Second Quest

In a normal culture, a company as gray-haired as MapQuest would not be having a straight-on cultural revival in 2026. But our culture is not normal.Last year, I wrote about MapQuest, and presented the company’s story as one that was fundamentally changed by a poor decision—AOL’s purchase of the company, which only completed after the tech IPO bubble burst.AOL, like its merger partner Time Warner, was a frequent target for acquisition. But unlike the modern day Warner Bros. Discovery, it lost cachet every time an acquirer swooped in to pick it up. And that left companies like MapQuest to languish in a culture that simply was too big to understand what was actually going on.But MapQuest, as I noted at the end of that piece, seemed to land in the perfect situation: In 2019, it was acquired by a company that actually made sense for it, the StartPage owner System1. Verizon essentially gave them the company for free, and System1 responded by actually making the company something of a viable…