More AOL Strangeness

Tweaking or having a nervous breakdown?

[Laisha]

Okay. AOL seems to be doing weirdness once again.

A quick search on insurance servicing and adjusting [search.aol.com] brings up 11 -- yes...just 11! -- results.

With the exception of the Encarta result, not one of them has ever been in ODP. Nor are any of them very relevant. Certainly, ODP has listings which are much more relevant to this search. And each of these listings is not just a deeplink, but an obscure one at that.

Are these Inktomi listings? Or just more strange tweaking?

[Froggyman]

About AOL Search
[search.aol.com...]

[Laisha]

>About AOL Search
[search.aol.com...]

Nice information, but it is not what's happening, at least with my usual control phrase. That's my point.

[Froggyman]

AOL search ranking by importance:

1.) AOL Recommends (I guess they're going to Yahoo their way to top, LOL)
2.) Sponsored Links (Self explanatory)
3.) Matching Sites (looks mostly like ODP)

On your search for insurance+servicing+and+adjusting each of the sites were listed on ODP:

[search.dmoz.org...]
[search.dmoz.org...]
[search.dmoz.org...]
[search.dmoz.org...]

I agree that their search is limited. They will learn as their traffic grinds to a stop.

[Mike_Mackin]

The sites are listed in ODP, but the pages AOL is listing are not. The pages listed on ODP are not coming up at all for this term.

I think that's why Laisha is saying it's strange. While they're apparently spidering the sites listed in ODP, AOL is returning non-listed but related sites in some cases. This is not how they've done it in the past and is different even from what they were doing just a week ago.

[Froggyman]

Which really brings the question down to what are they spidering with. Are they using their own or a third party service?

A search on my site returns the original ODP listing (no other pages listed) with a handful of other sites linked to us.