Amazon just announced who's still in the running for its $5 billion HQ2 - here are 15 of the most glaring omissions from the list

• Amazon has announced its short list of the cities it's considering for its second headquarters.
• The e-commerce giant plans to invest $5 billion in the project.
• We've rounded up the major cities that didn't make the cut despite making appealing pitches.

Amazon has narrowed down its list of possible HQ2 locations.

For 20 cities, that was amazing news. For the 218 other cities and regions that had put themselves in the running, it wasn't great.

"Getting from 238 to 20 was very tough - all the proposals showed tremendous enthusiasm and creativity," Holly Sullivan of Amazon's public policy department said in a statement. "Through this process, we learned about many new communities across North America that we will consider as locations for future infrastructure investment and job creation."

While there's been a lot of focus on which cities are moving on to the next round in this exciting sweepstakes, we decided to take a look at the cities that we thought had a good chance for HQ2, but ultimately didn't make the cut.