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The are rumors that Yahoo, Google and MSN are working on improved multimedia searching capabilities.
AOL entered into the field with their acquisition of Singingfish around a year ago.
Singingfish would be today announcing their updated services to cater to the increasing user base they have been getting since the acquisition. They started with few thousands of queries a day and now they are handling around 7 million queries a day!
The new services would include ability to save and share queries, refine searches and discover new multimedia content. According to the company, they are indexing around 14 million multimedia files in various formats (both streaming and normal) like Windows Media, Real, QuickTime and MP3.
Other engines currently providing similar searching abilities are AltaVista and AlltheWeb. Yahoo! incidentally happens to own both these search engines.
Source: Search Engine Journal
AOL is still using the Google search engine but is gradually integrating its own services and its own content inside its search results pages.
One good example was found on searching for ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’. AOL Search gave information from Moviefone like Movie Details, Buy the DVD, Find the Best Price, and even trailers and clips. Searching for ‘Eagles‘ (the music group) gave me information about Philadelphia Eagles from AOL Sports.
Not exactly what I was looking for but it can be helpful for someone looking for the football team. Overall, it is a good way to integrate you services and drive traffic to them. AOL saves money and effort in building a new Search Engine from scratch.
It is in the coming days releasing its own browser where the search page (or homepage) can be directed to this search engine. And they can use the Search service more effectively.
MSN Search Beta Engine does so with MSN Music, Encarta and other Microsoft services. Seems like trend is spreading for making search pages more than just plain jane. Google is also not behind with its News and desktop search results integrated with normal searches.
Source: Search Engine Journal
Web searches are now at the forefront of AOL's strategy and represents a new direction the company is taking.
A few years ago, AOL considered search important but not critical, but the company now sees it as a priority. "Search is a gigantic part of the company's focus," said Gerry Campbell, vice-president and general manager of AOL Search. "There's lots more to come."
The big goal is personalisation, or giving users the capability to customise their search activities, save queries and manage, manipulate and store results. Cambell said competitors such as Yahoo, A9 and Ask Jeeves had made strong moves in personal search recently, and that users could expect AOL to follow suit "in a few months".
But he said the company still doubted whether personalising search was any more than hype. "It's definitely interesting and we're charging after it even though it remains to be proven whether it's actually useful."
AOL is also looking to extend search towards its AIM instant messaging service. "We're leaders in the instant messaging market and there should be some significant offerings there," he said. Further integration of the multimedia search capabilities acquired when AOL bought Singingfish last year is also on the cards.
And with Yahoo and Google making moves into wireless search, AOL is determined not to be left behind. "We don't have anything out in the wireless search market yet, but that belies the amount of concentration we have on it as a company," Campbell said.
While the technical capabilities to tap search engines via a mobile device have existed since the late 1990s, Campbell sees the problem as lack of consumer demand. "What's going to crack it is someone coming up with a completely new and fantastic experience that people can't live without. There's an opportunity to create the wireless killer app when it comes to looking for information."
Campbell said AOL was happy with using Google's search technology to power AOL web searches, and that the company didn't want to duplicate what Google did so well already. But he pointed out that AOL was continually improving and expanding its own search technologies.
AOL's search efforts apply both to its fee-based online service and its free websites, although the company generally offers more search content within its fee-based service. AOL offers local, multimedia, image, news and product search, and has a desktop search product in beta.
"At AOL, search is now called the perfect business," said Campbell. "When members find what they're looking for, they're happy, and most of the time they're looking for things that can be monetised. There's a tremendous focus on this company at doing this."
Source: Computer Weekly
Web searches are now at the forefront of AOL's strategy and represents a new direction the company is taking.
A few years ago, AOL considered search important but not critical, but the company now sees it as a priority. "Search is a gigantic part of the company's focus," said Gerry Campbell, vice-president and general manager of AOL Search. "There's lots more to come."
The big goal is personalisation, or giving users the capability to customise their search activities, save queries and manage, manipulate and store results. Cambell said competitors such as Yahoo, A9 and Ask Jeeves had made strong moves in personal search recently, and that users could expect AOL to follow suit "in a few months".
But he said the company still doubted whether personalising search was any more than hype. "It's definitely interesting and we're charging after it even though it remains to be proven whether it's actually useful."
AOL is also looking to extend search towards its AIM instant messaging service. "We're leaders in the instant messaging market and there should be some significant offerings there," he said. Further integration of the multimedia search capabilities acquired when AOL bought Singingfish last year is also on the cards.
And with Yahoo and Google making moves into wireless search, AOL is determined not to be left behind. "We don't have anything out in the wireless search market yet, but that belies the amount of concentration we have on it as a company," Campbell said.
