertising company where 1990s web brands go to die (Metacrawler? Startpage.com?? Dogpile?!?!). Their maps are OpenStreetMaps maps. People think they have their back (because OSM is showing Lake Ontario), but it's just marketing.
- gruez 2mo ago>Startpage.com I thought that was still the best way to get anonymous google index search results?
- chewbacha 2mo agoI also enjoy their privacy focused email startmail.com
- doubled112 2mo agoDogpile?!? There's a name I haven't heard in what feels like 20 years. The concept of searching a bunch of search engines made sense to me.
- verdverm 2mo agoIronicly this is what my agent does today on my behalf because regular search has become so bad
- bigfishrunning 2mo agoUnfortunately at the other end of that websearch is a bunch of slop, your agent can't save you from it.
- verdverm 2mo agoMy experience is otherwise, try alternative search SaaS like Exa, i.e. pay per search, but use multiple because they return different sets. My agent looks at the results, includes some, performs more searches. It's more of a deep search thing, very similar in spirit to how I used to run multiple queries, click a bunch of links, evaluate, keep good ones, run follow up queries, and end up with an alt-tab of dozens of browsers, each with dozens of tabs.
- bch 2mo ago> The concept of searching a bunch of search engines made sense to me. It made sense to somebody else[0], too. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo
- mc32 2mo agoThey forgot to scoop up mapbalst! never mind looks like they got swallowed up by bing maps (that’s where Bing got line drive from, TIL!)
- nancyminusone 2mo agoas opposed to a top of the barrel advertising company like Google
- altcognito 2mo agoThere is significant differences in advertising. The things at the bottom of the barrel in advertising are often literally malware.
- soperj 2mo agoNah, it's all malware. Some just for your brain.
- nancyminusone 2mo agoYou mean like software that restricts what your devices can do and collects and sells your personal information? Its the very same barrel.
- altcognito 2mo agoI think of the three comments that make this point, this one is the most constructive. I still don't think Google is quite the same, but I agree that they share some fundamental problems and should be rejected as a whole.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- reaperducer 2mo agoThe things at the bottom of the barrel in advertising are often literally malware. So… Google, then? It's not like it hasn't been repeatedly documented that malware is pushed through Google Ads and other properties.
- ndriscoll 2mo agoOr a top of the barrel choice like just using one of the many non-profit FOSS apps that are also UIs over OpenStreetMap instead of one of the scam commercial ad-wrappers.
- strathmeyer 2mo ago[dead]
- amiga386 2mo agoI think people are more going on the "name it what you want" pages doing the rounds on socials, created originally for the Gulf of Mexico and now Lake Ontario, which a lot of people have seen, rather than the name presented by MapQuest's regular map which I don't think many people see. https://gulfof.mapquest.com/lakeontario/Epstein%20Files https://gulfof.mapquest.com/lakeontario/Epstein%20Files https://gulfof.mapquest.com/gulf/Epstein%20Files https://gulfof.mapquest.com/gulf/Epstein%20Files
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2mo agoDoubleclick Perhaps it would have died, too But no
- chrononaut 2mo ago> In 2019, Verizon sold MapQuest to internet advertising company System1. It's ad companies all the way down.
- declan_roberts 2mo agoAnd this is a PR piece put out by the ad company that people eat up because orange man bad.
- rjrjrjrj 2mo agoCurious. Do you think orange man not bad here? Y’all good with a president who changes a 400 year old name on a hissy fit and spends his days shitposting at the level of "dumb teenage boy"?
- expedition32 2mo agoAt least when China does it they come up with elaborate historical documents. This is just sad.
- pmdulaney 2mo agoOn the back of a cocktail napkin, I drew a map of you...
- egberts1 2mo agoOnce again, private equity ruined another fine company ... with incessant advertisements
- Varelion 2mo agoFinding MapQuest on the PlayStore was a quest all on its own. More specifically, it does not exist on my PlayStore, and I had to install it on my phone remotely through the browser PlayStore. Review wise, it sits firmly at a single star, so it's possible that Google burried it, although I would not put it past them to rig things.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- fwip 2mo agoRecommend you instead use something like OsmAnd. Mapquest pulls data from OpenStreetMaps - might as well use an open source application. https://osmand.net/ https://osmand.net/
- happymellon 2mo agoSo OSMAnd is better than Organic?
- fwip 2mo agoHaven't tried Organic, to be honest. I'll have to check it out. :)
- standeven 2mo agoI think a lot of people are desperate for tech giants to stand up to the current US administration.
