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 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.