Category: Of Note in Search Biz

As I worked on my book over the past year or so, AOL was quite significant for its absence. It didn’t seem to have a strategy to speak of when it came to search, its focus on its own walled garden of access customers kept it from influencing the broader conversation of web-based search.

That all seems to be changing now, as AOL last Fall announced it was opening up its service and was taking a more web-centric approach to its business. First major step seems to be in search: it too is throwing its hat into the ring, and the approach it’s taking should be familiar to anyone who has a Yahoo login – yup, it looks like Yahoo, with an AOL twist.

(NB: The new search is not available as I write this, I will update when is goes live. Full release is in extended entry.)

First, AOL has used Google as its core index for sometime, and this is not changing. What is changing, and what I find most interesting, is that AOL is throwing open its “Search Experience” to the general web user. AOL has developed any number of interesting tools layered on top of Google – think A9, and Yahoo till they dropped Google for their own index last year. But until now, AOL has focused on its access base – i.e. its access clients, who use PC-based client software to access the AOL service. AOL wasn’t really a search destination for anyone who wasn’t already an AOL member.

No longer. Last Fall AOL announced a business strategy shift which predicated today’s annoucement. It gave up the walled garden model, and – not surprisingly for those who feel search is critical to all things internet – their first big move toward paying off that announcement is in search.

As one might expect, AOL has joined Yahoo in taking what might be called the “media model” of search. The media model takes a person’s query and salts the results with all manners of human edited results – mostly from content the service owns, or content that the service access from partners, or content from the web that the service edits together to create what has been called “smart search”, “search shortcuts,” “programmatic search,” and the like. (To be fair, Yahoo, of all the players, is actually pursuing both a Head and a Tail approach – with their algorithmic index and in particular their approach to RSS and video search, for example, they are very much playing in the tail as well).

But AOL is taking “programmed search” to the extreme. It is, after all, a major division of a gigantic content player, and up until now, that content was locked away behind the failing access business model. No longer. AOL Search is taking the media model of search to the maximum – they have 60 full time employees creating edited “snapshots” which respond to what AOL Search chief Gerry Campbell says are 20% of all queries. That’s 2.5 million snapshots preloaded, so when you type in a popular query, you get an “answer, not just a list of results.” I imagine that number will only continue to grow. Yahoo circa 1995, anyone? This time, however, AOL only has to pre-load queries which prove out to be worth the time – the log files will tell them which ones. As will the economy. “We won’t have a smart box for a query like ‘birds of the Maldives'” Campbell told me. ” But that’s why we have Google.”

Yow! It’s not like Google is against “smart search boxes” – they do add Froogle, News, and Mapquest links when they deem it appropriate. But AOL (and Yahoo) have taken an far more aggressive approach. AOL “without a doubt” wants to to be a major web destination, Campbell says. Which will win? Eh, both.

AOL and Yahoo are playing to the head – where the money is, where the commercial value is – honestly, where most of the most popular content is. Google is playing, as a service, more to the tail. And the stuff they are adding to their new web search, combined with the stuff they plan to add, will, i think, push AOL into being a full throated contestant in the ongoing search scrum. Yippee!!!

Campbell said something interesting as we chewed through this: that AOL is creating a “query driven navigation interface,” as opposed to just another search engine.

To the particulars (and I’d love to have screen shots, but I never got the deck mailed to me that I saw online when AOL briefed me earlier today. When/if I get em, you’ll see em.)

AOL is adding a lot to its search play. First they have a new and much improved interface. Probably most impressive, at least in concept (I have not played with it) is the “SmartBox” feature which is sort of like Yahoo’s “Also Try” or Google’s search suggestion tool, but in real time as you type a query. Cool idea.

They’re adding clustering, via a deal with Vivisimo. They’re adding pay-per-call, via a deal with Ingenio (I’d love to write more about this, but I’m beat, it’s late, maybe later in the week!). They’re adding those smart boxes I was talking about. They’re adding search history – but only your last 50 searches. I think that’s lame, but Campbell told me the average AOL user searches just 20 times a month – same as your typical web surfer. They plan to watch that and possibly add more. And they’re planning on adding robust local search that integrates some of their properties – MapQuest, Moviefone, Yellow Pages, City Guides, etc.

And, of course, they will be adding desktop search, through a deal with Copernic, which is, I hear, a great desktop search tool.

Soon, Campbell told me, they plan to add localized indexing, so you can search just the part of the web that is in your region. That will be through a partnership with FAST.

And, oh yeah, they will be integrating vertical search, travel, shopping, etc. Oh, and they have added the ability for “AOL partner advertisers” to buy their own trademarks as ad terms, boxing out others. Hmmm, that smells a bit opportunistic given all the legal stuff swirling around trademarks, but hey, gotta make a buck.

Man, they’ve been busy. I can’t wait to play with it. I’ll update this post once I do.

Update: Boston.com points out that AOL’s use of FAST for local is a blow to Google. Also, my friends at Ask remind me that they had clustering, smart search, and suggest tools for years. ]]>

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UDATE: Doing some research on my last chapter, I re-read this interview in Fortune(sub required). Sheds some light on the subject of Google’s interest in fiber:

SCHMIDT: Let me tell you some things about broadband. The first is that we see broadband users use Google a lot more. Now, we don’t know what is the causality. We don’t know whether it’s the broadband that allows it, or whether it’s a demographic profile or something, but we do know that broadband users use Google much more and they buy more things. They live on the Internet because of broadband.