- declan_roberts 2mo agoAs long as tech companies make a stand against superficial culture war fights like this nobody will care that they've caved w.r.t privacy over the last two decades. Sad!
- mulemisterX 2mo agoPeople have nothing in common with tech giants. Tech giants support whoever is in power, because money. The current tech giants kicked the current President off of their platforms back in the day. Now these tech giants hang out at the White House. Funny how that works.
- organsnyder 2mo agoI tried it out for a trip yesterday. I wanted to love the app—it has a great retro feel, and an ad-free subscription option—but it gave me weird routes and the audio was extremely stuttery.
- gnuplustoejam 2mo agoIt still says Ontario because there's no one left at MapQuest that knows how to change it.
- D-Coder 2mo agoThat may be, but it's still what many people want.
- gnuplustoejam 2mo ago[flagged]
- nickthegreek 2mo agoOr we could not bend the knee to a single old man throwing a tantrum.
- charcircuit 2mo agoWhat about the executive order reads as someone throwing a tantrum? https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/08/honoring-the-american-history-of-the-great-lakes-and-renaming-lake-ontario-as-lake-america-3a36/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/08/hono...
- afavour 2mo agoI don’t understand why the phrasing of the order matters. It’s very obviously a petulant and childish move made in response to trade negotiation failures with Canada. That’s literally what Trump himself has said: > The United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America in that we don’t expect to be doing much business with Ontario any longer. Thank you for your attention to this matter! https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/117155789874645152 https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1171557898746...
- ghostoftiber 2mo agoI feel like it wasn't defiance as much as "we need to come up with a story why we don't have any developers who know how to update this".
- RajT88 2mo agoI enjoy how Bing Maps (and Bing in general) are so unloved that it's not even part of the debate. (Bing Maps hasn't changed - yet - but probably will eventually, since they caved on the Gulf of Mexico)
- buildsjets 2mo agoNot only did I have no idea that Bing or Bing Maps still existed, but the very fact that they ever existed at all had slipped from my consciousness.
- RajT88 2mo agoI guess Bing has an 8% market share, if you don't count services that use the Bing index (like DuckDuckGo does). I wonder if Bing is worth it for them to still operate because of the people paying to use the index.
- farlight 2mo agoThey're one of the few remaining air photography providers for OpenStreetMap editors with worldwide coverage (much of it high quality and regularly updated), so they have their uses.
- 0x457 2mo agoIt’s not like Microsoft has artisanal cartographers sitting around deciding what to call every geographic feature. Bing Maps ingests its base map data from providers, which in turn aggregate a bunch of authoritative, commercial, open, and government datasets. And for things like official geographic names, government naming databases are often one of the authoritative upstream sources. So if the U.S. government changes the name in its official geographic database, it’s not surprising for that change to eventually propagate through map providers and into Bing.
- afavour 2mo agoI get why people want Apple and Google to push back but ultimately there isn’t any logical approach for them to operate that isn’t “name things as the relevant governmental bodies name them”. Otherwise what source of truth is there? The responsibility here is with a spineless government. An executive order is not a law and a congress that did its job would quickly contract these kind of mad king declarations.
- bigstrat2003 2mo agoThe government has no right to name geographic features. The names are established by popular usage, not the feds. As such Google and Apple should not listen to the demands of a body which has no right to make them in the first place.
- afavour 2mo ago“Popular usage” is all very well and good until you have to quantify it in some way. No way it wouldn’t be a complete mess. For example: the body of water between the UK and France. The UK calls it “the English Channel”. The French call it “la Manche”. It has no official international name. In Google Maps both names are used depending on what country/language you are using. Choosing one via popular usage would not be a good solution.
- allturtles 2mo ago> Choosing one via popular usage would not be a good solution. Huh? Isn't that exactly what you've described? In the UK they show the popular usage in the UK, and the same in France.
- afavour 2mo agoNo, they show what the respective governments describe them as in official datasets etc.
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- yndoendo 2mo agoI've dumped Google Maps for OSM over three years ago and have not looked back. Did this as one of my de-Google steps by choosing a Fairphone. Looking at a FuriLabs FLX1S to start the next phase by switching to a Linux phone. I've become a sunk cost to Google by not spending anything on their products or services and always use Ad-Block solution in a private session if I must.
- stickfigure 2mo agoIn other news, Canada will be renaming Lake Michigan to Lake Epstein. (saw it on the internet, had to share)
- internet_points 2mo agohttps://gulfof.mapquest.com/lakeontario/Epstein%20Files https://gulfof.mapquest.com/lakeontario/Epstein%20Files
- guywithahat 2mo agoSad to see the WaPo wishcasting with no clear benefit