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#45 The Revelation was published in 2000. On page 21 of that book:

Where would "they" be waiting? His computer screen was still up — no screen-saver. At the bottom was a minimized "window," the words Yahoo! Maps written inside. I grabbed the mouse and clicked. Bingo— 1366 Fairmont and a road map in case I planned to drive. I didn't.

However, according to Yahoo! themselves and Wikipedia, "Yahoo! Maps" was only launched in 2002.

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How could Marco's dad use "Yahoo! Maps" in 2000?

And more interestingly, how could K.A. Applegate (or actually, probably ghostwriter Ellen Geroux) write about "Yahoo! Maps" in 2000?

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    She guessed? It's not an illogical extension of their services.
    – Paulie_D
    Commented Sep 3, 2016 at 19:27
  • 3
    See also scifi.stackexchange.com/q/18265/4918 How could Dudley have wrecked his PlayStation if the PlayStation didn't exist yet? [harry-potter]
    – b_jonas
    Commented Sep 3, 2016 at 20:07
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    @b_jonas Haha, nice one. Only here, the error was mine, no the authors'. (I also like the idea that Vernon had signed up for product testing, lol.)
    – Fiksdal
    Commented Sep 3, 2016 at 20:12
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    @Fiksdal I'd say the error belongs with Yahoo!; note that Wikipedia uses your first link as its main source, and it doesn't mention the older Maps. Wikipedia's second source kind-of mentions that something did previously exist, but states it in a way that sounds like the previous service wasn't called "Yahoo! Maps"
    – Izkata
    Commented Sep 3, 2016 at 21:11
  • Cf. this bold prediction also made in 2000: img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2016-03/23/19/enhanced/…
    – Hagen von Eitzen
    Commented Sep 4, 2016 at 18:42

1 Answer 1

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47

You've misunderstood the "New" in their timeline. The New Yahoo! Maps was released in 2002, but the first Yahoo! Maps existed at least as far back as February 1998. Its homepage exists on Archive.org's Wayback Machine.

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    IIRC, Y! maps went from being a Yahoo-branded MapQuest to a Yahoo-branded Here, except Y! bought Here and AOL owned MapQuest?
    – KutuluMike
    Commented Sep 3, 2016 at 21:22
  • @KutuluMike The second source on Wikipedia does mention dropping MapQuest, but inspecting the source of the archived page results in nothing obvious; maybe it was entirely back-end, in which case regular users wouldn't have known?
    – Izkata
    Commented Sep 4, 2016 at 0:23
  • Probably not. IIRC, Yahoo! rebranded other people's services as their own, including MapQuest and Google search, but it "looked like" Yahoo! services. Then in the early 2000s they started buying up vendors and/or writing their stuff in-house instead.
    – KutuluMike
    Commented Sep 4, 2016 at 0:27

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