July 16, 2008

AOL Seeks Microsoft Deal Before Yahoo Aug 1 Shareholders Meeting

AOL is feeling the urge to merge and soon. Time Warner is reportedly seeking a deal with Microsoft prior to the fast-approaching August 1 Yahoo shareholders meeting.

The deal would merge AOL with Yahoo's search business, and owned by Microsoft. Time Warner would take a minority stake in the newly formed company. AOL has shifted its focus from dial-up internet service to online advertising.

Previously, Yahoo talked to AOL about a merger in what appeared to be one of many attempts to stave off Microsoft.

AOL's Platform-A was the top online advertising network in the month of March. The network reaches 9 out of 10 internet users, or 170 million people. Yahoo Networks came in second at 160 million, while Google came in third at 152 million.

Seems like Microsoft should acquire AOL with or without Yahoo. Then again, nothing is quite what it seems when it comes to the whole Microhoo debacle is it?

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 9:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 8, 2008

Ex-Google Exec Heads to Bebo Europe

Ex-Googler Kate Burns has been tapped by social networking site Bebo to head up their European operations, according to the Guardian. Burns previously was Google's managing director for the UK. She also helped launch DoubleClick and AltaVista in the UK.

Bebo was recently acquired by AOL for $850 million. The site boasts 40 million members worldwide. AOL's Platform-A recently announced a guaranteed CPM for Bebo developers. Platform-A was the largest ad network in March.

Also in March, Microsoft announced a data portability with 5 social networks, including Bebo. However, AOL joined Google's OpenSocial initiative in May. Google owns a 5% stake in AOL, and was recently given permission to unload the stock, though it has yet to do so.

Meanwhile, rumor of a possible Yahoo-AOL merger have reared its (ugly?) head again, but today reports are suggesting any deal would not be completed in July. Yahoo's shareholder meeting is August 1.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 19, 2008

AOL Completes Bebo Acquisition

AOL has announced the completion of its acquisition of Bebo, a social network based in the UK. Bebo boasts an estimated 40 million users worldwide.

Randy Falco, Chairman and CEO of AOL, said of the deal, “AOL is now fully focused on growing our business in three key areas – our advertising network, publishing and people networks – by delivering relevant content and advertising across the Web, and we’re making great progress in each area.”

But will the acquisition threaten another ad network? Last year, Yahoo UK inked an ad deal with Bebo for the social network's display advertising.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 17, 2008

Is The AOL Brand Associated With Old School Web?

Seems the folks over at Time Warner have finally realized that the AOL brand does not have any impact in the niched content space. But is AOL mired in the thoughts of web users as that "old internet dialup service" as some of the Time Warner staff believe?

According to the Associated Press, AOL parent Time Warner was more blunt in a regulatory filing:

"If AOL cannot effectively build a portfolio of alternate brands that are appealing to Internet consumers, AOL may have difficulty in increasing the engagement of Internet consumers on its Web products and services. AOL believes that the `AOL' brand is associated in the minds of consumers with its dial-up Internet access service."

To overcome this hurdle AOL has started creating separate niched communities - though they may want to hire someone else to name them. Asylum for the young men's site, Spinner, the indie music site, WalletPop, the personal finance site, StyleList for fashion and AOL Body (which kept the association after tests showed it works) for women's health.

Should be interesting to see how that works for them. I had not heard of any of them prior to reading the AP report so the new branding has not made much of an impact yet. Though why, as AP stated, have they decided to roll the new sites out quietly?

Branding requires people knowing about the name. Forget replacing the Yahoo board, AOL needs some new minds at the helm - maybe some that are not still thinking like last century.

ValleyWag has had some interesting things to say about Bill Wilson, the head of the AOL rebranding effort.

Bill Wilson: Forget about his mother, will he frag AOL?

Posted by Frank Watson at 10:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

March 13, 2008

Press release about AOL acquiring Bebo ranks #1 in Techmeme

Nathania Johnson did a great job earlier today covering the news about the AOL acquisition of Bebo for $850 million cash. But, there's a follow-up story that Drew Kerr over at Four Corners Communications has brought to my attention.

Drew emailed me to say, "The PRESS RELEASE carried on Business Wire -- not a news article, of AOL's acquisition of social search engine company Bebo -- is the top item on Techmeme's site today."

He added, "Here's another example of how Techmeme, the highly popular news aggregator among the tech community and tech bloggers, continues to recognize and display Business Wire content as a leading news source."

Once upon a time, you might have seen something similar in Google News. As I reported in "Beyond Beta: Google News Graduates" back in January 2006, Krishna Bharat, the creator of Google News, wrote in January 2006, "We've certainly gotten a lot of feedback from both readers and editors. For example, readers told us they loved the news clusters but they didn't want press releases on the home page (although they are still useful to have in the search results)."

