Accessibility to step-by-step directions from point A to point B has gone from being a luxury to a necessity since the early 2000s. When I was younger, I remember being entrusted with our family Thomas Guide, an old and quite thick booklet of maps we kept in our car to navigate freeways and streets on long car trips. As I got older, we stopped carrying around the Thomas Guide and transitioned to using the internet to map out our journey in the most efficient way possible. When planning these trips, MapQuest was our go-to route planning site.
As Jim Detwiler writes in “Introduction to Web Mapping,” MapQuest helped break new ground in the age of digital mapping technology. It was part of the first generation of sites in the web mapping industry and even when other websites started to outpace it, the site continued to update its services. When Google made its map interface public so did MapQuest, and from there, a whole new generation of custom mapping applications was born.
I recall using MapQuest as my default mapping website up until around 2009 or so when I decided Google Maps offered a more convenient service. (This convenience was mostly due to the fact that Google was the homepage for my family computer and it was far easier to click on the “Maps” tab than it was to type MapQuest’s URL.) A 2009 Business Insider article addresses MapQuest’s decline at this time and comments on the increasing site space being devoted to advertisements, while Google Maps kept its interface clean and to the point. The article also goes on to give MapQuest some advice to turn their company around and return to its role as a leading online map service, a key point being that presentation of the site is important (something we can all relate to now after learning about the importance of data visualization techniques).
It’s been a few years since 2009 now, so I wanted to go back and see how MapQuest is doing and how the site has evolved over time. The layout of the site is very similar to the (now) older Google Maps layout, with directions and options on the left side and a map on the right. There was one momentary flaw in MapQuest’s direction system; when I inputted “UCLA Young Research Library” on both sites I was met with an unexpected surprise. Google Maps gave me a direct image of UCLA’s campus with YRL pinpointed on it but MapQuest got confused and gave me “related” locations in Pennsylvania. Only 2400 miles off.
