MapQuest and Other Internet Zombies

admin June 21, 2022

0 4 minutes read

Looking at the right corner, the dreams of the Internet in the 1990s are still alive.

According to data from research firm Comscore, more than 17 million Americans regularly use MapQuest, one of the first digital mapping websites to be overtaken by Google and Apple long ago. The Internet portal Go.com in the dot-com era was closed 20 years ago, but its ghosts are still alive in “Go.” Part of the web address For some Disney site..

Ask Jeeves, a web search engine that started before Google, still has fans and people typing “Ask Jeeves a question” in Google search.

Maybe you’re ridiculing AOL, but according to SimilarWeb numbers, it’s still the 50th most popular website in the United States. The virtual world Second Life in the early 2000s never disappeared and is now Have a second life As a Proto Metaverse brand.

Some of the former online stars have been stuck for much longer than we expected, showing that it is possible to open up a life online long after the star’s status declines. I am.

Benshot, brand and advertising columnist at Bloomberg Opinion, said: “They are small enough and elastic enough that they cannot be killed.”

Comparison with fledgling bugs may not be so Seem It will be a compliment. But there’s something heartwarming about the pioneers who shaped the early Internet, lost their coolness and control, and eventually opened up a niche. They will never be as unpopular and powerful as they were a generation ago, but musty internet brands may still have a fruitful purpose.

These brands have managed to survive by combining inertia, nostalgia, the fact that they have created the products people love, their digital money-making prowess, and the nasty Internet quirks. If the power of today’s Internet, like Facebook and Pinterest, also loses relevance, they can last for decades.

Among other websites, System1, which owns MapQuest and HowStuffWorks, has a strategy to attract people to a collection of digital properties through advertising and other methods, turn them into loyal users, and monetize from clicks and other sales. increase. Not far from the early 2000s web strategy of turning the “eyeball” into revenue.

Michael Blend, CEO and co-founder of System 1, said his company spent money on Internet advertising to lure people into MapQuest and improved its mapping capabilities. One feature added since System1 I bought MapQuest from Verizon In 2019, delivery courier companies will be able to plan long routes with many stops.

Blend may convince people to try MapQuest once or twice due to Generation X’s nostalgia and online marketing, but the company is good enough to help the site be able to come back on a regular basis. Said I wanted to. He also said that more than half of the people using MapQuest were young enough that they might not have known it during their heyday.

Blend is proud that MapQuest is alive and well. “There are a lot of internet brands coming and going, and they never contact me again,” he told me.

There isn’t much explanation about the restoring force of Internet properties in the 1990s. Despite being the owner of the Internet conglomerate IAC / InterActive Corp, people are looking for Ask Jeeves. Gave up the name of an English butler in 2005 When Stop competing with Google search More than 10 years ago. The website, now called Ask.com, is primarily a compilation of entertainment and celebrity news.

A Disney spokesman who owned the Go.com internet portal didn’t give a firm explanation as to why some of the company’s internet sites still have Go fingerprints. (Onions from a few years ago Mocked Disney for this.. In general, today’s websites are often built on the wreckage of the old Internet, like modern mansions built on the foundations of 19th-century homes.

Shot mentioned that he couldn’t get out of his head. He said the typical public reaction was sadness for what people lost when the once-loved restaurant chains and industrial factories were closed. But Schott said that when Internet assets like Yahoo and Myspace fall or die, they’re often wiped out as a joke.

“If a tech company fails, there’s a weird Schadenfreude that I don’t think will happen in other industries,” he said. “I don’t know what it is.”

Maybe it’s starting to change. When Microsoft abolished the Internet Explorer web browser 27 years ago this month, it was full of nostalgia. As the Internet gets older, and as we remember its early days, we may feel emotional upset about what happened before.

Before going …

Eyes on Chinese Citizens: According to a New York Times survey, surveillance by Chinese authorities is more extensive than previously understood. Police want facial recognition cameras for people to eat, shop, and even in private spaces such as homes and hotels. Authorities have purchased equipment for building iris scans and large databases of DNA. The goal reported by my colleague is “to maximize what the state can know about an individual’s identity, activities and social connections, which ultimately helps the government maintain authoritarian dominance. May be useful. “

Watch this video survey.
Complaints about bait-and-switch: Small business owners have engrossed them in the company’s free customized email and other workplace software, and now demand payment in a process they thought they couldn’t handle. Say there is. “I thought it was unnecessarily trivial,” one business owner told my colleague Nico Grant.
Other car companies have Tesla’s envy: A well-established car maker like Ford, like Tesla, wants to sell more cars online to buyers directly. One issue: Many state laws require cars to be sold through dealers, Paul Stenquist wrote in The Times.