So, Techmeme seems to be taking a different path. Will it last?

Only if press releases meet the high standard set by Ivy Lee in his "Declaration of Principles" issued more than 100 years ago. The so-called father of modern PR said back then, "This is not a secret press bureau. All our work is done in the open. We aim to supply news. If you think any of our matter ought properly to go to your business office, do not use it."

His Declaration of Principles added, "Our matter is accurate. Further details on any subject treated will be supplied promptly, and any editor will be assisted most cheerfully in verifying directly any statement of fact. In brief, our plan is, frankly and openly, on behalf of business concerns and public institutions, to supply to the press and public of the United States prompt and accurate information concerning subjects which it is of value and interest to the public to know about."

So, can the vast majority of PR people live by these rules today? Let's wait and see. The jury is out, but I expect a verdict shortly.

Posted by Greg Jarboe at 3:59 PM | Permalink

AOL Buys Social Network Bebo for $850M

AOL will buy Facebook competitor Bebo for $850 million cash. Combining social network Bebo's estimated 40 million users with AIM and ICQ will boost AOL's social media reach to 80 million users worldwide.

Google had reportedly been in talks to acquire to acquire Bebo to bolster its Orkut social search engine.

The deal comes on the heels of AOL’s launch of Open AIM 2.0, which enables developers to utilize the popular instant messaging client for third party sites and applications. Apple also recently announced a downloadable AIM application for the iPhone.

Like other search engines, AOL has been making several strategic moves in an attempt to position itself as a leader in digital media and marketing. The company spent nearly $1 billion building Platform-A, a top display ad serving network focused on helping marketers build brands that perform online. In the process it has acquired ADTECH, buy.at, Lightningcast, Quigo, TACODA and Third Screen Media.

Still, the future of AOL remains uncertain. Rumors of an acquisition by Disney were squelched by Robert Iger yesterday. Parent company Time Warner is open to a sale or spinoff, including a partnership with Yahoo Last week, it was widely reported that Yahoo and AOL were in talks, as part of Yahoo's delaying/avoidance strategy in the wake of Microsoft's unsolicited offer for the Sunnyvale search engine.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 8:17 AM | Permalink

February 11, 2008

Another AOL Exec Leaves

AOL says aloha to strategic ad exec Dave Morgan, founder of AOL-acquired Tacoda.

From a leadership standpoint, huge loss. Morgan was EVP Global Advertising Strategy. His departure essentially leaves AOL without a global advertising strategy while Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes splits and sells AOL.

Doubtful any entrepreneurial execs would stay through the sale. Buyers: Yahoo? Google? MicroWho? Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Impact on Yahoo-AOL talks? Negligible. Paid Content's Rafat Ali broke the story and has the exclusive on why Morgan stayed at AOL for only 90 days - think startups & Platform A, not AvenueA or M&A.

AOL paid around $275 million (actual purchase price undisclosed) to buy the behavioral targeting network, Tacoda. AOL most likely didn't have the development team to build behavioral targeting technology in-house.

That left AOL's search engine renaissance missing the search re-targeting piece, the hottest area in paid search and conversion marketing. If search engine consolidation is all about search, then Tacoda and Advertising.com are valuable prizes for Yahoo -- or Google, which owns a 5 percent stake in AOL.

Tacoda had several slogans during its evolution (before being swallowed up by AOL). The startup was "The Audience Management Company" and "The Audience Company." My favorite: "Where the people are" … and Dave Morgan is not.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 10:54 AM | Permalink

February 10, 2008

AOL Yahoo Talk Merger - Microsoft Rebuked

Yahoo merges with AOL, saves Time Warner and re-Bewkes Microsoft. That's a best case scenario for Yahoo from investment bank advisers at Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers. The i-banks are advising Yahoo on mergers with media and technology firms that might snatch Yang & Co. from the jaws of Microsoft. On Sunday, Siobhan Kennedy and Suzy Jagger of The Times Online (UK) broke the story AOL may emerge as Yahoo's exit strategy from the Microsoft $45 billion (give or take a billion) bid.

An AOL merger leads the pack of deals Yahoo and its i-bank M&A advisers are pursuing. Not long ago Yahoo failed to close a deal for AOL. Now the pressure from Yahoo shareholders won't let up until a Microsoft bid (sweetened or unsweetened) is accepted - or an AOL-sized deal is done. Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes would be the big winner.

Google has long been discussed as Yahoo's outsourced search partner (again). The surprise? The House of Mouse has emerged as a possible home for Yahooligans. (The revenge of Terry Semel?)

If you can't bring Hollywood to Yahoo, then move the Yahoo to Hollywood. Any Yahoo tie-up would likely put Disney CEO Bob Iger in the driver's seat, not a bad thing for Yahoo's beleaguered shareholders.