While the technical capabilities to tap search engines via a mobile device have existed since the late 1990s, Campbell sees the problem as lack of consumer demand. "What's going to crack it is someone coming up with a completely new and fantastic experience that people can't live without. There's an opportunity to create the wireless killer app when it comes to looking for information."
Campbell said AOL was happy with using Google's search technology to power AOL web searches, and that the company didn't want to duplicate what Google did so well already. But he pointed out that AOL was continually improving and expanding its own search technologies.
AOL's search efforts apply both to its fee-based online service and its free websites, although the company generally offers more search content within its fee-based service. AOL offers local, multimedia, image, news and product search, and has a desktop search product in beta.
"At AOL, search is now called the perfect business," said Campbell. "When members find what they're looking for, they're happy, and most of the time they're looking for things that can be monetised. There's a tremendous focus on this company at doing this."
Source: Computer Weekly
AOL Europe and Google announces a new multi-year agreement that will provide users of the AOL European services with targeted advertising from Google's AdWords advertisers.
Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
The agreement underlines AOL's commitment to providing the most comprehensive, relevant and useful search experience for its approx. 6.3 million members in the UK, France and Germany.
Google currently provides web search results for AOL search products in Europe. Under the new expanded alliance with Google, users of the AOL services in the UK, France and Germany will now also get targeted advertising from Google related to their search request.
Google AdWords advertisers can now appear on the search results pages of AOL's European properties based on users' expressed interests. This enables Google advertisers to reach millions of potential customers searching on AOL properties across the UK, France and Germany.
This enhanced partnership allows AOL to continue to take full advantage of the rapid growth in online marketing in Europe, particularly in search-related advertising.
"This strategic alliance with Google, one of the leading search providers, underscores our commitment to providing our European consumers with the best online experience possible, while providing great value to our marketing partners," said Philip Rowley, President of AOL Europe.
"By expanding AOL's relationship with Google, AOL Europe provides our members in the UK, France and Germany with useful information about products and services relevant to their searches, and ensures that we are continuing to provide a vehicle for advertisers to reach a highly desirable audience in a compelling and effective way."
"We are pleased to strengthen and grow our existing worldwide partnership with AOL," said Omid Kordestani, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Field Operations at Google.
"Partnering with one of Europe's leading online and interactive services providers reflects Google's continued commitment to providing value to our European advertising customers.
With this new agreement, AOL's European operations will benefit from the revenue opportunity, while its users will enjoy an enhanced online experience through the addition of relevant commercial information."
Source: AOL-Europe and Google
America Online is developing its own desktop search technology for the AOL Browser (beta) as early as this week.
AOL's entry into the space pits it directly against rival Microsoft Corp., which has designs for a desktop search engine of its own.
AOL Desktop Search is one of many value-added features shoring up America Online's upcoming alternative Web browser, currently code-named AOL Browser. AOL Browser is a stand-alone application based upon Internet Explorer and is independent from AOL's client software.
Although AOL Browser shares the same underlying engine as Microsoft's Internet Explorer, many features more commonly found in AOL's Netscape brand can be found in the release. These additions include tabbed browsing, a pop-up blocker and toolbar buttons that produce thumbnails of Web pages when users hover over them.
AOL Browser is also the lynchpin of an emerging strategy to increase the utility of AOL.com, which has coincidentally undergone a recent makeover.
AOL Desktop Search is an integrated feature that will allow users to search for a plethora of files including documents in Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, as well as PDF, HTML, WordPerfect, rich text and plain text files. In addition, users can scour through Web pages they have previously seen in Internet Explorer, AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) chat logs, locally stored newsgroups and Web logs, as well as digital media and pictures.
The software's next iteration—scheduled to be unveiled sometime in 2005—extends existing newsgroup and blog search functionality to the Web. Other additions that are in store for members include searches for e-mail sent or received via AOL Mail and the ability to search AOL host content and content saved on AOL. For non-members, integration into Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express will be offered.
Commenting on AOL's intentions to build a desktop search utility, Jupiter Research senior analyst Joe Wilcox told BetaNews, "Desktop search is heating up, particularly as Google and MSN plan to expand into that area. Microsoft isn't expected to improve Windows search capabilities for another two years, when Longhorn ships."
"But AOL customers, which increasingly interact with the vendor's digital content services, need better search before then. AOL search tied to its existing service and extended to the Windows desktop would be an enticing utility," said Wilcox.
