How one founder’s bet on ‘the old school web’ is paying off
How one founder’s bet on ‘the old school web’ is paying off
一位创始人对“老派网络”的押注为何能获得回报
In 2022, Craig Campbell walked away from a ‘blank check’ to start, of all things, a website. And his bet is paying off. 2022年，克雷格·坎贝尔（Craig Campbell）拒绝了一张“空白支票”，转而去创办了一个网站。而他的这场押注，如今正获得回报。
Craig Campbell walked away from the river of investor money flowing into AI to create, of all things, a website. 克雷格·坎贝尔拒绝了涌向人工智能领域的滚滚投资资金，转而创办了一个网站。
Sure, Campbell probably could have started an AI company. He’s a former engineer at Meta and an experienced tech founder who in 2022 sold his last venture — an e-commerce tool for businesses that use Shopify — right as the AI boom was booming. “I had my prior VC investors breathing down my neck, going ‘start something else. We’ll write you a blank check.’” He had other ideas. 当然，坎贝尔本可以创办一家人工智能公司。他曾是Meta的工程师，也是一位经验丰富的科技创业者。2022年，就在人工智能热潮爆发之际，他卖掉了自己的上一家初创公司——一个为Shopify商家提供服务的电商工具。“我之前的风投投资者一直催我，说‘再创办点什么吧，我们会给你开一张空白支票。’”但他有其他的想法。
People generally aren’t rushing to get into the website business, what with the Google Zero event horizon approaching. Campbell was undeterred and has grown his service — Past Maps — into a sustainable business. And he’s managed it in an increasingly unlikely way: via organic search. 考虑到“谷歌零点击搜索”（Google Zero）时代的临近，人们通常不会急于投身网站业务。但坎贝尔并未因此退缩，他将自己的服务——“过去地图”（Past Maps）——发展成了一项可持续的业务。而且，他实现这一目标的方式在当下显得愈发不可思议：通过自然搜索。
Past Maps is true to its name. The site lets you view historical maps of a particular region with a modern-day map overlaid. You can adjust the opacity to fade between the two views. The maps come from publicly available sources like the US Geological Survey, but the tools to allow people to explore them in this way were developed by Campbell. “过去地图”名副其实。该网站允许用户查看特定区域的历史地图，并将其与现代地图叠加。你可以调整透明度，在两种视图之间进行平滑切换。这些地图来自美国地质调查局等公开资源，但让人们能够以这种方式探索地图的工具是由坎贝尔开发的。
He built them to help inform his metal detection hobby — by pinpointing the modern-day locations of old structures and trails, he’d identify new places to go looking for artifacts. He started sharing his map tooling on Reddit with other metal detection enthusiasts and found that other people wanted to get their hands on what he’d created. With that, his newest tech venture was charted. 他开发这些工具最初是为了辅助他的金属探测爱好——通过定位旧建筑和古道的现代位置，他能找到新的地点去搜寻文物。他开始在Reddit上与其他金属探测爱好者分享他的地图工具，并发现其他人也想使用他所创造的东西。就这样，他最新的科技创业项目诞生了。
You don’t have to be looking for literal gold to enjoy Past Maps. For someone who’s just curious about what’s around them, it’s its own kind of treasure trove. I’ve used it to help grasp things like the shape of the Duwamish River before it was straightened out to help ships move through the waterway. Campbell’s customers use it for a wide range of reasons — from genealogy research to a daily user who maps old oil wells. It’s a research tool, but it’s also just plain fun. 你不必非得去寻找真正的黄金才能享受“过去地图”的乐趣。对于那些仅仅是对周围环境感到好奇的人来说，它本身就是一座宝库。我曾用它来了解杜瓦米什河（Duwamish River）在被拉直以利于航运之前的形状。坎贝尔的客户使用它的原因多种多样——从家谱研究到绘制旧油井地图的日常用户。它既是一个研究工具，也纯粹是一种乐趣。
The growth trajectory has been steady. Campbell says traffic has grown from an average of 20,000 active users a month to now over 300,000 a month in year three. The income is good enough to sustain Campbell and his wife, who also helps with the business. But he can’t help but think about what the money might have been like if he had taken those VC investments to work on AI. “I’m making the same as when I was like, an E4 at Facebook, which is like a mid-level engineer.” 增长轨迹一直很稳定。坎贝尔表示，在第三年，月活跃用户数已从平均2万增长到现在的30多万。这些收入足以维持坎贝尔和他妻子的生活，他的妻子也参与了这项业务。但他不禁会想，如果当初接受了那些风投去搞AI，收入会是什么样。“我现在赚的钱和我当初在Facebook做E4（中级工程师）时差不多。”