Would an AOL merger somehow increase the value of Yahoo's stock by more than 60 percent? (Microsoft premium: 62 percent) Not likely. Yahoo shareholders have long been asking - to no avail - for a plan to boost YHOO by 25 percent from its 52 week low. So far the Microsoft bid has been the only (un)plan that did.

I mentioned the AOL scenario last Friday morning on a conference call with Oppenheimer senior analyst Sandeep Aggarwal and Oppenheimer's Media & Internet and Enterprise Software teams.

Kevin Lee of Didit joined us on the call, along with Jaideep Singh, CEO of vertical search engine Spock.com and Seth Barnes, senior manager for Edmunds.com, a leading consumer automotive site.

To listen to a replay, the dial-in number is (888) 266-2081 or (703) 925-2533. Replay dates are now thru 2/22/2008 23:59 EST.

Whether the Yahoo AOL portal-saurus merger would work is moot.

Now it's One Deal, One Day.

All this week: Yahoo! on Woot!.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 11:43 PM | Permalink | TrackBack

July 30, 2007

AOL Rumored To Be Changing Name to TMZ

Bill Hartzer is reporting that AOL is moving towards changing its name to TMZ - the large entertainment site.

Though it is noted at this stage the information is only speculation, not doubt people will be scurrying to confirm this one.

Posted by Frank Watson at 3:17 PM | Permalink

February 14, 2007

AOL Turns Up Dial on FullView Marketing

AOL launched its new FullView search interface in October, integrating Google search results with multimedia, local or other content from AOL and its partners. On Tuesday, AOL shuttered its AOL Search blog and opened up a new "Discover FullView" blog in its place. It's decidedly conversational in tone, written by Mia, a young AOLer whose stated goals are to provide FullView updates, search tips, and persuade users to try AOL Search with FullView.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 5:29 AM | Permalink

December 27, 2006

AOL Merger Speculation

Mediapost reported last week that Merrill Lynch was eyeing the possibility of AOL merging with either Microsoft or Yahoo, in an attempt to gain back market share from Google. This speculation comes on the heels of a report that AOL's total subscriber numbers are up for the first time in a year, after dropping premium memberships in August.

Yahoo would be the more likely company to merge with AOL, accourding to Merrill Lynch. Merrill Lynch's report also noted that traditional media companies may stay away from the purchase of AOL, in the wake of the "disasterous" initial merger with Time Warner.

Posted by Elisabeth Osmeloski at 12:18 PM | Permalink

December 18, 2006

2006 Top Searches

Following Yahoo's release on December 4 of its top searches for 2006, last week AOL, Lycos and MSN Live released their top searches for the year 2006. Google still has their 2005 review at Zeitgeist, along with recent monthly totals. Ask.com presents weekly lists, but has yet to release a 2006 year in review.

A closer look at these lists reveals some interesting questions about the differences in the data from engine to engine.

Looking at the slight differences between this data can be an interesting project, and can probably yield some good insight into both the user demographics of each of the engines

Paris Hilton is an interesting example to use in showing how search engines classify types of searches. In Yahoo! and in AOL, Paris is listed as a celebrity, yet she is found in top News searches for MSN Live. Does this mean that people search Live's (formerly search.msn.com) News category when they look for everyone's favorite socialite?

More can undoubtedly be read into the top overall searches reported for each portal. AOL reports: "weather" (does this mean they included all weather-inclusive searches or just the term "weather?"); Yahoo! says Britney Spears is number one (hmm...wonder if that includes people misspelling it?); MSN Live claims that the world wanted to know about Ronaldinho more than anyone or thing else; and Lycos puts Poker at number one. Again, others can fill in the blanks as to what they think the demographics most closely associated with each portal are.

It will be interesting to see what the top Google searches are. It would also be nice to have some more details as to how many misspellings were included in searches and perhaps how many of the searches for each top term were actually contained in a longer keyword phrase.

See also the discussions about this at the Yahoo! Search Blog, and the MSN Blog post that introduced their list. AOL has opened up the floor for discussion at the AOL Search Blog (thanks Susan for the link!). Lycos provides a platform for discussion which can be found at the Lycos 50 Blog. (Thanks Carolyn!)

(Note this story was edited after I discovered that Paris Hilton did make the top celebrity list at AOL. For some reason I missed that originally. Apologies to the AOL team for this oversight. CB)

Posted by Chris Boggs at 10:58 AM | Permalink

August 21, 2006

AOL Fires CTO & Two Employees After Search Records Slip Up

The Wall Street Journal just reported that AOL has fired the Chief Technology Officer, Maureen Govern, and two other employees after releasing search records last week. The article named "AOL Fires Technology Chief After Web-Search Data Scandal" discloses that Maureen Govern, the CTO along with the researcher who released the data and the manager overseeing the research have been all fired. I am kind of surprised that AOL hit someone so high to the top, but it does make a statement, a statement AOL must make.