As Longhorn development continues to encounter delays, Microsoft has demoed a prototype desktop search technology that was integrated into the MSN Toolbar add-on for Internet Explorer, while Microsoft's MSN business unit has publicly unveiled a Web log search engine dubbed blogbot. The software giant promises to cycle its resources toward developing search technologies on an "immense scale."
Departing from its longstanding "members only" business strategy, AOL has opened up to outsiders.
Most recently, the company has offered subscribers open e-mail access to third-party clients, a separate dialer to connect to the Web, and a beta of its next-generation FanFare client.
FanFare delivers on AOL's Open Client Platform initiative known as "Copland," and is an alternative means of accessing communications and digital content for broadband users.
AOL's latest contribution to non-members will be a free public preview of AOL Browser, which will include AOL Desktop Search, according to the company.
Source: eWeek
America Online (AOL) will introduce a new shopping search engine called In-Store.com to go with the company's improved shopping section.
It will be AOL's first offering to consumers who want to research products side by side before buying. As a result, comparison shopping websites and search engines such as Yahoo Shopping, Google's Froogle, MySimon, BizRate and Shopping.com are about to face some new competition from an old online player.
An AOL spokesman would not comment on the impending announcement, but AOL executives who spoke on condition of anonymity said the new service had been in development for 18 months and would be accompanied by considerable promotion to AOL members, starting next week. "We've done a lot of heavy work to get back in the game," one executive said.
Analysts said it was too early to say whether AOL's new offering would have a meaningful financial impact this year. Other portals with shopping comparison features do not break out separate revenue figures for those features, but Shopping.com, which this spring registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission to offer shares to the public, said in its filing documents that it had earned $7 million last year on revenues of $67 million.
Consumers have yet to fully embrace comparison shopping. Only about 10 percent of online consumers visited a comparison site during last year's holiday season, and most of those people were shopping for consumer electronics, according to Patti Freeman Evans, an analyst with Jupiter Research. But the sites have enjoyed fairly strong momentum in the last year. The number of visits increased 13 percent over the previous year, according to comScore MediaMetrix, an Internet statistics firm.
The new shopping category also represents a shift in how AOL operates with advertisers, company executives and analysts said. Instead of charging advertisers on the basis of how many thousands of people view an ad, as it has in the past, AOL will collect a fee each time someone clicks on an ad.
In-Store will include elements of both a traditional online shopping mall, with an array of products and featured merchants, and a comparison shopping engine, which allows users to select attributes of, say, digital cameras, then choose from a short list of products that fit the bill.
Shoppers also can click to select a product category. On each page, a drop-down box called "Pinpoint Shopping" will help shoppers narrow a universe of more than 45,000 online sellers with combined inventories of 25 million items.
For instance, digital camera shoppers can narrow the field of 1,407 products by selecting the camera's resolution, zoom settings and price, among other attributes. Thus, when searching for a camera below $340 with resolution of at least 3.0 megapixels and zoom capabilities up to 3x, the search narrows to three cameras. For consumers who are unfamiliar with a particular merchant, the site will display customer ratings.
Shoppers can test a version of Pinpoint Shopping now, at PinpointShopping.com. The site also allows AOL members to save products to a single Web page, so they can compare them side by side or simply build a wish list - a feature that will be available to non-AOL users when In-Store rolls out.
In-Store.com will also automatically show repeat visitors a list of their most frequently visited stores, and users of AOL's instant messenger will be able to view products together and chat about them. Shoppers will also have the option of requesting e-mail alerts when prices on specified products reach a certain threshold.
According to Ms. Freeman Evans, who previewed an early version of In-Store, the new service "is a good first step."
"It's become the standard among portals," she said, "to have comparison shopping features, so they're catching up in the game."
Indeed, last year Yahoo started an aggressive counterattack against specialty shopping sites like Shopping.com, BizRate.com, PriceGrabber.com and NexTag, which were threatening to steal momentum from Yahoo Shopping. Google's entrance into the shopping category last year, with its Froogle service, also signaled its intention of competing with Yahoo on several fronts.
In the face of that competition, Yahoo introduced a handful of new features intended to help customers simplify their online shopping tasks, including a price-alert function, along with a service allowing users to save products they are considering.
Shopping.com, meanwhile, is quietly introducing a promotion in which it offers $10 rebates for purchases from certain merchants. According to Sarah Leary, Shopping.com's vice president for product marketing, the company is offering the rebate with about a dozen merchants, and will expand it to include "hundreds of merchants" later this month.
Sites like BizRate.com, Shopping.com and PriceGrabber.com have expanded the roster of merchants that they can search on behalf of buyers, in hopes that apparel shoppers, car buyers and others will also look to them for help. More shoppers means more revenue for the shopping sites from merchants, who typically pay a fee ranging from a few pennies to 50 cents or more every time someone clicks on their product.
