Again, typing is tough so I’ll let John McKinley do the talking, the entire thing is really worth a read:
The challenge with this approach is fourfold:
1. We lost the impact of some of the tips and techniques we had developed as a “veneer” player that maximized the revenue we could get from high-value searches – maybe that will be offset by the private label adwords, but maybe not…
2. Over time, the average consumer is going to develop more of a tendency to just go to google.com directly – I certainly have begun doing that. The value of AOL as part of the value chain in the eyes of the consumer is getting pretty minimal.
3. It under-leverages AOL’s ability to deliver unique rich content assets from within the TWX network.
4. It is, by its nature, defensive in nature – how could you possibly grow search share materially this way?
I love his fourth point. Why copy google to grow. Even google can do better than they currently do in search. They just don’t want to quickly disrupt the click through ratio on the ads just yet. Must be hard holding back some of those creative bright engineers. AOL is in a good position to do something great, but they probably will not. Paris Roussos