Google Ride Finder

» see labs.google.com/ridefinder as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

For about three and a half years Google would tell you where the taxis were. Ride Finder took live GPS feeds from participating taxi and limousine fleets in ten American metro areas, plotted every vehicle as a pin on Google Maps, and refreshed the whole thing every five minutes. You opened a page in a browser and watched the cabs move around Manhattan or downtown Chicago in near real time. In 2005 that was close to science fiction.

It shipped out of Google Labs, and the launch date is the one soft number in this grave. Search Engine Watch announced it on 31 March 2005 under the headline that Google Labs had a new thing; killedbygoogle carries 1 May 2005; a TechCrunch retrospective from 2015 says May. The grave uses March 2005 at month precision because the contemporaneous trade coverage beats a retrospective, and says so rather than picking a day it cannot defend.

What Ride Finder never had was the last step. Having found a cab two blocks away, your options were to phone the dispatcher and describe where you were standing, or to walk outside and wave. There was no booking, no account, no payment, no way to tell the driver on the screen that you were the one who wanted them. Shuttle operators were carried too, on the same terms.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

Quietly, is the answer. Google barely promoted it and it never graduated out of Labs, which in that era was where Google parked things it wanted to see used before committing engineers. The dependency was awkward too: the map only had pins where a fleet operator had agreed to publish its GPS feed to Google, so coverage was patchy inside the ten cities it claimed and absent everywhere else.

Turkish taxis in 2005 were hailed at the curb or by phoning a durak, and no dispatcher within a thousand kilometers of me was publishing a GPS feed to anybody, least of all to Google. Had the page loaded in Ankara it would have drawn an empty map. This was a US-only product at the data layer rather than the licensing layer, which meant there was nothing to unlock and no workaround to find.

~ what it predicted ~

The death date is worth stating carefully because the usual source has it wrong. killedbygoogle lists 31 October 2009. The Internet Archive disagrees: labs.google.com/ridefinder returns a working 200 as late as 19 December 2008, goes to 404 on 20 December, and never serves a page again. There are scattered 404s earlier in 2008 consistent with a flaky host, but no capture after 19 December 2008 succeeds. The published date is about ten months late.

Uber was incorporated the following year and put its first cars on the road in San Francisco in 2010. What it added to Google's 2005 map was the button. Google had already solved the hard-looking half of the problem, showing a citizen the live position of every available vehicle nearby, and then switched it off in the week before Christmas because nobody could work out what it was for.

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