“This is how the web is supposed to work. This is actually the old school web.” “这才是网络本该有的样子。这实际上就是老派网络。”
Past Maps’ biggest source of traffic is Google Search results. Campbell found early on that Past Maps was rising through the ranks of search when people went looking for historical information about locations of interest to them — a church their grandmother attended, or abandoned mine sites in a particular county. “过去地图”最大的流量来源是谷歌搜索结果。坎贝尔很早就发现，当人们搜索他们感兴趣地点的历史信息时——比如祖母去过的教堂，或者某个县的废弃矿区——“过去地图”在搜索排名中会不断上升。
By tagging his maps and webpages in a way that Google understands, he saw a cycle start to pick up. “As I started exploding out this data and making it finally available to Google and giving it a place on the web, traffic just started to build.” 通过以谷歌能够理解的方式标记他的地图和网页，他看到了一个良性循环的开始。“当我开始将这些数据铺开，并最终让谷歌能够获取，让它们在网络上占有一席之地时，流量就开始增长了。”
“This is how the web is supposed to work. This is actually the old school web,” he says. “It is alive and well, but only in these really, really small niches.” “这才是网络本该有的样子。这实际上就是老派网络，”他说。“它依然充满活力，但只存在于这些非常、非常细分的领域中。”
An old school web publisher of 10 or 15 years ago likely would have relied on display advertising for the bulk of their revenue. You can dabble with a free Past Maps account, but going deeper requires a $9 weekly pass or $52 per year for an annual subscription. Subscriptions protect Campbell from the whims of fluctuating marketing budgets and an ad tech industry largely controlled by Google — which the DOJ ruled as an illegal monopoly in 2025. 10到15年前的老派网络出版商很可能依赖展示广告作为主要收入来源。你可以尝试使用“过去地图”的免费账户，但若想深入使用，则需要支付9美元的周票或52美元的年度订阅费。订阅模式保护了坎贝尔，使他免受波动不定的营销预算和主要由谷歌控制的广告技术行业的影响——美国司法部已在2025年裁定谷歌为非法垄断。
While AI may be eating the open web alive, Campbell has fully embraced AI tools to help run the business. Campbell says that he used to spend one or two hours a day handling every service request himself, writing lengthy emails rather than sending a form response and an FAQ. Now, he lets a local agent model on his desktop to handle the front-line triage. Its prescheduled task runs once an hour — assuming his laptop is powered on — and has access to his Gmail. It weeds out spam and marketing messages, identifies the things that need his attention, and drafts a response. He says this has cut down his customer service time to about 10 minutes a day. 虽然人工智能可能正在蚕食开放网络，但坎贝尔已完全拥抱人工智能工具来帮助经营业务。坎贝尔说，他过去每天要花一两个小时亲自处理每一项服务请求，撰写冗长的电子邮件，而不是发送格式化的回复和常见问题解答。现在，他让桌面上的本地代理模型来处理一线分类工作。它的预定任务每小时运行一次（前提是他的笔记本电脑开着），并可以访问他的Gmail。它会过滤掉垃圾邮件和营销信息，识别出需要他关注的事项，并起草回复。他说，这已将他的客户服务时间缩短到每天约10分钟。
“I do sometimes have angry customers,” Campbell says. “If they ask me for a refund, it cues up the refund and subscription cancellation request with Stripe. It does the whole thing, then it pings me.” At that point, he looks over the request, approves or denies it, and checks the message before hitting send. “我有时也会遇到愤怒的客户，”坎贝尔说。“如果他们要求退款，它会向Stripe发起退款和取消订阅的请求。它完成整个流程，然后通知我。”届时，他会查看请求，批准或拒绝，并在点击发送前检查一下消息。
Campbell is also using AI to help build an OCR tool — Optical Character Recognition — that will work with old maps. “Cartographers are assholes,” Campbell jokes. Historical maps are a particular challenge for existing OCR systems. Labels will curve along features like rivers, use inconsistent spacing, and are sometimes crowded in on top of each other. Campbell found that off-the-shelf tools would fail to parse these maps. He found more success with modern LLMs using reasoning, but it’s not a simple matter of prompting. 坎贝尔还在利用人工智能构建一个OCR（光学字符识别）工具，用于处理旧地图。“制图师都是混蛋，”坎贝尔开玩笑说。历史地图对现有的OCR系统来说是一个特殊的挑战。标签会沿着河流等特征弯曲，使用不一致的间距，有时还会挤在一起。坎贝尔发现现成的工具无法解析这些地图。他发现使用具备推理能力的现代大语言模型（LLM）效果更好，但这并不是简单的提示词工程就能解决的。