Although AOL's entry could mean fewer customers for other sites, at least one company, BizRate.com, stands to benefit. According to Chuck Davis, chief executive, his company largely developed the Pinpoint Shopping function for AOL in exchange for a share of revenue when customers click on a merchant's product. He declined to say what that share was.
"This category is still in the second inning," Mr. Davis said. "So this partnership, I think, will help grow the category, and grow BizRate."
The new service will also turn from the cost-per-click approach that has dominated in recent years, thanks to the growth of Google's search advertisement program and that of Yahoo's Overture unit.
Now, retailers can avoid committing to, say, a banner ad on the home page or in the apparel category for a year, and can instead negotiate for the right to have their ad appear for limited time during peak shopping seasons. With enough merchants, AOL claims that its overall revenue will not suffer. Those advertisers will also be given the chance to swap out their ads on short notice if they are not performing well, AOL executives said.
To attract more merchant revenue, both from featured advertisers and from smaller merchants who appear in the shopping search results, AOL is making the service available to non-AOL members.
Ms. Freeman Evans, the Jupiter analyst, said: "This is a much more reasonable approach for AOL. It's basically brings them in line with the industry standard, so I can see them getting good traction with advertisers - especially because retailers want access to the AOL customer."
Indeed, while AOL has seen its subscriber base erode from a peak of 26.7 million in September 2002 to to 23.4 million last June as more users gravitate toward high-speed Internet services, retailers still covet the service's customers, because they tend to be more avid online shoppers than non-AOL users.
According to a March report by comScore, AOL members spent more than $15 billion online in the previous year - roughly 25 percent of overall online spending. And Ms. Freeman Evans said that more than two-thirds of AOL's members shopped online.
"That's a pretty high penetration," she said. "So it means a lot for AOL to enhance its shopping environment, which in the past was really not so great."
Source: NY Times
Time Warner said yesterday that its AOL unit saw strong advertising sales growth in the second quarter, after nearly three years of declines, thanks to help from its Google search partnership.
Ad sales climbed 23 percent in the quarter to $221 million. Paid search revenue through AOL's Google partnership grew 76 percent from a year earlier to $72 million.
"AOL's advertising business is emerging as one of the most exciting growth opportunities in our business," Time Warner chairman/CEO Dick Parsons said in a conference call.
Overall, AOL reported operating income of $276 million, up 31 percent from last year's second quarter. AOL posted $2.2 billion in sales for the quarter, up 2 percent. Ad revenue from Google accounted for 33 percent of AOL's ad revenue and 74 percent of the ad sales growth reported in the quarter.
AOL has become an important partner for Google. In the first half of 2004, AOL accounted for 13 percent of Google's revenue. AOL has used Google paid listings since May 2002, when it dropped Overture Services for Google's then-new paid search offering. The companies signed a multiyear extension in October 2003. AOL and Google declined to give a specific date for its expiration.
The advertising growth offset continued subscriber declines. AOL ended the quarter with 23.4 million U.S. subscribers, losing 668,000 in the period. Its subscriber revenue remained at $1.9 billion.
Don Logan, chairman of Time Warner's media and communications group, said AOL would look to make up for a loss of dial-up customers by using the AOL.com site to attract non-subscribers. In the next year, he said, AOL will add content to the site and use Time Warner sites to promote it.
"We have a plan in place to drive increased traffic there that we will try to monetize with ad sales as well as search," he said.
Time Warner has struggled to turn around AOL since the collapse of the dot-com boom, in contrast to sustained ad growth from rivals such as Yahoo over the past year. Since third-quarter 2001, AOL ad sales have declined with the expiration of long-term deals struck in the late 1990s. In 2003, ad sales fell 35 percent. For first-quarter 2004, they declined 40 percent.
AOL's restructuring suffered a setback in January with the departure of Lisa Brown, the ad sales chief AOL CEO Jonathan Miller brought in only six months earlier. Time Warner ad sales executive Michael Kelly was tapped to replace her.
Time Warner's confidence in AOL's future was highlighted recently with its $435 million acquisition of Advertising.com, a performance-based ad network that will let AOL capitalize on the strong growth of online direct response advertising.
"We're investing to position AOL to return healthy growth in 2005," Parsons said.
Time Warner had 10 percent sales growth in the quarter, reaching $10.9 billion.
Source: DM News
Time Warner might be looking a bit more kindly upon its AOL subsidiary today.