Postscript From Danny: News.com has a nice follow-up here, Three workers depart AOL after privacy uproar, and Lisa Barone over at Bruce Clay highlights a Mercury News article where AOL's statement of keeping data "roughly 30 days" obviously didn't hold true. AOL also said they purge personally identifiable information after 30 days last year. To be fair, the search records did have personal ids removed. It's simply that the searches themselves made at least one person identifiable.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 2:28 PM | Permalink

August 15, 2006

EFF Asks FTC To Limit How Long AOL Can Store Search Records

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has asked the US Federal Trade Commission to investigate AOL's release of search records last week and prevent the company from storing search data for longer than two weeks.

The formal complaint (PDF) asks for the FTC to:

order AOL to refrain from collecting or storing logs of its users’ search activity except where necessary incident to the rendition of AOL’s services or the protection of AOL rights and property, and to refrain in any case from storing logs of its users’ search activity in personally identifiable form or for more than fourteen (14) days;

The EFF also wants all those whose searches were revealed through the data to be notified by AOL, which sounds like a good idea and something you'd think AOL would already want to do. Other things are requested, such as one year's worth of credit monitoring to protect against identity theft. That seems far-fetched, but I suppose you never know.

Coinciding with the complaint, the Wall Street Journal has a debate between the EFF and an internet lobbying group NetCoalition that apparently represents Yahoo and Google, among others.

The debate, Should Web Search Data Be Stored?, is free to anyone to view. It's well worth a read, if only to read that the US Department Of Justice is apparently arguing that access to search records might not require a search warrant, as the EFF says the Electronic Communication Privacy Act requires.

Overall, I'm much more on the side of the EFF in the debate. Some highlights from it and my remarks about them.

NetCoalition: Search queries are stored and used by Internet companies for internal purposes.

Me: Search queries have been shared by various companies in different ways with third parties over the years. More important, even if these are stored for internal purposes, there's no guarantee that they'll be perfectly protected. Leaks, accidental or intentional, do happen.

NetCoalition: There are good, legitimate reasons why an Internet company would use historical search queries for internal uses. For example, search query information can be used in research and development to make improvements to search technology, to better tailor and make more efficient users' online requests. Companies also analyze historical query information to detect and protect against click fraud -- an activity that involves faking clicks on Web advertisements to drive up costs.

Me: Excellent points, but the major search engines are going to have to step up now with better proof that there's no way data can be tied back with an individual, even when made "anonymous" in the way AOL has shown doesn't work. Click fraud refunds typically aren't given for activity longer than 60 days, so that provides a time horizon for how long data might be associated with actual users/IP activity.

NetCoalition: Search queries are essentially "directory assistance" requests from users to companies that help them find locations on the Internet. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act is meant to protect communications between and among users -- not to protect requests from customers for directions on the Internet.

Me: Wow, I think the search engines need a new lobbying group that understands search better. Searches can be directory assistance and much more than that. Search engines are confidents, trusted friends that we effectively tell secrets to in order to get advice. They aren't about getting location. They are about getting information.

NetCoalition: The Video Privacy Protection Act is a bad analogy. Internet companies do not match up the user's personal information (e.g., name, address and phone number) with search queries the way a video rental record would.

Me: Except they do. If you're logged in to a search engine, then any personal information you've provided is associated with your search query in some way.

EFF: The public needs to know the facts about how their data is being stored and used before they can make informed decisions as consumers as to whether and how to use a particular search engine, and to make informed decisions as citizens as to whether and how Congress needs to update the law. I think the best route would be hearings in Congress to get to the bottom of the issue.

Me: I think the best route would be for the search engines themselves to act in conjunction with privacy groups right now to get protections and standards in place. But if they can't act, then hopefully laws covering the entire search spectrum -- from ISP to search engine -- will be enacted.

NetCoalition: Search queries are not being linked to users' personal information and shared for marketing purposes.

Me: Except they are. Showing ads in response to a query, while long-standing and generally accepted, is a marketing purpose. Showing ads based on search profiles, such as the New York Times wrote about today, is a more extreme example.

EFF: My organization also strongly opposes proposals by the DOJ and Congresswoman DeGette that would force companies to store this kind of sensitive data for government use. That's like asking the post office to keep copies of our mail, or phone companies to keep recordings of our phone calls, just in case investigators might find it useful. The bottom line is that Americans deserve the same privacy protections online that they've always had offline, and that includes the ability to be able to speak and consume speech freely and privately, without fear that their deepest secrets might be shared with the government or published to the world. Yet when search engines accumulate this kind of data, such disclosures are bound to happen, as this week's news has demonstrated.

Me: Well said!

Postscript: I'd sent some questions over to the EFF and just got answers back from EFF staff attorney Kevin Bankston. Here they are:

Q. Why just AOL? Why aren't you asking for all search engines to be limited? I did see that you want federal laws to expand to cover them, but what happened with AOL could happen with the others as well.

