History Of AOL Search

In preparation for those trying AOL tomorrow as part of our first Google-Free Friday, I thought it would be helpful to give some background on AOL in search. AOL has long offered search — and even owned several web crawling technologies — over the years. Don’t forget to read AOL: Tomorrow’s Google Free Friday Alternative […]

Chat with SearchBot

In preparation for those trying AOL tomorrow as part of our first
Google-Free Friday,
I thought it would be helpful to give some background on AOL in search. AOL has long offered search — and even owned several web crawling
technologies — over the years. Don’t forget to read
AOL: Tomorrow’s Google
Free Friday Alternative
for tips to what services to use from AOL in your
searching!

1995-1999

  • June 1995: AOL
    buys
    WebCrawler, one of the major
    crawler-based search engines of its day.
  • November 1996: AOL

    announces
    deal to sell WebCrawler to Excite (which itself later

    gets sold
    to Infospace in 2001).
     
  • March 1997: The deal to sell WebCrawler
    closes. AOL also
    launches its own
    branded search engine, NetFind (formerly at

    https://www.aol.com/netfind/
    , for nostalgia folks). The service was simply
    the Excite search engine with an AOL look-and-feel.
     
  • January 1998: AOL

    purchases
    enterprise search company PLS, uses the technology in various
    ways internally but never continues as an enterprise search player.
     
  • November 1998: AOL
    announced a deal to
    purchase Netscape, which gave it the
    Netscape-owned Open Directory Project as part
    of the purchase. At the time, the Open Directory was the major human-powered
    search engine that rivaled Yahoo and powered results for many services. It has
    greatly diminished in stature since then, in no small part due to AOL’s
    neglect and lack of support for the system.
  • August 1999: AOL
    NetFind drops
    Excite as a partner and shifts over to being powered by Inktomi’s crawler,
    through a
    new deal
    .
     
  • October 1999: AOL does
    a major
    relaunch
    of its search engine and renames it
    AOL Search (originally at
    https://search.aol.com while the
    https://aolsearch.com address is never
    promoted despite a domain dispute over it that AOL
    won). The relaunch saw
    those searching getting served first matches found by AOL editors, then
    results drawn from the Open Directory, with Inktomi’s crawler-based results
    kicking in only if the first two tiers failed to have answers.

2000-2004

  • September 2000: AOL

    cut a deal
    with the then GoTo (later Overture, later
    Yahoo Search Marketing) to
    carry paid search listings.
     
  • October 2001: AOL
    no longer
    tiers results so that Open Directory results come first, then Inktomi results
    come second. As a result, more of Inktomi’s crawler-based content becomes
    visible for more queries.
    By
    January 2002, the Open Directory results disappear altogether, other than
    category links.
     
  • May 2002:
    Shock
    waves
    as Google wins AOL’s paid search listings

    from
    Overture and also
    announces
    that Inktomi will go in August. That
    happens,
    turning AOL largely into Google with an AOL look-and-feel, though it still
    offers some editorial enhancements.
     
  • October 2003: AOL
    renews
    its agreement with Google.
     
  • November 2003: AOL
    acquires
    the Singingfish multimedia search engine (which later closes) plus makes
    content from it visible through a new Audio/Video tab that’s
    part of
    a general relaunch for AOL Search.
     
  • September 2004: AOL
    launches
    inStore (later AOL Shopping), a
    shopping service that also offered at
    Pinpoint Shopping and that’s
    integrated into AOL Search. Shopping results come from
    Bizrate.

2005-2007

  • January 2005: AOL
    relaunches
    AOL Search, offering
    Snapshots, short units providing direct answers and information in its search
    results, that had been in
    testing since the
    previous November. A SmartBox to suggest search queries is
    unveiled.
    Local search results powered by FAST
    are promised (and
    later come
    as AOL Local, combining AOL Yellow Pages,
    CityGuide and MapQuest), and a desktop search tool powered by
    Copernic is announced.
     
  • March 2005: AOL
    releases
    Pinpoint Travel site, powered
    through a
    deal
    with Kayak.
     
  • December 2005: AOL and
    Google

    agree
    to renew their deal. Google later purchases 5 percent of AOL as part
    of the agreement.
     
  • January 2006: AOL
    acquires
    the Truveo video search site, which
    gathers content by crawling the web.
     
  • June 2006: Netscape is
    relaunched as a
    social news site.
     
  • July 2006: The AOL
    Podcasts Search
    area is
    launched,
    powered by Podscope, following an agreement
    reached
    in 2005.
     
  • August 2006: AOL
    researchers (two are fired
    later) release
    search query data that they believe will be anonymous, but it quickly turns
    out that by looking through the records, individual can be guessed at. A
    privacy storm erupts.
    One person is illustrated in a front page

    New York Times story
    . AOL also
    releases
    a new version AOL Video using both
    Singingfish and Truveo, plus offering content from partners.
     
  • October 2006: AOL
    relaunches
    AOL Search with a feature called FullView, designed to make content from
    vertical search listings (such as multimedia or local listings) appear
    alongside web search results.
     
  • April 2007: AOL
    launches its
    AOL Search
    Marketplace
    , a way for advertisers to buy search ads directly from AOL,
    rather than having to go through Google. Google ads also continue to be shown.
    AOL also continues to carry pay-per-call ads through a April 2005
    deal with
    Ingenio. In May, it also
    buys
    Third Screen Media, a mobile ad
    company.
     
  • July 2007: AOL
    relaunches AOL
    Video, this time primarily using Truveo and content provided by partnerships.
    Singingfish is gone — indeed, the Singingfish site was closed in February
    2007 and redirected
    to AOL Video. Truveo itself remains running, powering search not just at AOL
    but also with other partners, with a number of new ones
    named in June.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Danny Sullivan
Contributor
Danny Sullivan was a journalist and analyst who covered the digital and search marketing space from 1996 through 2017. He was also a cofounder of Third Door Media, which publishes Search Engine Land and MarTech, and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo and MarTech events. He retired from journalism and Third Door Media in June 2017. You can learn more about him on his personal site & blog He can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.

Get the must-read newsletter for search marketers.