Thanks to Lake Ontario, MapQuest is popular all over again

as opposed to a top of the barrel advertising company like Google

Dogpile?!? There's a name I haven't heard in what feels like 20 years.

The concept of searching a bunch of search engines made sense to me.

>Startpage.com

I thought that was still the best way to get anonymous google index search results?

I think people are more going on the "name it what you want" pages doing the rounds on socials, created originally for the Gulf of Mexico and now Lake Ontario, which a lot of people have seen, rather than the name presented by MapQuest's regular map which I don't think many people see.

https://gulfof.mapquest.com/lakeontario/Epstein%20Files

https://gulfof.mapquest.com/gulf/Epstein%20Files

They forgot to scoop up mapbalst!

never mind looks like they got swallowed up by bing maps (that’s where Bing got line drive from, TIL!)

That may be, but it's still what many people want.

What do you use on Android instead of Google Maps, OsmAnd or something else?

It’s not like Microsoft has artisanal cartographers sitting around deciding what to call every geographic feature. Bing Maps ingests its base map data from providers, which in turn aggregate a bunch of authoritative, commercial, open, and government datasets.

And for things like official geographic names, government naming databases are often one of the authoritative upstream sources. So if the U.S. government changes the name in its official geographic database, it’s not surprising for that change to eventually propagate through map providers and into Bing.

Not only did I have no idea that Bing or Bing Maps still existed, but the very fact that they ever existed at all had slipped from my consciousness.

And this is a PR piece put out by the ad company that people eat up because orange man bad.

As long as tech companies make a stand against superficial culture war fights like this nobody will care that they've caved w.r.t privacy over the last two decades. Sad!

Recommend you instead use something like OsmAnd. Mapquest pulls data from OpenStreetMaps - might as well use an open source application.

https://osmand.net/

It’s an international body of water that has had the same name for longer than the government that tried to rename it has existed. The renaming was an overtly political act. There are many logical approaches to leaving the name the same, and there is one logical approach to changing it (appeasement)

What about researchers at universities? Maintain a list of experts and conduct a poll whenever an event like this happens or enough of the experts request.

Or require an act of Congress. Obviously, we can no longer rely on Executive Orders being careful, thought-out, or lasting changes. Does any mapping organization want to change names back and forth? Does any user want to see these changes?

How are they determining the relevant government bodies?

The government has no right to name geographic features. The names are established by popular usage, not the feds. As such Google and Apple should not listen to the demands of a body which has no right to make them in the first place.

I think Cory would be surprised to see how many Mapquest referrers show up in the referrer logs of brick-and-mortar businesses.