Up until lately, Time Warner may have wondered if it did the right thing by acquiring America Online in January of 2000. Since that day, shares in AOL have consistently fallen and have been pretty much a thorne in Time Warner's financial results. Adding insult to injury, criticism from some of it's shareholders didn't help either.
With Google going public soon, Time Warner's luck could turn to the better. The company has just exercised its options to buy 7.4 million Google shares, or three per cent of the company, for $22 million.
The option to buy was part of a deal struck two years ago, whereby Google provided search and advertising for the AOL website. When Google finally launches its IPO, the shares will be converted to the Class B shares.
However, depending on which overheated analysis you look at, that stake may be worth around $1.3 billion when the search engine company floats later this year.
Source: PC Pro.co.uk
Wall Street sources said Parsons has been sending a message to prospective buyers from the investment world, who are itching to snap up AOL on the cheap.
Much of the interest is coming from private equity firms, like Blackstone Group, KKR, and Thomas H. Lee - who have lots of cash to spend.
The rumor of a possible AOL sale to Yahoo or Microsoft is floating around again, after AOL posted a successful 1st Quarter, mostly based on advertising sales. The New York Daily News said Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons is expected to listen to bids from other online competitors such as Yahoo and MSN:
Parsons is said to be seeking $20 billion for AOL - more than double what he’s being offered by financial buyers.
“He’s being approached,” a source said. “He has no plans to do anything right now.”
But while financial buyers are being spurned, sources said they expect Parsons to listen to strategic buyers, such as Microsoft or Yahoo, who could merge their operations with AOL and slash costs.
However, it is also reported that the Time Warner chief is not entertaining bids, only considering them. “Indeed, with positive results being seen in both advertising sales and growth in AOL’s broadband service subscriptions, Parsons is said to be ‘brushing off suitors.’ And if a deal were to be done, a source told the News, Time Warner would ‘retain a significant stake’ in AOL.”
Time Warner’s America Online turned in a better than expected performance in the first quarter of 2003 with a little help from paid search and broadband. According to reports from analysts, paid search brought in revenues of $27 million in Q1 from an AOL partnership with Google. Google powers the AOL search engine along with AOL search engine advertising - which is actually Google AdWords.
AOL reported total operating income of US$277 million, compared to $194 million in the year-ago period on revenue that remained essentially flat at $2.2 billion.
Operating income before depreciation and amortization rose 21 percent, from $404 million in the first quarter of 2003 to $489 million in the most recent quarter.
Source: Search Engine Journal
Time Warner’s America Online turned in a better than expected performance in the first quarter of 2003 with a little help from paid search and broadband.
According to reports from analysts, paid search brought in revenues of $27 million in Q1 from an AOL partnership with Google.
Google powers the AOL search engine along with AOL search engine advertising - which is actually Google AdWords.
AOL reported total operating income of US$277 million, compared to $194 million in the year-ago period on revenue that remained essentially flat at $2.2 billion. Operating income before depreciation and amortization rose 21 percent, from $404 million in the first quarter of 2003 to $489 million in the most recent quarter.
On news of the earnings, Time Warner shares rose 4 percent, or 70 cents, to $17.21 in early trading on the New York Stock Exchange today.
The number of subscriber defections has slowed, especially with the new AOL Netscape low budget Internet service, and AOL says it has more than 3 million subscribers on its new broadband service.
Total subscription revenue was up 1 percent, or $21 million, due to favorable foreign currency exchange rates at AOL Europe and the expansion of AOL broadband services, Time Warner said, with AOL Europe reporting a growth this quarter of 38,000 which brings its total EU subscribers to 6.4 million users.
Focusing on Search and More Public Users
AOL also introduced the AOL toolbar for both subscribers and nonmembers which opens AOL more so to the public than ever before, giving toolbar users an open door to the Google powered AOL search and members can view incoming email messages.
Along with providing a search box for AOL search, the toolbar lets users add icons to popular AOL content areas such as Yellow Pages, white pages, maps, weather, stock quotes, movie times and AOL CityGuide.
Other features include the toolbar standard popup blocker and access to AOL Instant Messenger. While AOL provides a toolbar for Netscape, the latest toolbar is its first for the AOL-branded service, AOL officials said.
Google and AOL a Sound Partnership
After proven success in the US market with AOL serving Google and Google AdWords search results, AOL and Google will be working together in AOL’s global expansion.
Last week Google announced their partnership with AOL Latin America to display its paid listings on AOL sites in Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and Puerto Rico. Google already provided Web search technology to AOL Latin America and is currently the search and search advertising provider to the US’s AOL.
Source: Search Engine Journal.com
