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Slashdot: Why MapQuest, Jeeves, and Other 'Internet Zombies' are Still Around

Why MapQuest, Jeeves, and Other 'Internet Zombies' are Still Around
Published on June 26, 2022 at 01:04PM
"The dream of the 1990s internet is still alive, if you look in the right corners," argues the New York Times' newsletter On Tech: More than 17 million Americans regularly use MapQuest, one of the first digital mapping websites that was long ago overtaken by Google and Apple, according to data from the research firm Comscore. The dot-com-era internet portal Go.com shut down 20 years ago, but its ghost lives on in the "Go" that's part of web addresses for some Disney sites. Ask Jeeves, a web search engine that started before Google, still has fans and people typing "Ask Jeeves a question" into Google searches. Maybe you scoff at AOL, but it is still the 50th most popular website in the U.S., according to figures from SimilarWeb. The early 2000s virtual world Second Life never went away and is now having a second life as a proto-metaverse brand.... There is something heartwarming about pioneers that shaped the early internet, lost their cool and dominance, and eventually carved out a niche. They'll never be as popular or powerful as they were a generation ago, but musty internet brands might still have a fruitful purpose. These brands have managed to stay alive through a combination of inertia, nostalgia, the fact they've produced a product that people like, digital moneymaking prowess and oddities of the rickety internet. If today's internet powers like Facebook and Pinterest lose relevance, too, they could stick around for decades. The article quotes Bloomberg Opinion columnist Ben Schott calling the older sites "almost cockroach brands. They're small enough and resilient enough that they can't be killed."

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