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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