Once you select a location, provides at least two routes to your destination. All data is crunched in fractions of a second to calculate multiple routes, each with an estimated arrival time and how much it will cost in fuel to get there. highway), speed limits, stop lights, turns, real-time traffic data, road closures and construction, and more. This requires a very sophisticated algorithm that can juggle many variables at once: types of roads (one-lane vs. Once the user chooses a location, it's time for the routing engine to plot the fastest and most direct route to the destination. Results are optimized by anonymous feedback, using the search results chosen by past users to deliver the best options going forward. When a MapQuest user searches for "173 Hawkins Dr." or "coffee," the search engine scours the MapQuest database of addresses and locations for the best match. That's where MapQuest's search engine comes in. Of course, all of those data-rich maps are only useful if users can easily navigate through them. Instead, it partners with dozens of data providers who specialize in gathering geocoding data for restaurants, gas stations, hotels and more. MapQuest doesn't collect all of this location data itself. Each tile is a baseline vector image into which other data can be plugged in, like the locations of businesses, restaurants or other points of interest. You can zoom in on an individual tile or zoom out to see hundreds of tiles covering an entire city. The online maps consist of millions of pre-drawn "tiles" that live on MapQuest's servers. The maps themselves are created by MapQuest using satellite images and road data purchased from other companies like TomTom, a Dutch location technology creator. Next, let's look at the basic underlying technology that makes a mapping tool like MapQuest work. The website averages 20 to 30 million unique users every month, which makes it the third most-trafficked mapping website after Google Maps and Waze (also owned by Google), according to John Chipouras, general manager of MapQuest. While MapQuest might not be a household name for younger generations who don't remember a time before Google or iPhones, the company is still one of the biggest players in online mapping. One of the coolest features of the first MapQuest app was free turn-by-turn voice commands, the first ever in a mobile navigation app. MapQuest was slow to release its own mobile app, which it did in 2012, the same year that Apple dropped Google and launched Apple Maps. The next hit to MapQuest came with the release of the iPhone in 2007, which not only revolutionized mobile technology, but shipped with the very first mapping app, none other than Google Maps (just called "Maps" on the original iPhone). Without any visibility on Google, by far the most-used search engine, MapQuest quickly began to lose market share and was officially overtaken by Google Maps in January 2009. Google was already the king of search engines in 2005, and the first version of Google Maps had some features that MapQuest didn't, like the ability to search maps for businesses, parks and other points of interest.īut industry experts believe that the real tipping point for MapQuest came in 2007 when Google removed all links from its search results to competing mapping websites like MapQuest and Yahoo Maps. The first threat to MapQuest's dominance arrived in 2005 with the launch of Google Maps. (Full disclosure: System1 is also the parent company of HowStuffWorks). In 2019, Verizon sold MapQuest to ad tech company System1. When Verizon bought AOL in 2015, MapQuest was part of the package. America Online (now AOL), another giant of the early internet, bought MapQuest for $1.1 billion in 1999. But from the late 1990s through the mid-2000s, MapQuest was virtually the only name in the online mapping game, commanding nearly 100 percent of the market share for online direction searches. Coincidentally, 1996 was also the year that two Stanford University graduate students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, developed the "PageRank" algorithm that would become Google.
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