A. Why aren't we asking the FTC to investigate and take action against other search engines? Because we can't, just like we can't go to court and demand that Google pay for AOL's mistake. The FTC isn't a suggestion box. We had a specific complaint about AOL--we think this disclosure violated their policy and therefore constitutes an unfair and deceptive trade practice--and we filed that complaint with the FTC. If other companies engaged in similar disclosures, we'd file similar complaints.

If you are familiar with our work, you know that we've been complaining about the logging practices of search engines as a category for a long while. In fact, I'm usually the one trying to explain to Google-hungry journalists that your Yahoos and AOLs and MSNs and other multi-service portals pose most if not all of the same privacy threats, so it's funny to be accused of singling out one of them for some sort of special mistreatment. We're merely reacting to a specific incident that happened to involve AOL rather than Google or Yahoo or MSN.

We want strong, clear legal rules that cover all the search engines; we want all the search engines to limit retention.

Q. Why just the search engines? Many ISPs are recording the same data but aren't being limited on data retention. It's actually more worrisome to me in that many ISPs are happily selling this data to third parties.

Again, if you are familiar with our work, you know that we are generally concerned about data retention by all stripes of online service providers (see, e.g., our white paper on best practices for online service providers, http://www.eff.org/osp/). So, in short, we share your worry. But again, we are reacting to a specific incident concerning a search engine, so our discussion right now is focused on search engines.

BTW, if you are specifically aware of any ISP that routinely collects the searches its users submit to other search engines, we'd love to hear more about it. I think that without very clear consent from the customer, that would be an unauthorized interception of your communications, and therefore a felony.

Q. How long does the EFF retain search data? You've got a search box. People do sensitive searches on your sites. I want to ensure AOL isn't being held to a higher standard than the EFF itself meets.

We don't retain search terms. Of course, since we use Google, Google does undoubtedly retain them. But we proxy everyone's requests so that their IP addresses and cookies are not transmitted to Google, therefore individual search terms are only identifiable to EFF visitors as a population and not personally or uniquely. In fact, we call this out on our site: if you click on the link next to our search box that says "about EFF's search," you'll see a pop-up that says "EFF uses Google for search functionality on www.eff.org. To protect your privacy, EFF proxies search requests to Google with a special CGI script on our server, thus hiding your IP address and your Google cookie (if any) from Google's servers."

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:02 AM | Permalink

August 9, 2006

Search Privacy Concerns Humanized As The New York Times Tracks Down Anonymous AOL Searcher

A Face Is Exposed for AOL Searcher No. 4417749 is an excellent read from the New York Times, where you can meet the person who is about to become the most famous searcher ever: Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old from Georgia. Using the released AOL search records, the New York Times figured out who she was and interviewed her and her searching habits for the story. No more discussing whether anonymous search records might contain enough information to identify people. In some cases, they do (or at least enough to make an extremely good guess and get confirmation from the person themselves). Thelma Arnold now becomes the face of search privacy issues. Meanwhile, though not naming people, News.com has a good look at more searching behavior from the records: AOL's disturbing glimpse into users' lives.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:53 AM | Permalink

August 7, 2006

AOL Releases Search Data & Raises Privacy Concerns

Techmeme is reporting a huge amount of concern over AOL releasing, then pulling, search logs done by 500,000 users over three months. The purpose of the release was to help search researchers better understand user behavior in conjunction with an industry event for search researchers happening in Seattle, SIGIR. The data was posted on the AOL research site, but has since been pulled.

Unlike what TechCrunch suggests, this isn't private data in that no personally identifiable information has been released. Instead, actual usernames have been replaced with anonymous one. However, this still means it's possible to track the behavior of a particular user and potentially know who they are if their searches contained personally identifiable information.

To understand this more, this page gives some examples gleaned from the new AOL data. Also see this example of someone who might be planning to murder his wife. Danny's earlier post, Private Searches Versus Personally Identifiable Searches, also covers the general difference between private data versus personally identifiable stuff.

How does what AOL compare to what the Department of Justice asked for from search engines earlier this year? It actually goes further. The DOJ simply wanted searches, not any further information that would allow a group of searches to be linked with an individual, even if that individual as kept anonymous.

Danny may have more to say about this next week. He's at the SES San Jose conference this week and very busy with that, but he sent me some notes from a brief review of the AOL move to give perspective here as he sees it.

Postscript From Danny: Just a few quick thoughts and updates in the short time I have between sessions.

AOL: Dooooooh! from John Battelle and AOL apologizes for release of user search data from News.com have AOL apologizing for the release, now said to be data involving about 658,000 individuals from March through May of this year. AOL says the release of the data wasn't properly vetted for privacy issues and that the release intentions were innocent.

