Rambler Maps

» see maps.rambler.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Rambler Maps opened on 10 October 2000, which makes it older than almost everything it eventually lost to. Yandex did not have a mapping product yet, and 2GIS was still a city directory in Novosibirsk. Google Maps was more than four years away from existing anywhere. A Russian portal with a search engine and a mail service put a national map on the web because a portal in 2000 was supposed to have one of everything, and for a long stretch it was the only one in the country.

What it could do grew slowly and in the order these things usually grow. Measuring a distance came first. A serious rebuild landed in 2006. Route building arrived in 2008, covering the whole territory rather than a handful of cities, which for Russia is an unreasonable amount of ground. Traffic conditions followed, and on top of the base map sat a directory layer of places worth finding: cinemas, museums, concert halls, restaurants, and a set of webcams pointed at streets.

The data underneath was never Rambler's own. An agreement with Sidikom Navigation in 2010 supplied the cartography, a local advertising product went on in 2011, and from 2012 the company was working with 2GIS, by then the strongest map dataset in the country. Buying your map from the competition is a workable arrangement right up until the competition no longer needs you.

~ the record ~

~ february 2013 ~

On 1 February 2013 the merged Afisha-Rambler company announced what it was closing. Rambler Photos and Rambler Dictionaries went in the same sentence, and Lenta noted that both had been sitting unmaintained for so long that shutting them was a formality. Maps was the one with a real product behind it, and the stated reason there was different: the partner had not given the service sufficient competitive advantages. Rambler Avia stopped being developed at the same time while the company looked for a co-investor.

The Maps closure was described as happening in stages, which it did. The service went off on 15 April 2013. Twelve and a half years, ended by an ownership change and an honest admission that the thing was no longer better than the free alternatives.

~ the recommendation ~

The detail worth keeping is what Rambler told its users to do next. Not Yandex Maps, which was Russian and excellent and owned by a direct rival. Not 2GIS, which had been supplying the data. Rambler staff pointed people at OpenStreetMap, a noncommercial volunteer project with no company behind it at all. A portal shutting down its own map and sending the traffic to a free community dataset is an unusually plain statement about where the value in mapping had moved by 2013.

~ the redirect ~

maps.rambler.ru still answers. It returns a 301 to the Rambler homepage, which means the address was never sold, never parked, and never allowed to 404. The portal simply kept the doorway and removed the room behind it. Rambler itself is still trading, which puts this grave in the smaller category of dead products whose parent company is alive and reachable and has just quietly stopped mentioning them.

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