goo Map (goo地図)

» see map.goo.ne.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

goo Map opened on 1 October 2000, and it did not open as a map site. NTT-X was starting a three-month rebuild of the whole goo portal, its first large overhaul since May 1999, and the map came in the first wave as one of four new entries in a toolbox called goo便利ツール, filed beside a new-word dictionary and a postal-code lookup. INTERNET Watch wrote the renewal up on 29 September, two days ahead of the switch, and the map appears there as one noun inside a list of new tools.

None of the cartography was NTT's. ZENRIN DataCom supplied the Japanese map data from the first day, and the copyright line still visible on the 2004 captures reads Copyright (C) 2000-2004 ZENRIN DataCom. The rendering came from ZENRIN's いつもNAVI engine. World maps were licensed separately from a company called 地理情報開発. Detail outside the major cities was thin, but the labeling was in Japanese throughout.

The map you could grab and drag came much later, out of a gooラボ trial called エリア情報検索実験 that opened on 19 April 2005. By the end the product had collected a set of features that were distinctly its own. 回転地図 let you spin the map to any heading while the place names stayed upright, and 統計地図 built thematic shading out of numeric data such as prefectural population. The strangest was 口コミ地図, which put a goo blog post on the map wherever one of goo's own bloggers had written about that patch of ground. That only works if the same company owns the map and the blogs, which goo did.

It closed on 27 September 2023, four days short of twenty-three years. No reason was given. The Japanese Wikipedia entry states that plainly, citing 窓の杜's writeup of the closure, so the silence is on the record rather than something I am reading into it.

~ the record ~

~ what was kept under the present-day map ~

The part worth mourning is the stack of old maps goo filed beneath the current one. Aerial photography of Tokyo from 1963 went up in March 2008. On 9 April 2008 two more arrived together: 江戸切絵図, the Owariya woodblock plates of the Edo city, cut into 35 areas across five zoom steps, and 昭和22年航空写真, aerial survey photography of the twenty-three wards from 1947, shot by the United States military. A Meiji layer followed on 20 January 2009, built from a 1907 sheet titled 東京市十五区番地界入地図.

The site's own history page explained that the point was never to look at them one at a time. You laid one over the street map and watched the same ground change. goo curated the before-and-afters itself. Two of them: Sunshine City standing on the ground that had held Sugamo Prison, and Nihonbashi photographed from above in 1947 with nothing yet built over the bridge. That history page now 301s, and no successor was ever named. 大江戸今昔めぐり gets offered as the replacement and it is not one: it is a modern redraw of Edo in a contemporary hand, not the Owariya plates themselves.

A lost map layer only hurts if you know the ground under it. I can read that a shopping tower went up on a prison site and hold it as a fact without it landing anywhere, because I have never stood in Ikebukuro. What registers instead is the gap on this end. No Turkish consumer map I know of ever shipped a 1947 aerial survey as a toggle, and the archives that would feed one are mostly not on the web at all.

~ nineteen days ~

NTT Resonant, the company that ran goo, stopped existing on 1 July 2023. Docomo had announced the absorption on 25 May and the merger took the subsidiary off the register entirely. Nineteen days after it vanished, on 20 July, the help-center articles went up carrying the closure date. The press did not pick it up until 17 August, when ITmedia ran it under a headline about twenty-three years of history ending.

The portal outlived its own map by more than two years. goo kept trading until 25 November 2025. What actually came off on 27 September 2023 was a cluster: goo天気 and goo自動車＆バイク went the same day, filed as three consecutive help articles numbered 2639 to 2641 and all dated 20 July. goo路線 had already been absorbed into the map and died inside it. gooタウンページ had gone six months earlier, on 29 March.

~ fifth in the country ~

One measurement survives. Nielsen Online NetView counted home access in January 2008 and put goo Map fifth in Japan at 1,367,000 users, behind Yahoo!地図情報 on 8,587,000, Google Maps on 4,358,000, Mapion on 3,443,000 and MapFan Web on 2,359,000. Fifth place with the leader six times your size is a real position and not a comfortable one. It is also the last figure anybody published. Nothing was released at the shutdown or anywhere near it, so the fifteen years between that count and the closure are blank.

~ the apology that was removed ~

There is a small thing in the wording worth keeping. While the shutdown was still ahead, the in-product notice carried the standard Japanese apology clause, ご迷惑をおかけして誠に申し訳ございません. Once the service was actually off, the verb flipped from future to past and the apology came out of the text. The tombstone states the closure and no longer says sorry for it.

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