I believe that. Make no mistake, this was a big screw up. The researchers providing the data didn't think hard enough about how making it possible to build a profile of individuals, even if they were given anonymous names, might then make it possible to determine who those people are if they revealed enough information in their searches.

In addition, it's going to be very difficult for some law enforcement agency not to want to subpoena AOL for actual user names when they read about things that suggest a murder is being planned or may have happened, as covered above. I'm not saying they'll get it, but I think it's almost inevitable that someone will try. That will set off further privacy fireworks.

But yes, the original intention was innocent. I got an email about the research site last week (and with my traveling all last week, simply did not have a chance to check it out). Here's what a researcher involved with it emailed me:

Over the last few years I have witnessed a divide developing within Information Retrieval research - between the haves and have-nots. The ‘haves’ are the companies like Google, Yahoo, MSN, and ourselves, with lots of resources and data. The ‘have-nots’ are people without those resources such as academic researchers and smart guys at small companies. We want to be able to help anyone work on great ideas by giving them the data and infrastructure they need.

So we started building data sets and made them available for everyone to test their ideas with. Each data set features a dynamic view, which allows you to inspect the data without having to download it. We also built some APIs for news, video, audio and podcasts, which will save people time from having to do that themselves. We have tried to stay away from interfaces like web search as those are already around.

There's nothing evil in that. In fact, there's much to appreciate, intention-wise.

We all use search engines so much, and they are so important in our daily lives, yet they remain one of the most poorly researched media venues out there. Yes, we're getting new labs like the one from Yahoo at UC Berkeley. But most search behavior studies outside of the search engines have depended on ancient search logs from places like Excite from back in 2001 or so. Newer studies, if the search engines are doing them, simply don't come out often. So the intention to promote learning with this release was innocent, if not honorable. The execution was poor and inexcusable.

This is the second major milestone in raising awareness of search privacy issues this year. The first was the Department of Justice action, which rightly focused on whether we need more safeguards over what governments can request. Today's upset highlights the protections that are needed again corporate releases of data.

The good news is that perhaps it will spur better protections even more. Microsoft, Google & Others Call For Unified Federal Privacy Protection covers how the major search engines recently asked for better legal protections from the government. But perhaps the search industry itself will move forward to develop better privacy standards. I've hoped recently for some type of Search Privacy Bill Of Rights. Since I doubt the government will act quickly, perhaps the industry will go faster before a third incident causes searchers to completely lose faith in them.

AOL's Jason Calacanis, who runs Netscape, is proposing that AOL not keep search records at all. That might sound like a nice idea, but it's not practical. To not keep records raises issues with click fraud, plus with internal tracking to determine how to improve a search engine itself in how it responds and feeds queries. Putting better limits on how long data is kept might help, as might developing ways to somehow remove personally identifiable information that might get into search records.

Then again, Ixquick recently tried a PR push on how it doesn't keep records. Perhaps that's going to be a way for some players to win new users. Just make sure you also use some tool like Anonymizer to keep your ISP from logging your actions. Otherwise, your data is still out there and being recorded in another way.

For more on search privacy issues, here's a big giant list of recent posts:

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:52 AM | Permalink

January 19, 2006

Keynote Says Google, Yahoo Preferred in North America

Keynote Systems has released the results of its annual study of North American searchers and their satisfaction with search engines. The study ranked user satisfaction by tracking the search behavior of 2,000 users on AOL Search, Ask Jeeves, Google, MSN Search and Yahoo, and found Google and Yahoo were clear #1 and #2 favorites, respectively. Today's SearchDay article, Survey: Google, Yahoo Still Favorites in North America, has the details. Also see yesterday's SearchDay article, Study: Google #1 in China, for details of a similar study Keynote performed in China.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 10:47 AM | Permalink

December 17, 2005

Special Holiday Goodies, Pages, and Info from a Few of the Major Engines

Several of the large web engines are offering special holiday goodies from smart answers to holiday questions to logos to holiday borders around ads.

Let's review: + Ask Jeeves offers up Smart Answers with info about and links about: Christmas ||| Hanukkah ||| Kwanzza. + Google places special festive borders around AdWords on web results pages for Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzza, and some related holiday words. + A festive snowman visits the logo on the Yahoo home page and provides a direct link to Yahoo Holiday Guide. + AOL Search offers "snapshots" atop of results pages with links and info about the three widely celebrated December holidays: C ||| H ||| K.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:22 PM | Permalink

September 23, 2005

AOL.com Portal Leaves Beta

After a three month beta period, the AOL.com open web portal has been officially released.

