Mapping service MapQuest has made waves on social media for its stance against the United States changing official designations of geographic features, including converting Lake Ontario to Lake America. The company’s refusal to acknowledge the new name helped it dethrone Google Maps from app store rankings. But before the advent of mobile app stores and even before the advent of Google Maps, millennials and Generation X fondly remember collecting and printing turn-by-turn driving directions from MapQuest, one of these new websites.
The company is a subsidiary of ad tech company System1, which owns other brands including Answers.com, a competitor to the question-and-answer site Quora that centers its core experience around AI chatbots and search engine StartPage, among others. MapQuest’s ad transfer experience puts local businesses among the first pins you see, linking to Yelp for reviews or Booking.com for hotel reservations and more.
Under System1’s tenure, MapQuest also launched a new subscription service called Lighthouse, where families and individuals with a shared account can track each member’s location as well as the battery levels of their phones. At $6.66 per month, however, it’s a tough ask when compared to free methods of real-time location sharing. Considering how Systems1 was incorporated in 2013, you might be curious about how MapsQuest actually got started.
A Condensed History of MapQuest
Jules Wang/BGR
MapQuest’s origins grew from the convergence of RR Donnelley & Sons, a 19th-century Chicago-area printing company that became an international marketing powerhouse over the decades, and Spatial Data Services, a late-’80s startup focused on digital mapping. SDS was working on a digital travel planning product and successfully launched RRD in a joint venture, which eventually led to GeoSystems Global in 1994. Two years later, MapQuest started.
GeoSystems renamed itself MapQuest when it went public on Nasdaq in 1999 and was actively looking for a buyer. He would get one on America Online by the end of the year, but at a significant undervaluation. Unfortunately, AOL would go on to merge with Time Warner shortly after. James Killick, a veteran of MapQuest and the Apple Maps team, described AOL-Time Warner’s tenure as chaos. In a lengthy article on the history of MapQuest on the Map Happenings blog, Killick described layoffs across MapQuest’s entire headquarters, including the former map printing operations that were responsible for most of the company’s revenue, and a lack of mission outside of dealing in ad inventory. And if your ad revenue as a dot-com company isn’t doubling every year, then what’s the point, right?
MapQuest would remain in AOL’s portfolio over the years, even as the Time Warner merger was undone in 2009 and AOL was expanding its media business by acquiring TechCrunch and The Huffington Post. Verizon acquired AOL in 2015. It wasn’t until 2019 that System1 acquired MapQuest from Verizon, ending a two-decade association with AOL.
