Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/10/do-webrings-next.html
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Correction, AOL bought Mapquest in 2000, it was never owned by Yahoo.
I worked for Mapquest for 8 years (2007-2015) until they shut down the Lancaster, PA office and shipped the whole operation to Denver, CO thinking that they could hire a better engineering staff, not realizing that competition for better engineers was much stiffer and Mapquest wasn’t exactly a hot brand anymore. While I worked among a great engineering staff, it was by far the most politically toxic management environment I’ve ever worked in. Managers wholesale abandoned individual teams for “sexier” teams (my manager abandoned the search team for the mobile team) with no backfill. I finally wrapped up my tenure on a great team with great management but it wasn’t enough.
FYI, if you type in “casa de esteban”, an override that still takes you to my previous house.
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Right you are! Fixed!
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Just tried that…it took me to somewhere in rural Colombia. Is that right?
I would wager 37.9m of those 38m monthly Mapquest users are disinterested government workers required to use Mapquest for personal vehicle milage reimbursement due to archaic policies that require the exclusive use of Mapquest as the sole distance calculator from point A to B.
Examples:
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D’oh, they updated their autocomplete functionality. If you hit enter after typing it in w/o selecting from the dropdown, it will work. Here’s the backend call being made: http://searchcontroller.web.mapquest.com/search/v2/location?clientId=9014&query=casa%20de%20esteban&debug=1
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Woohoo! Nice easter egg. I assume your old house was in rural Pennsylvania, not rural Colombia.
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That’s very WTF-worthy. Really, they shouldn’t be hitching their wagon to any one company. Of course, the other problem is alternate routing based on traffic.
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Correct! “Franklin Pierce Fan Club” also works. Once those go away, I’ll be bummed (even though I don’t even live there anymore!)
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Some of it was technology based. That is, Mapquest supported IE6 far longer than everyone else did, and government computers are on notoriously long update cycles.
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Mapquest annoyingly didn’t let you paste an entire address for the longest time. You had to paste the street, then tab or click the city field, then the zip.
Oath: something you say whenever you have to deal with anything having to do with Verizon.
No worries. After AOL scammed millions of subscribers out of billions of dollars, they also bought Huffington Post. which is one heck of a great, fair and balanced unbiased news service. As time grow ever darker and hotter thanks to the climate, its assuring to know that posting on HuffPost while keep the world at large safe and free forever
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