The AOL.com home page offers access to a many AOL services including mail, mobile tools, and AIM which are available at no charge to all web users as the service continues its move from its original subscription model to one that's ad-supported. AOL.com also includes a tabbed AOL Search box at the top of the site. The home page seems to put emphasis on multimedia content. You'll find access to AOL Video material via the main search box, a "Video on Demand" link located directly below the search box, and a "Media on Demand" module (along with another search box) located about 3/4 of the way down the page. The AOL.com portal also provides a link to the MyAOL service which remains in beta and currently offers an RSS feed reader. This page offers additional info about what AOL has planned for the MyAOL service in the future.

Posted by Gary Price at 9:54 AM | Permalink

August 25, 2005

AOL's Beta Central Now With RSS Feed

The AOL Beta Central page is the place to find news about and links to the latest tests that the folks in Dulles, VA are making publicly available. If you would like to be alerted to new posts on the site an AOL Beta Central RSS feed is now available. You'll find it at: http://beta.aol.com/rss/news.xml

Posted by Gary Price at 7:44 PM | Permalink

April 15, 2005

AOL Tweaks Search Interface; Offering Links to ITunes

I noticed a tweak to the AOL Search interface this morning. Until today, a tab labeled "Audio and Video" (cached version) linked to an interface that searched both types of content. You'll now see that audio and video search have separate tabs on the home page and separate interfaces (audio ||| video).

I also noticed (possibly late to the party with this item) that some results found when searching for audio with AOL Search offer direct links ITunes. For example, I searched for "Chemical Brothers" and found a link labeled "ITunes" next to the first "featured" result. Clicking it opened my ITunes app and took me directly to The Chemical Brothers ITunes page.

Posted by Gary Price at 10:42 AM | Permalink | TrackBack

April 12, 2005

AOL Posts Spring's Top Searches

AOL Hot Searches Spring 2005 now up from AOL covers top "spring" search topics on its US service from January 1 to March 21, 2005, the company tells us. You'll see top baseball teams, players, spring cleaning related terms, top tax forms searched for, colleges, diets, destinations, flower-related, prom-related and wedding-related terms. As a reminder, top searches-style lists from other major search engines are listed on our What People Search For page.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:21 AM | Permalink | TrackBack

January 25, 2005

AOL Says Adios to Newsgroups

A brief story in The Register mentions that AOL has stopped providing access to newsgroups. AOL tells users who want to search or browse these groups to visit Google Groups.

An AOL spokesman said the service is being withdrawn because so few people use it: "Google does a very good job of hosting newsgroups and the typical AOL user probably doesn't use newsgroups that often."

Posted by Gary Price at 3:37 PM | Permalink | TrackBack

January 24, 2005

AOL Search Enhancements Now Publicly Available

The enhancements at AOL Search that Chris and I wrote about last week (AOL Search: Playing In the Big Leagues Now) and were only accessible to AOL subscribers are now publicly available at search.aol.com

Posted by Gary Price at 7:55 AM | Permalink | TrackBack

January 20, 2005

AOL Search Playing with the Big Guns Now

AOL Search is rolling out some new enhancements to both its proprietary client software and to AOL Web Search as part of its relatively recent efforts to transform itself into a web portal. The new features are nothing revolutionary, but are useful and powerful, and effectively differentiate AOL Search from the other major players—including AOL Search partner Google.

Today's SearchDay article, AOL Search: Playing In the Big Leagues Now, covers the new enhancements, including search personalization features, result clustering using Vivisimo technology and local search results drawn from (among other sources) a customized crawl of the web by FAST Search & Transfer.

Postscript: John Battelle also has a nice write-up over here: AOL Puts A Stake In The Ground

Posted by Chris Sherman at 12:18 AM | Permalink | TrackBack

December 14, 2004

Most Popular Search Terms 2004: AOL

It's year-end list season!

Today, it's the America Online's 2004 Search Scrapbook (most popular search terms in a variety of categories).

Posted by Gary Price at 9:35 AM | Permalink | TrackBack

December 3, 2004

On AOL's Plans

Short article in the Wall Street Journal today (sub req) about AOL's move plans to offer moore free content for non-subcribers.

John Buckley, an AOL spokesman, says the current free site is basically a marketing tool for the paid subscription service. "You can look at the current [free] site as a Yugo," Mr. Buckley said, referring to a low-cost Yugoslavian car. "We're going to build a Bentley."

Posted by Gary Price at 3:16 PM | Permalink | TrackBack

December 2, 2004

MSN's Third Portal To Gain Blogs; Where's The Blog Search?

MSN is now offering blogging space through its new MSN Spaces service, making it the third major portal to jump into this area. The first? Google, of course.

Google a portal? Sure, a stealth portal. It's got all the traditional portal features of email, search and free home pages -- or at least the successor to personal home pages, blogs. You just don't see them all displayed in a traditional portal format.

My Google Buys Blogging Company - But Why? article from Feb. 2003 looks at the issue of blogs as a portal feature and Google heading down that path. One of the predictions in it, which was obvious to many, was that once Google knocked over the blog domino, other portals would follow.

