NYT/Bloomberg: AOL Offers a More Refined Search Engine

[DeepModem Mom]

AOL Offers a More Refined Search Engine
By BLOOMBERG NEWS
Published: January 21, 2005


America Online introduced a new Internet search engine yesterday, part of an effort to gain a larger share of the online advertising market.

The service, called AOL Search, will sort results by geography and topic and offer a suggestion tool, the company, a Time Warner unit, said. AOL has licensed technology from Vivisimo, a closely held software company.

America Online is bolstering its search features to compensate for its inability to win market share in Web advertising from Google, the most-used Internet search engine, and Yahoo. Google sells about half the search advertising in the United States. AOL has lost subscribers for seven consecutive quarters....

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The Web tools introduced yesterday provide users with more personalized search features and snapshots at the top of each page presenting information on topics including local movies and sports results....


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/21/technology/21search.html

[fasttense]

1. No wonder it doesn't work

I tried all day yesterday and today to do a search on AOL and have yet to even connect to the search site. What a big piece of crap.

[radwriter0555]

2. AOL's corporate HQ is next door to the FBI. They got their suburb renamed

so they wouldn't have the same ID as LANGLEY, VA... known as home to the illustrious government agency.

Draw any conclusions you want...

[Occulus]

4. Don't most internet communications into and out from the US

travel through servers at Langley (either AOL or FBI) at some point? I know I heard this several years ago, I wonder if it's still true....

[Spazito]

3. AOL could offer gold-plated service and I wouldn't touch them...

with a ten foot pole.