AOL launched its AOL Journals service in September 2003. Now with MSN in the space, that leaves just Yahoo among the majors.

Yahoo still has the GeoCities personal home pages service (valued at $3.6 billion when acquired in 1999 -- in contrast, Google likely paid only a few million for Blogger). But I'm sure we'll eventually see Yahoo gain a blogging system as well.

All this is great for those seeking to build blogs, though it has nothing to do with search. What none of the majors yet offer is an actual blog search service.

Yahoo is the closest now, making it at least possible to search to find blog feeds but not through actual blog entries. MSN has promised an actual blog search engine to come out later this year. Google's also said last year that a blog search would come, though it gave no timeline about when. Aside from the majors, we list a number of other blog search engines here.

For more details of the new MSN Spaces service, see this ClickZ article: MSN Enters Blogging Fray with "Spaces". And as an aside, Microsoft blogvangelist Robert Scoble says he's sticking with the Radio UserLand service and provides a wrap-up of reaction to the new Microsoft entry.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 5:15 PM | Permalink | TrackBack

November 12, 2004

AOL Joins Search Shortcuts Game

News.com reports that AOL Search is joining the search shortcuts game with the release of AOL Snapshots.

Gerry Campbell, vice president and general manager of search for AOL, calls them "rocket science and smart editorial."

I'll also call it catch-up on AOL's part with other web search players. Most have been offering shortcuts for more than a year. Search shortcuts come in two basic flavors. Either a direct answer found at the top of the results page or direct links to specialized databases and other content. In some cases, shortcuts are triggered with a specific piece of syntax or by interpreting the query.

The News.com article mentions that AOL Snapshots are, "categories of popular information, such as movie times, news and sports scores, which will appear in the body of related search results."

Snapshots offer direct links to info, specific facts at the top of the results page, or an interactive web-based tools.

Here's a complete list of what AOL offers.

A good idea? Yes! Shortcuts can save a searcher time, clicks, and aggravation. They can also help by leading the searcher to high quality info and also allow companies (Time Warner and Yahoo are examples) to leverage content and promo other services they provide.

Search shortcuts might also also offer an early glimpse at how web engines will become answer engines (for certain types of queries) in the future.

Other Players Here are a few, just a few, examples of what other search companies offer.

+ Ask Jeeves has been online with MANY shortcuts (what they call Smart Search) for more than 18 months. Examples include: + Basic biographical info for newsmakers and celebrities + Local info (with direct links to key web sites) + Answers to questions (for certain queries) You can find info about other Smart Search shortcuts here and here.

+ Yahoo has also been ramping up on shortcuts during the last year. Examples include: + Sports Scores + Movie Times + Time Info + Gas Prices + Exchange Rates + Calculator and measurement converter. AllTheWeb (now part of Yahoo) was the first major engine to offer a web-based calculator (4/2003). Here's a full list of Yahoo's shortcuts.

+ Google also offers several shortcuts. Examples include: + News Headlines (via a Google One Box) + Flight Tracking + Calculator and conversions. A list of what Google offers is available here.

As I mentioned yesterday, MSN's new beta also provides direct answers and links for cetain query types.

Posted by Gary Price at 7:12 PM | Permalink | TrackBack

November 2, 2004

AOL: Personal Search Will Come

AOL has said before it plans to do things in terms of personalizing the search experience. This article from IDG has them saying it again: AOL eyes personal search. No specifics on particular products or release data -- just that personal moves will happen at some point in the future.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 21, 2004

AOL, Robots, and Search

AOL to promote Aim Robots Source: ComputerWeekly.com

It appears that AOL is beginning a push to build more instant messaging robots.

Huh?

"Aim Robots are sponsored and operated by AOL and other suppliers and appear as buddy icons in the buddy lists of Aim users who install them. For example, users can send an instant message to the AOLYellowpages Aim Robot with the name of a local business or with simply a keyword and the robot replies with related directory listings."

"Robot" technology is nothing new, its been around since 2002. In fact, I tried Smart Buddy, an AIM robot tool back then.

With the growing popularity of instant messaging along with more and more interest in vertical search tools, it will be interesting to see if AOL partners with some of these services to create search robots like the directory robot mentioned above. Would the search companies be interested? I know some have tried it before.

How about the Feedster robot or the IMDB robot? Will companies like Dialog and Factiva get involved since instant messaging is growing in the business world?

Finally, it's easy to realize that "answer engine" technology and IM robots will get along famously. Coupling an "answer engine" with a IM robot also might make sense for mobile searching.

Here's a list of the AIM robots that are currently available.

UPDATE: We've learned that just today CitySearch released an AIM robot. They also offer a search-by-email option.

It's also worth noting that the new version of Yahoo Instant Messenger allows you to search directly from the IM client.

Posted by Gary Price at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack